‘Ghost’ Writer Finally Makes the Top Rung : Movies: After a 20-year struggle, Bruce Joel Rubin is riding high. His shocking ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ opens Friday.

Standing out on the balcony of the penthouse suite at the Chateau Marmont, Bruce Joel Rubin looked a little like a star-struck tourist seeing Mann’s Chinese Theatre for the first time.

“This is where Robert De Niro stays when he’s here,” Rubin said, gesturing toward his spacious suite. “It practically has his name on it. I was actually here with him a few years ago, working on a script, when the big earthquake hit, and we went out on the balcony to watch the fires.”

He fell silent for a moment. “It’s pretty incredible, being here,” he said, wagging his head in disbelief. “It’s funny how things can change, isn’t it?”

Incredible is the word.

After a 20-year struggle, the 47-year-old screenwriter has finally made his mark on the movie business. Ten years ago, Rubin was living in Indiana, writing industrial films. When he moved to Hollywood in the mid-’80s, he was so broke that after he finished a six-hour story meeting, he had to borrow money from a production executive to get his car out of the parking lot.

Today, Rubin is riding the wave, basking in the heat that radiates from Hollywood’s favorite commodity: a hit movie. Rubin wrote this year’s big success, “Ghost,” which has grossed more than $176 million. He recently did a rewrite of “Sleeping With the Enemy,” an upcoming Fox film starring Julia Roberts. Now he is holed up at the Chateau, doing rewrites on a Goldie Hawn project.

But what really has people buzzing is Rubin’s new film, “Jacob’s Ladder.” Directed by Adrian Lyne, who made “Flashdance” and “Fatal Attraction,” the movie is a cinematic shocker--a tumultuous drama with the thrills of a two-hour ride on Space Mountain and the terror of a bad acid trip.

The film, which opens Friday, stars Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, a Vietnam War vet whose world is coming apart at the seams. Besieged by nightmarish hallucinations, pursued by Army thugs and hideous demons, he is a man apparently caught in a dark passage between reality and illusion.

Or is he? The film’s surprise ending packs such a jolt that most audiences leave the theater completely baffled, hotly debating the merits--not to mention the meaning-- of the denouement.

“It’s really two movies for the price of one, isn’t it?,” says Lyne, who says he passed up directing “Bonfire of the Vanities” to make “Jacob’s Ladder.” “We’ve had preview audiences who were supposed to discuss the film for a half-hour, and they’ve ended up staying for 90 minutes.”

Tri-Star Pictures faces a serious marketing challenge with a picture that is both a psychological drama and a horrific thriller and the studio, after some consideration, declined to discuss the film at all. One thing is certain: Many moviegoers--and critics--will be upset about the ambiguous nature of the film’s finale. But don’t expect any apologies from Rubin.

“Storytelling in 20th-Century America has become so predictable that we know how the stories will end before we start,” Rubin says. “I think storytellers need to rediscover the value of surprise. This film won’t be 100% satisfying for everybody. Obviously the ending makes you re-examine everything you’ve seen on the screen. But Jacob is on a journey, a spiritual quest, and to experience it, we have to go on the journey with him.”

Rubin is so guileless and unassuming that he can ruminate for hours about quests, gurus and metaphysical journeys without ever sounding like a wacko disciple of Alan Watts. Soft-spoken and professorial in appearance, Rubin is the antithesis of today’s young hot-rod screenwriters. In fact, he happily confesses that he nearly flunked every screenwriting course he took. Rubin is more at home musing about 16th-Century art, quoting Aldous Huxley and marveling that his long-neglected script, largely based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, is finally getting a big Hollywood send-off.

If “Jacob’s Ladder” finds an audience, Rubin feels it will be for much the same reasons that people have responded to “Ghost.” “We’re in a society where people are starving for spiritual nourishment,” he says. “People often think that I’m obsessed with death. But I think I’m actually obsessed with life. It’s just that life doesn’t have its meaning unless you understand your own mortality.

“We have to start listening to themselves. In our society today, you can go all day listening to radio or TV or your Walkman. We don’t have enough quiet in the world. When I get into my car, I turn the radio off. When I come home, I turn the TV off. You need the quiet to hear yourself.”

Rubin flashed a sheepish grin. “Geez, I hope I’m not beginning to sound like Timothy Leary here.”

Rubin does share a certain kinship with Leary and other counterculture icons. After attending the New York University Film School in the early 1960s, in the same class with Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma, Rubin headed off on a two-year journey, seeking inner peace.

“I felt trapped--I needed time for self-reflection,” he says of a trip that took him from Turkey and Iran through Afghanistan and Nepal and on to Malaysia, Thailand and Japan.

When he returned to the United States, he married and took a job as film curator at the Whitney Museum, overseeing its New American Filmmaker series. In the mid-1970s, he moved to Bloomington, Ind., where his wife took a doctorate in art education.

Though he wrote a script that was eventually made into “Brainstorm” (with Rubin getting story credit), his chances of breaking into Hollywood seemed remote. “I lost faith lots of times,” he says. “I was in Indiana and everyone I knew doing films was out in Hollywood.

“But I’m resilient. When Moses was wandering in the desert, he followed a pillar of smoke and a column of fire by night. And I kept following the pillar of smoke inside myself.”

When Rubin visited Hollywood, his old classmate, De Palma, offered more practical advice: If you want a movie career, move to Hollywood. Rubin had avoided Los Angeles before, keeping his distance after he graduated from film school.

“I had a complete fear of coming here,” he says. “It wasn’t just the emptiness of the place, which is changing, but the feeling that everything was so make it or break it. I really felt--if I fail, what else would I do?”

Before he moved to Los Angeles, Rubin wrote “Jacob’s Ladder.” When his wife asked him what he writing, Rubin simply told her, “I don’t know.”

“It just came out of me and I tried to take it down as fast as I could. It was a terrifying experience. In a lot of ways, I was simply the first person to see the movie. I was in a completely different space. I remember when my kids would run in and say, ‘Hey, Dad, it’s dinner time,’ I’d almost jump out of my chair. I was so far away.”

In Hollywood, “Jacob’s Ladder” was praised--to death. “Everybody told my agent ‘We love it. What a great story, but no thanks,’ ” Rubin recalls. It was even featured in an American Film magazine story about Hollywood’s 10-best unproduced screenplays. Finally, as a result of the 1988 Writers Guild strike, director Lyne read the script and took up the crusade.

“It was this huge, incredibly descriptive document,” Lyne says. “Bruce had really written a novel. I can imagine why it went unmade so long. It was incredibly intimidating. I spent a year just working on a way to film it.”

Even though Rubin praised Lyne’s handling of the film, he acknowledges that they had a yearlong “raging debate” over how to depict his scripts’ various demons and hallucinations.

“We did a lot of arguing,” Lyne says with a laugh. “What would start as an intellectual debate ended up as some almost down-on-the-ground fighting.”

Talk about a Hollywood odd couple. Rubin, who likes to quote Plato’s last words (“Practice dying”), is a man of the spirit. Lyne, the stylish director behind such heated sexual dramas as “Fatal Attraction” and “9 1/2 Weeks,” is a man of the flesh. As Rubin says, Lyne gave him a crash course in Hollywood pragmatism.

Poring over the script one day, Lyne came to a line which read: “The wall shatters and we see a vision of the abyss.” He turned to Rubin and said, “OK, Bruce. How many carpenters do I need to build the abyss?”

To find the appropriate images for the script’s ominous apparitions, Lyne waded through stacks of photography books and magazines, searching for strikingly original images.

“I wanted images you hadn’t seen before--images you couldn’t categorize right away,” he says. “Bruce’s descriptions were brilliant, but very literary. They would’ve seemed corny on screen. I needed something more tangible. Maybe Steven Spielberg could’ve shot them, but I was afraid if I did it they’d look like some Liberace version of a light show.”

Lyne turned to his trick-bag of cinematic wizardry, shaking the camera and filming the movie’s demonic apparitions at four frames per second, instead of the customary 24, to give them an unsettling, almost surreal sense of whirring motion.

After preview audiences saw the film, Lyne trimmed more than 30 minutes out of the film, including one particularly garish scene showing a butcher cleaving a huge, bloody chunk of meat. “It was just too-ugh-too awful!” Lyne groans. “Sometimes it’s what you don’t show that’s most effective. You let the audiences’ imagination provide the terror.”

Lyne relied as much on his emotions as his technique. One scene in the script featured a spectacular stairway to heaven, complete with angels and sunbeams.

“I knew it would be doomed to failure--I could never show enough sunbeams,” he says. “So I shot the scene showing a father and his child together, almost as a family reunion. Maybe the idea came from my own feelings about being reunited with my father, who died 15 years ago. He didn’t like me much, and I didn’t like him much. But I’ve always hoped that if we ever had a second time around, maybe we’d make our peace with each other.”

“Jacob’s Ladder” is full of that sense of spirit and passion. As Rubin puts it, it’s a raging war about a soul trying to make peace with itself. Having finally seen his work reach the screen, Rubin identifies with the film’s eerie, dream-like vision.

“It’s been extraordinary to finally achieve this. Success is a really dreamlike experience. And because it’s so dreamlike, you know it’s temporary. It’s not a dream that lasts forever.”

A thin smile spread across Rubin’s face as he stared out of the window of his penthouse suite. “So I guess right now I’m just living out a fulfillment dream.”