From Word to Screen, Eventually
an extract from Robert Cettl's book Film Tales: Movie Trivia in the Age of DVD (on sale now in print and soon in e-book)
Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin became a major Hollywood player after the success of the romantic supernatural piece Ghost. In demand as a writer, he had written a script for a bleak supernatural thriller entitled Jacob’s Ladder. However, studio after studio passed on the project and for the longest time, the script for Jacob’s Ladder (starring Tim Robbins) was considered the finest un-produced film script circulating in Hollywood. In a rare nod to the screenwriter’s craft, the script was even written about and analysed – as a script – in the then-influential film journal American Film. Yet, even though Ghost was an enormous hit and made Rubin a bankable figure now in executive terms, Jacob’s Ladder was considered to be un-filmable. That is until British director Adrian Lyne, better known for his cold and glossily “sophisticated” morality plays (Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal), was on the lookout for a challenging new project and was given the script to read. He was enamoured of it quickly and soon turned it into a clever, hallucinatory, psychological riddle, one of the finest fantasy films made about psychosis and the process of dying.