His love of theater began at the age of five when he saw his mother acting in Mary Poppins at a local high school.
[2] Rubin traces his interest in filmmaking to viewing the Ingmar Bergman film Wild Strawberries at the Krim Theater in Detroit when he was a teenager.
[2] Rubin only took one screenwriting course at NYU and almost failed it, due in part to what he considered the confusing, non-intuitive theories on plotting and structure.
[3][4] His classmates at NYU included Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, who became the director of Jennifer,[5] Rubin's first student script.
While still at NYU, Rubin got a job selling hot dogs and beer at the 1964 New York World's Fair.
"[2] In 1966, Rubin became an assistant film editor at NBC's evening news show, The Huntley-Brinkley Report,[6] but an LSD experience inspired his departure on a spiritual quest a year later.
He meditated in Greece and then headed for Tibet, hitchhiking through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he "felt embraced and expanded by each culture."
But it wasn't until Rubin returned to New York City that he met his spiritual teacher, Rudi, only a few blocks away from where he began his journey.
[2] David Bienstock, an independent filmmaker who was Curator of Film at the Whitney Museum in New York, was a friend of Rubin's and hired him as an assistant.
Rubin recalled, "We came up with a story about an astronomer who discovers what he thinks is a giant quasar, but it turns out to be something that spiritually changes his life.
While there, Rubin began writing Jacob's Ladder and the treatment for Ghost, and waited to hear about a script he'd started in New York and sold in 1979, The George Dunlap Tape.
[2][3][4][6] The director of Rubin's George Dunlap Tape script, Doug Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, Blade Runner) brought in other writers and the film opened in 1983 as Brainstorm, starring Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood, in her last film.
The final ten screenplays included The Princess Bride, Total Recall, At Close Range and Jacob's Ladder.
Rebello wrote in part: "Admirers of Bruce Joel Rubin's Jacob's Ladder flat out refuse to describe this screenplay.
As written on his website: "The result of always carrying an iPhone in his pocket, he describes this new phase in his creative life as the discovery of seeing.
Although Bruce's film career has been entwined with the imagery of cinema, his primary focus has always been on narrative storytelling more than the visual.
In recent years, he has shifted his focus to the image itself and has discovered that photographs, even in abstraction, have wonderful stories to tell.
"[2]Rubin and his wife, Blanche, split their time between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and he teaches weekly meditation classes in Dutchess County, New York.
[9] Their son Joshua has worked as an award-winning writer of major video games like Assassin's Creed 2 and Destiny.
In 2018 he was involved in the development of virtual reality projects, and worked as an Interactive Narrative Consultant with clients in the U.S. and Europe.