Danny Rubin – Groundhog Day
By: Michael D. McClellan | Danny Rubin is jazzed, and for good reason. The laid back screenwriter who, in 1993, broke it big with the existential Hollywood hit Groundhog Day, is basking in the success of his critically-acclaimed Groundhog Day The Musical, which, in 2017, garnered seven Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. Throw in eight Olivier nominations (and two wins) following a well-received run at London’s iconic Old Vic, and Rubin’s 24-year odyssey from film to stage not only proves the staying power of his beloved collaboration with Harold Ramis, it validates his longstanding belief that Groundhog Day always had the chops to charm live audiences.
“Originally, I thought it was such a strong and original way of telling a story, that it would deserve retelling in a variety of media,” Rubin explains. “I’d been working on it for several years when I got British theatre director Matthew Warchus’ call. Dozens of people had contacted me over the years, but this time it was a wonderful confluence of timing, taste and perception.”
Nearly everyone has seen the 1993 Bill Murray film on which this show is based, the story of a cynical weatherman trapped in a single repeating day. When it was released on Feb. 12, 1993, Groundhog Day was considered little more than a better-than-average comedy. Since then, the film has earned critical respect for its originality, while being regarded as a deceptively deep philosophical meditation on the meaning of life – a high-brow statement concealed in a low-brow wrapper.
“The movie was never intended, by me or by Harold, to be anything more than a good, heartfelt, entertaining story,” Rubin says. “He and I had terrific conversations about Buddhism and reincarnation, about Superman and the ethics of not saving everybody constantly, and other philosophical ideas stimulated by the story. Still, we never anticipated the impact the film would have. I did, however, feel from the very beginning that I’d stumbled upon a story with all the makings of a classic, so simple and true that it could be retold many different ways by many different storytellers.”
Rubin, in his own way, has been living and reliving Groundhog Day every day since the movie first hit the big screen. With only four film credits to his name, Groundhog Day is by far the most successful.
“I’ve been called a one-hit wonder, but it’s not something that I view negatively,” he says. “Groundhog Day is something I get asked about every day, whether that’s through interviews, fan email, or meetings with studio execs. It’s a blessing, not a curse. Doors open because of Groundhog Day.”
Following the surprising success of the Punxsutawney-based romantic comedy – which was made for $14.6 million and raked in a tidy $70.9 million – Rubin disappeared into the ether. He moved his family to New Mexico, eschewing the glitz of Hollywood in favor of the serenity of Santa Fe. He kept writing scripts for his own ideas, and he kept optioning them, steadily, over the years – to Universal, to Amblin, to Castle Rock, to Miramax – although none were ever produced. And he continued to believe in the power of Groundhog Day as a musical.
“By the time Matthew Warchus called, I already had an outline, a rough draft of the book, about 30 song ideas I had winnowed down to 12, and a ream of scenes, themes, bits, gags, progressions, dialogue snippets and even some melodies. But as someone from outside of the theatre community, I had no idea how to find a partner. Fortunately, Matthew found me.”
Warchus introduced Rubin to Tim Minchin, the composer and lyricist for the Tony-winning smash Matilda The Musical. The project gained momentum from there, and soon the charismatic Andy Karl was cast in the lead role. Following its run at the Old Vic, Rubin’s brainchild premiered on Broadway at the August Wilson Theater on April 17, 2017. During its five month run, Groundhog Day The Musical mesmerized audiences and critics alike, eventually garnering Rubin a Tony Award nomination for Best Book of a Musical.
Not bad for a guy who’s been living the same day since February 12, 1993.
Groundhog Day was your idea and your story, but it took collaboration to make it to the big screen. What was it like working with the late, great Harold Ramis?
Danny Rubin: I think that we were both just nice guys and we wanted to make a good movie. We were also professionals who did what needed to be done. We sat down and talked about interesting things, which made it fun. I would go off and write, and he would react to that.
Was it hard to make creative concessions when editing Groundhog Day?
Danny Rubin: It was challenging because I really liked the original script. I was willing to make changes, but we both understood that you don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater, so there was a lot of back and forth.
Give me an example.
Danny Rubin: For example, you don’t throw away the first act the way that I had it. You start in the middle, which Harold had said that he loved. You don’t create a reason for Phil Connors being stuck in the same day if you want to make an existentially flavored movie; you create a reason for the thing if you want to make a Saturday afternoon popcorn chopper.
Given your laid back personalities, I can’t imagine the two of you getting into heated arguments over the direction of the script.
Danny Rubin: It was a more of an intellectual argument in that I was being protective of my material. I wanted to let go early on, but I wasn’t getting a lot of assurances that this wasn’t going to become the stupidest movie ever. Harold wanted to work with me because he was a decent guy. He gave me plenty of room to work, rather than grabbing the script and making changes. Ultimately, he felt that he needed to take it away and reshape it.
Harold Ramis knew what it took to make something funny.
Bill Murray was cast as weatherman Phil Connors. Did he have any influence over the script?
Danny Rubin: Bill actually liked the original draft more than what Harold had come up with, but the studio had already agreed to Harold’s draft. That’s when they rehired me to work directly with Bill to get the script into a sort of intermediary place. We did that, and then Bill had to start learning his lines and getting into character, leaving Harold and I to resolve some issues. We ultimately hammered out a smooth draft that was all in his voice. It came out pretty well.
Groundhog Day was your big break, but you earned your BA as a biology major at Brown University. How did the creative side win out?
Danny Rubin: I thought that they would be combined in some way. There was a time when I thought the only job I could do was Ira Flatow’s job. Ira Flatow is the guy that you hear on NPR on Fridays doing the science report. He was and is absolutely wonderful at creating an entertaining production that teaches something that is fundamental and interesting that most people don’t know about in science. I thought that could be me. When I was in college, I had a radio show along those lines. I would research a topic and produce a public affairs segment that taught somebody something about science. I thought that was a great way to have a life of learning that did not include going to graduate school or being in academia.
Did you ever second-guess your decision to go away from your field of study?
Danny Rubin: That never really crossed my mind, although journey was both exciting and hellish. I was searching for something but I wasn’t completely focused. I had recalibrated from being a science-oriented person to being someone interested in the arts and media, which opened up a lot of possibilities, but also introduced a lot of unknowns. I always felt confident that I could do something creative, but I didn’t really know what. I was living in Chicago and doing everything that came along – music, acting, comedy, writing. When you’re going in a lot of different directions at once it becomes quite exhausting.
Rejection is a part of the entertainment business. What was that like for you?
Danny Rubin: When I was first looking to establish myself, I started a folder that I called “Independent Producer Correspondence.” One day I was looking through it, and I realized that it was pretty much all rejection letters. I was in my mid-twenties. I was young, so rejection didn’t really bother me.
Did you ever get discouraged?
Danny Rubin: The rejection letters usually came on letterhead from NBC Studios, or Columbia Pictures, or wherever, so they actually had the opposite effect. It made me feel like I was in the business! It’s these little psychological boosts that keep you going. You have to have the right attitude to survive, and a lot of people who are very talented and creative don’t have the right temperament to struggle against a beast that’s impossible to truly understand. I somehow had the right combination of timely luck, which kept me from total despair, and the right attitude to keep going. You have to take the long view if you’re going to make it in this business.
Groundhog Day: The Musical garnered 7 Tony Award Nominations
Did you grow up dreaming of becoming a screenwriter?
Danny Rubin: The dream wasn’t to become a great screenwriter. At one point I figured I’d wind up on public television doing one of those fund drives or something like that [laughs]. I imagined them saying, “Danny, you are really good at this.” And that would be that. My dream was to have a satisfying life, whatever that meant. I didn’t go into it thinking that I had to make a lot of money, that I needed to be important, or that I needed to work in a specific job. It was just me pursuing things as they came along. I got a lot of pleasure out of entertaining, and being creative. I felt that if I pursued that, even if I failed, it would at least be an interesting, fun life, because I was doing something that I was interested in.
How did you break into the business?
Danny Rubin: I just kept at it. I was living in Chicago at the time, and while I didn’t know anybody in the industry, I knew people who knew people in the industry. I’m not a shy person, so I approached a lot of these people at parties and other events, and asked for help in trying to find anybody who might want to read a screenplay. Strangely, people want to help. Someone would say, “My cousin drives a car in Hollywood, sometimes for famous people,” and I would pursue that lead. There were a bunch of these. One of them was a guy who had recently become an agent and had started representing somebody who I knew, so I sent him the script for a movie that eventually became Hear No Evil, starring Marlee Matlin. That’s how I sold my first screenplay and wound up in the business.
Your next move is to Los Angeles. Your agent wants another screenplay – a “calling-card script” – something fresh that would open doors and get you into the room with studio execs. What happened next?
Danny Rubin: I went to see a movie at the Writer’s Guild Theater in Los Angeles. My wife was at home with our baby, so my companion that afternoon was a book about vampires, which I was reading while waiting for the lights to go down. In was in this strange, cinematic netherworld that I started thinking about the concept of somebody living forever, and the potential for a person to change over the course of an eternal life, but I wasn’t sure how to set it up. My character would have to interact with history and then keep going into the future. There would be worlds I would need to invent. Such an interesting premise, but a very cumbersome movie to set up – and very expensive. And then I remembered something that happened to be on my list of screenplay ideas, which happened to be about a guy repeating the same day over and over again. That idea suddenly became very useful in the service of this first idea, about a young man’s very long journey through life. I could put it all in the same day, and that made it doable. That’s how I ended up writing Groundhog Day.
Urban legend has it that you hammered out the draft of Groundhog Day over a four day stretch.
Danny Rubin: It’s an exaggeration to say that I wrote it all in four days. It makes for a good story, but the four days was just the scripting part. I had already spent almost two months coming up with all of the creative ideas and ironing out the structure.
Tell me about the process.
Danny Rubin: I brainstormed a lot. It was a stream of consciousness, page-after-page-after-page of what it would be like to be in that situation – what it would be fun to see, how the character would feel, the changes that would occur over time. I would write out little dialogue sketches, trying to figure out who my characters were, what the rules were, things like that. I finally felt like I had enough there, and that’s when I started focusing on the structure. The rest came later as we developed it in the studio with Harold Ramis, which turned it into the movie that you saw.
How hard is it to sell a movie idea?
Danny Rubin: I felt that I understood what would make an entertaining movie. I didn’t really make any distinctions between whether that movie came from Ealing Studios in London, or from Hollywood. Everywhere I took it, people said, “We love it, but we can’t make it.” I didn’t want to appear like a guy from out of town, which I was, so I said, “Of course you can’t make it.”
How long did it take to get the green light?
Danny Rubin: It took about six months. My agent had quit and left the business, so I had to find a new agent and I was using Groundhog Day as a calling card. I had gotten plenty of meetings with people and had actually gotten some work off of it, which was great. And then, I got a call from this agent at Creative Artists Agency who said, “I read Groundhog Day and I loved it. We can’t represent you, but do you mind if I send your script to some of our people?” So, he wound up giving it to Trevor Alpert, who was a producing partner for Harold Ramis. Trevor really loved it, so he gave it to Harold, and it took off from there. Suddenly, I really was a Hollywood writer!
What was the negotiation like?
Danny Rubin: Trevor wanted to do business with Harold, and I’m sure he said, “Do you think you can handle this script? Can you turn Groundhog Day into a Harold Ramis script?” And the response was, “Hey, I’m Harold Ramis.” I assume it happened something like that [laughs].
Groundhog Day never explains the thing that keeps Phil looped in that single, repeating day.
Danny Rubin: I thought that it was boring and unnecessary. I hated having to come up with an explanation for the event because I loved the mystery of it. It felt arbitrary. To me, the interesting thing is the character’s response to being stuck in this repeating situation. It didn’t matter to me what it was, and I certainly didn’t want the story to be about Phil undoing the curse or fixing the time machine. I wanted to start after the repetition.
How did you envision this repetition changing Phil Connors?
Danny Rubin: I felt like Phil’s eternity would go in stages. I imagined an adolescent stage, where he realizes that he can get away with anything. When that becomes boring, he becomes more debauched and tries darker things. And then, when he becomes so self-hating, he commits suicide – which he tries several times, unsuccessfully, in a lightly dark but funny way. And then, once he’s completely empty, and he’s unsuccessfully killed himself, then what does he do? Whether or not you’re a God for having all of these supernatural powers, you are still stuck in that day. I imagined there would be a stage where he starts to fill the vessel, ultimately becoming a lovable person – and that’s when Rita falls in love with him. We know that he’s changed, and that’s what gets him out of the thing, whatever that thing is.
Does the repetition change Phil, or does Rita change Phil?
Danny Rubin: In my opinion, it was the repetition that changed Phil. That’s what makes it a beautiful, pure, and unique experiment. I think we all understand that we move through life and mature emotionally in part by how long we’ve lived. Yet, I think this shows pretty clearly that we have this other experience, the day-to-day activities that we have, that plays a part in driving us to the next stage. We all experience a certain kind of repetition, and that has a usefulness.
Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell
Does this mean that Phil’s repetition is circular and linear at the same time?
Danny Rubin: Exactly. A young man in his twenties might think of dating a new woman every night and figuring out how to get her in bed as a challenge, and quite possibly the best life ever. And yet, by the time he’s in his thirties it starts to get tedious and boring. It’s no longer fulfilling. But you have to go through it. You just can’t skip a step and say that I’m going to go one to the next step. Even though it was the same repeating day, Phil had to grow through his experiences.
Groundhog Day opens in the TV studio, but the original idea was to start in the middle of the story.
Danny Rubin: None of us were sure exactly what would make it all work. In the drafts that Harold and I did together, we backed it up as far as the van moving into town, going from Pittsburgh, which gave us plenty of opportunities to set up the characters in the journey. But we changed our minds after the audience screen test. That’s when we made changes, did the re-shoots, and added the opening bit at the TV station. If you think about it, the thing really does have two openings. There’s the opening, and then there’s the music, which is when the movie starts again.
How did tweaking the beginning of the film change character development?
Danny Rubin: As far as the impact, it emphasized Rita a little bit more. Rita was an element of the whole story, but Groundhog Day was very much Phil’s story in the original version. The changes made the film more of a traditional Hollywood romantic comedy, and it wasn’t originally written that way. That was part of what helped it fall together for Harold. It helped him understand it, and in turn helped him explain it to an audience. I’m glad that it worked, and it worked really, really well.
Tell me about Bill Murray’s character.
Danny Rubin: It was a shared responsibility, and sometimes these things either magically come together or they don’t. I had originally imagined Phil as more of an average guy, not a particularly nasty guy. He was young, in his mid-twenties, and sort of looked at things, like, “Well, if you were put in this situation you would do it, too.” And that premise worked for my original concept. And then they cast Bill Murray and decided to make the film more of a romantic comedy. Bill’s sense of humor being what it is, he had his own take on Phil Connors, which was a guy working through middle-age issues and trying to escape the rut in his life. Bill saw a struggling character, one that was maybe a little disillusioned with where the journey had taken him. He decided to make Phil Connors a little bit more of an unsympathetic character, who was also an egotist and into only himself. I didn’t disagree with those things, but I didn’t think they were necessary to tell the story. You have to remember, I wasn’t writing a comedy when I sat down and came up with the concept. I was writing Siddhartha. It wasn’t supposed to feel like a sitcom.
Did Bill’s interpretation of Phil Connors ever become a point of contention?
Danny Rubin: Harold gently walked me away from the ledge [laughs]. Actually, Harold reassured me that it would be okay. Sometimes I was assured and sometimes I wasn’t, but we had what I think was a genial, friendly, but professional relationship. This provided a cushion. Through the years we spoke to each other every Groundhog Day. Sometimes we’d make it a point to see each other and have a meal.
It sounds like the movie created a bond between writer and director.
Danny Rubin: Over the years, as the film became more and more important in people’s minds and imaginations, there was more distance behind the process that made it, and more shared experience of the afterlife. We met each other’s families, and talked about our kids and how things were going. It was a very lovely, friendly relationship in the years that followed.
Did you write Ned Ryerson over-the-top, or did the actor bring that to the smarmy insurance salesman?
Danny Rubin: It was on the page exactly as he said it, but nobody else brought that level of “scrape him off the pavement” that Stephen Tobolowsky did. When discussing the role, he said something like, “You’re going to have to take me off pavement with a spatula.” I never imagined it happening like it did, but in some ways he’s the most memorable character that I’ve ever created.
Stephen Tobolowsky as insurance salesmen Ned Reyerson
Phil Connors seemed to relish punching Ned.
Danny Rubin: What a cliché that the most obnoxious guy in town would be an insurance salesman. And yet, I met several insurance salesmen in my early twenties who were exactly like that. Someone like Ned Ryerson is the last person that I would ever want to be stuck anywhere with, so Phil slugging the guy would have been a perfectly reasonable way to deal with this eternity…well-deserved and, somehow, morally defensible.
Tell me about Rita, played by Andie MacDowell.
Danny Rubin: I think Rita was a change agent for Phil. She took him from his lowest point and set him on the right course for that one beat. Until then, Phil’s mindset was “I am a god.” After that point he suddenly contemplated what he wanted to do with his life. To some extent, that sounds like a dishonest alteration from the experiment, but on the other hand, that was one of the conceits that Harold came up with that made the film feel like a romantic comedy.
After that scene, Phil stops looking at his predicament as a curse.
Danny Rubin: It felt natural to go in that direction. He could fill his days figuring out new ways to torture people, or new ways to create mayhem. I think it felt more natural that he would have already done that and gotten over it. We don’t see everything that happened to the character in the movie, but we understand that Phil had torn down every bit of who he was, and then started to fill himself up with something new. I always imagined Phil as a vessel that gets emptied and refilled.
Refilled in a good way.
Danny Rubin: Torture and mayhem doesn’t feel like a Harold Ramis movie [laughs]. Redemption was the only direction it could go. We open our ears to civilization and we learn to develop skills and sensitivities, and we listen to the world and we pay attention to other people, and realize that we aren’t the only thing going. We learn that being generous to other people can bring its own kind of satisfaction, which is arguably even more fulfilling than trying to satisfy yourself. And that was Phil’s ultimate realization.
Let’s talk about Groundhog Day: The Musical. What was it like taking the film to the stage?
Danny Rubin: I always had it in my mind that Groundhog Day would make a great musical. I just kind of kept that in the back of my head, because I figured I had a long career ahead of me and I wasn’t about to just start making more Groundhog stuff. Eventually it bubbled up to the top of my pile, and I realized that it was now or never.
Old friends: Danny Rubin and Bill Murray at the Broadway premiere of Groundhog Day: The Musical
You needed the theatre equivalent of Harold Ramis to pull it off.
Danny Rubin: It was at this same time that I found my partners, Tim Minchin and Matthew Warchus. I loved their work on Matilda. Both of them were people that I felt almost immediately that I could trust. They seemed to value my work and my input and wanted to create something really special as opposed to something that they could just capitalize on.
Was it important for them to stay true to the movie?
Danny Rubin: They had their hearts in the right place. Because Groundhog Day had become so huge in the public imagination, I felt like we had a responsibility to do something at least as good as the movie. We were able to pull it off because we were all on the same page.
Did you write any of the songs?
Danny Rubin: I didn’t try to write any songs. I told Tim all of my song ideas, and we talked about where the songs would go, but I left that up to him. I was able to help him evaluate where the play was emotionally before, during, and after a song. It was a great, great collaboration.
Groundhog Day has had incredible staying power. How does it feel to be a part of something so beloved?
Danny Rubin: Lucky. Just incredibly fortunate. I guess there are a couple of things that you could hope for in a life, or in a career, and doing something that actually affects other people in a way and becomes part of the conversation, it’s just an honor to be associated with a film like that.
If you had one piece of advice for others what would that be?
Danny Rubin: I don’t think I’m supposed to do that. People will figure that out for themselves. I only do what I like or what I’m proud of, and I try to like what I do when I can’t control what I’m stuck doing. And no matter what those big goal values are, you try to stick to them. You’ve got to bend a little bit here and there. I guess if I had one piece of advice is to remember that it’s life, and you’ve only got one of them. Appreciate the miraculous nature of that in as many ways as you can, and as often as you can. And don’t focus on all of those rejection letters.
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