The Sticking Place

Bruce Joel Rubin

Cronin 34It’s Only a Movie (2024) is a memoir by Bruce Joel Rubin, a certified member of the Movie Brat generation and the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of the films Brainstorm, Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder. He is also a product of the great American counterculture experiment of the late 1960s, a seasoned meditation teacher, and an author who believes that stories have the potential to lead us everywhere and nowhere. His own tale has all the rises and falls of an epic, all the mysteries, complexities and contradictions of a fully-lived life. Through his unguarded reflections on the personal, the professional and the profound, in It’s Only a Movie, Bruce offers a unique and intimate portrait of creative forces that weave us in and out of the world we know.

Three Visionary Screenplays (2024), contains three unproduced scripts written by Rubin. Quasar, written with David Bienstock, is a mind-bending science fiction epic for the era of Timothy Leary, 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Human Potential Movement, about a scientist who sees the origins of life as we know it and a society on the verge of an evolutionary leap. Teratoma is a gut-wrenching horror story that combines body horror with spiritual drama, charting the outbreak of a global epidemic and a soul-searching war between hope and fear, angels and devils. Secrets of the Astral Plane is a metaphysical thriller set during the waning days of the Cold War, pitting a ragtag team of American psychics against a Soviet supervillain. The fate of the Western world will be determined behind the cosmic curtain. Together, these three unproduced scripts offer insight into their respective genres, the times in which they were written, and the existential questions of a writer who has inspired many.