The film Ghost (1990) is one of the most iconic love stories ever put on film. Who can forget Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore sensually touching fingers through soft, buttery clay as the song “Unchained Melody” is soulfully crooned by The Righteous Brothers? The film’s exploration of love’s ability to transcend physical boundaries struck a nerve with audiences.
Ghost became the top-grossing movie that year and the screenwriter, Bruce Joel Rubin, won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Rubin, now 81, has a new book called It’s Only a Movie about his life’s journey and deep pursuit of all things spiritual – both personally and on film.
I spoke to Rubin over Zoom about some of his most inspiring movies including Brainstorm, Stuart Little 2, and Deep Impact. But it was the mind-bending Jacob’s Ladder (1990)that had a big impact on me. I probably watched Jacob’s Ladder, starring Tim Robbins and Elizabeth Peña, about fifty times when it came out on videotape, just trying to understand what was happening to Robbins’ character Jacob in this Kafka-esque tale of a Vietnam vet struggling to understand his own life (and death) after being exposed to an experimental drug that increases aggression.
The film was inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Rubin’s own LSD overdose in the 1960s which he calls a “death and rebirth experience.” His unexpected overdose on LSD came about when a friend of Rubin’s – who knew Timothy Leary – was given a bottle of pure LSD straight from Sandoz Labs in Switzerland. Rubin intended to swallow just a tiny droplet of the psychedelic drug, but his friend accidentally squirted an entire eyedropper of the stuff down Rubin’s throat. What happened next was nothing short of harrowing.
Jacob's Ladder (1990)
“Out of that came a two- or three-billion-year journey. I can't tell you the actual time frame, but I know the endpoint of it. I was no longer in existence. I had whatever you would call die – I had done that. There was nothing left at all,” says Rubin, but the experience didn’t end there.
“Somehow, in the middle of nothingness, there was like a plop or an impregnation of something entering me and dividing me into half and quarters, and my body slowly came back, fingernails and elbows and walls of the room and everything else, and I was back in the room. I didn't know what to make of it. I didn't know why I was back. I started laughing a lot. And then I said, ‘Why am I back?’ And this voice said, ‘To tell people what you saw.’ Well, what did I see? And that began a year-and-a-half hitchhiking journey around the world trying to find teachers who could explain my mystical experience. Jacob's Ladder was an absolute demonstration of that journey and what it means to enter the realm of dying, what you go through before you arrive at a place where you make peace with your existence,” he says.
Suddenly, Jacob’s Ladder finally makes sense to me. But that wasn’t the case with everyone who saw the film when it first came out. Rubin explains.
Jacob's Ladder (1990)
“There was a guy who came out of the theater the first night Jacob’s Ladder opened in Westwood. He ran out of the theater and yelled at nobody in particular because it was just me standing there. He said, ‘If I ever meet the writer of that film, I'll kill him.’”
Clearly the film isn’t for everyone, but evoking strong reactions is generally considered a good thing. And it inspired a remake in 2019 (Rubin was not involved in the writing).
For the record, Rubin does NOT advocate taking LSD.
Rubin’s quest to understand life before and after death plays out thematically in all his films. What happens to us when we die is life’s biggest mystery and the exploration of that mystery makes for the most compelling stories like in the romantic thriller Ghost.
It’s almost difficult to believe that the same writer executed both Jacob’s Ladder and Ghost – considering how commercially appealing Ghost was – but they kind of play out as two sides of the same coin. Both involve love, death, and peering behind the veil into the spiritual realm. Jacob’s Ladder is more on the horror end of the spectrum while Ghost is more of a romantic mystery and reaches out to a different audience.
“Ghost was what Jerry Zucker [the film’s director] called a four-quadrant movie. So, we had children and old people, everyone watching it. It was comedy. It was tragedy. It was all the above. It's a ‘popular’ film because it touches a lot of bases. Does it go to the ultimate core of being? I don't think so. But does it wake certain things up in people? Or bring up questions about [life’s] final purpose?”
Ghost (1990)
No question that it does. Rubin says the message of Ghost can be summed up in one of the final lines in the movie, a line that he and Zucker struggled to find for about two years. Zucker wanted a Casablanca line, something that the audience would remember after they left the theater. It finally came to Rubin when he and Zucker were in the car heading to the drugstore.
Sam (Swayze) says to Molly (Moore), “That love inside. You can take it with you.”
“That's our line, “The love inside, you take it with you.’ And that really is what the movie is about, finding the love inside. Sam had to do all of this incredible work to find a way back into the world to be able to help the person he loves, who he can never say ‘I love you,’ to because he would just say ‘Ditto,’ which I used to do. But finding the ability to say, ‘I love you,’ is the message of Ghost, and is that worthwhile? Well, I think so. And I think the movie endures for a reason, because it keeps speaking to people in different age groups and in whatever time and place in history, it's still there,” he says.
Rubin admits that not every one of his movies has such a timeless or relatable message, but his goal has always been to awaken people’s consciousness – even if ever so slightly.
“Movies like Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder and a few others, they push the nodule inside you that goes, ‘Oh!’ And I don't think they need to do much more than that. What I keep trying to do is get people to feel something deeper than their day-to-day life experience, something that really moves you or comforts you, or gives you a sense of wholeness, or something like that. It’s not easy to do, and I'm not sure I know how to do it. But some of the things I've written go in that direction, and some of them work,” he says.
Ghost (1990)
His film Deep Impact (1998), focuses on similar themes but on a more catastrophic scale: a giant comet is about to hit Earth, potentially destroying all life. It may sound full of doom and gloom, but it is another way to investigate the death experience especially if you look at it from a symbolic point of view.
“If there's one catastrophe that we all share, every one of us, it's leaving this body and this world. And everybody knows how to do it. Really, I mean, you have hopes that things will work out. You have belief systems that may carry you, but the moment of departure is pretty catastrophic, I think, for most human beings. How do you move toward catastrophe with an open heart, or with a calmness, or with a generosity of spirit, or with a kind of trust? My whole goal is to trust the journey. Trust the journey. And if I can create movies that allow you little bits at a time to do that, then that's meaningful. It's a worthwhile life,” says Rubin.
Rubin had this advice to share with emerging screenwriters: “The first and most important thing is finding your voice. What is it that you have to say? If you don't have that down, everything else will be meaningless. You have to have your own unique perspective on life and on the world. Why is it that you need to make movies? Why is it you need to tell stories? People need to, not just want to, but have to do it. What is that in you? And how do you find that part of yourself? Have a love affair, risk something in the world, drop out of college for a year, and travel. Do something that shakes everything up so that you have to find yourself where you're not comfortable, where you're not known, where you're not predictable, and stories will start to emerge from that,” he says.
Once you feel like you’ve found your voice, he says you can start to write stories with high stakes, where the reader can’t wait to see what happens next.
Bruce Joel Rubin (Photo by Capella Films - © 1993)
Also important is creating characters people want to spend time with.
“You have to know how to make people root for your character, care about your character, deny them the one thing you know they need the most, and then slowly deliver. And then in the very end, like most movies, you take away everything, and there's no possibility of success,” he says.
He gives an example from Star Wars when Luke Skywalker is trying to attack the Death Star.
“Luke Skywalker takes the helmet off his head because nothing is working.
And then he hears a voice from deep inside say, ‘Trust the Force, Luke.’
Rubin says you need to arrive at a place in your story that is transcendent, unexpected, and the core of what your story is about.
“Luke blows up the Death Star and he saves the world. But he had to get to a moment where nothing was working, and something transcendent, something unexpected, something profound occurs and changes his life, the life of everybody in the story, and maybe the life of the audience. Find your way into that space where you've tried everything, and nothing's working, and something greater comes. Every writer has to find that,” Rubin says.
His book, It’s Only a Movie, is available now in all formats and he even narrates the audiobook himself which I highly recommend.