Danny Says Theater Movie ' title='Danny Says Theater Movie ' />Groundhog Day Writer Danny Rubin Lived His Movie. On the first night of previews for Groundhog Day the musical, as the lights go down, its safe to say that most of the audience already knows the story thats about to unfold. It would be hard to find anyone who hasnt seen, or osmotically absorbed, the 1. Bill Murray film on which this show is based, the story of a cynical weatherman trapped in a single repeating day. But no one knows it as well as the guy in the third row a 6. Hopi sun symbol stud in one ear. Danny Rubin is utterly rapt, even though hes seen this performance more than 2. Toshiba laptop when he was a young man of 3. Rubin is the guy who wrote Groundhog Day the musical. Hes also the guy who wrote Groundhog Day the film both the original script and the version he later hammered out with director Harold Ramis. Its still the film hes still best known for in fact, to this day, its the only film hes known for. If you look him up on imdb. Screenwriter Alex Garland says he and director Danny Boyle have had talks about the proposed sequel to 28 Weeks Later. One of them is the story credit for the Italian remake of Groundhog Day Stork Day. Two others are screenplays for a 1. Marlee Matlin thriller and a 1. S. F. W. that enjoys a solid 1. Rotten Tomatoes. The fourth credit is Groundhog Day a film so beloved, idiomized, and dissertated about that its passed into English vernacular. For almost 2. 5 years, that lone film has remained, for good or ill, his calling card. Im the guy who wrote Groundhog Day, he says now. Im not the amazing screenwriter whos had this long and storied career. Im not Tom Stoppard. But if you have to be stuck with one movie, it could be a worse movie than Groundhog Day. Its delightful to be so associated with something so well loved, Rubin says. You could break your heart thinking youre the victim of this amazing life youve got. This is the story of how Danny Rubin wrote Groundhog Day not once but twice maybe more times than that, but whos counting. Its unusual for any artist to live so long under the shadow of a single work, let alone a story that is itself intimately concerned with limits and repetition. Its more unusual still for an artist to return to that story in another medium for an encore nearly three decades later. Yet here Rubin is, in a Broadway theater, listening to his words echo, again and again and again, into the dark. He doesnt remember how the idea first came to him. Rubin gets ideas the way some people take drugs in wee fistfuls. When this particular batch hit him, he wrote down ten of the best ones in a list. It was the late 8. Rubin was living in Chicago, turning out scripts for industrial films. He once spent two days working the front counter of the countrys most productive Mc. Donalds so he could write a video showing other Mc. Donalds workers how to shave seconds off their time with each customer. It wasnt glorious, but at least he was being paid for writing. Danny Says Theater Movie ' title='Danny Says Theater Movie ' />EXCLUSIVE Danny DeVito is negotiating to join Tim Burtons circus in Disneys liveaction rendering of Dumbo which is casting up now. DeVito is trying to work out. WFMZTV 69 News serves the Lehigh Valley, Berks County, and Philadelphia regions with news and family programming. Biography Movies Watch Dante`S Inferno: An Animated Epic there. Theres a very nice piece on Danny DeVito today by Martha Teichner on CBS Sunday Morning. But sadly, Danny conceded to Teichner that he and Rhea. Still, he wanted to try writing real screenplays. So he made a list of his ten best ideas. Idea No. 2 was a Hitchcockian thriller about a murder in the deaf community he called it Silencer. An agent got interested and that script sold, and a version of it eventually became the decidedly un Hitchcockian Marlee Matlin vehicle Hear No Evil. Rubin moved his family to L. A. His agent said, Get me a writing sample, so Rubin went back to his list. Idea No. 1. 0 on the list was A man lives the same day over and over. He wasnt the first to think of this premise. The idea of reiterating the same stretch of time goes at least as far back as a 1. British military strategist, in which a man dreams his way through the same battle, again and again. In 1. 97. 3, an American named Richard A. Lupoff published a short book titled 1. P. M. about a man stuck in a disfiguration of time. Lupoff briefly pursued legal action against Columbia Pictures after Groundhog Day came out, but the lawsuit was never formally filed. Rubin had never read either of these, and he didnt care how his protagonist had come to be trapped in February 2 a date he chose in the hope that the movie might become a holiday cable perennial, the way Its a Wonderful Life was broadcast every Christmas. Rubin was more interested in what would happen to a man stuck reliving the same day over and over. Would he go crazy Fall to his worst impulses How many lifetimes would it take for someone to truly changeHe thought about the possibilities for a while. Then he powered through drafting the script in four days and sent it off to his agent. Ramis, who wrote and co starred in Ghostbusters, found the script and was hired to direct it, and he cast Bill Murray to star in it. Rubin spent weeks revising it, first with Ramis, then with Murray the two of them throwing ideas back and forth, hanging out in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and then it went back to Ramis, who defended it from the studios worst impulses, such as inserting a scene where the main character, Phil Connors, gets cursed by a gypsy. Then they filmed it, and it was a hit. For Rubin, working with Ramis and Murray wasnt intimidating as much as reassuring It felt like Hollywood had recognized him for who he was, like it had realized what he could do. It was like, Finally,  he says now. This is where I belong. And then it never happened again. After the film. Groundhog Day was a success, Rubin started getting calls to work on scripts. He was now a known quantity he was the guy who wrote Groundhog Day and all producers seemingly wanted was for him to write the same movie again. A rom com. Something quirky. But not too quirky. Maybe something with a time warp or a weatherman. Theyd say, Just write something normal and itll come out Danny Rubiny. Itll be great,  he says. But I dont want to write something normal Its messing with the premise and the structure that makes it excitingRubin made a list of his ten best ideas. Idea No. 1. 0 was A man lives the same day over and over again. It didnt help that hed moved his family to Santa Fe, New Mexico, before Groundhog Day had even finished shooting. At first, L. A. tried to woo him back, regularly flying him into town. Rubins brother Michael, who also worked in Hollywood, knew how this was supposed to go They want to meet you for lunch at the Ivy and they want to think youre a totally fun guy, he says. You get in the door because you wrote a hit movie, but they want to see you as a guy they can play with. But Rubin wouldnt play. It would be like, Goldie Hawn has a dysfunctional family, none of them get along, so they go camping and in the end they all learn to love each other, Rubin recalls. Typically I would say, Okay, I am going to tell you your movie. Hed lay out a perfectly respectable studio picture, with a three act structure and a conventional conclusion. And then Id say, Under no circumstances am I going to write that movie. He sighs. It took me years to understand thats why the business started disappearing. Most people in this situation either quit the screenplay business or learn to compromise. Rubin did neither. He kept writing scripts for his own ideas, and he kept selling them, pretty steadily, over the years to Universal, to Amblin, to Castle Rock, to Miramax. But none of them were produced, and even when one of them spent some time being developed, Rubin would often be booted off the project. He wrote a movie about a woman they asked if it could be about a man. He wrote a silent film they asked if it could have dialogue. People werent responding to my stuff by making movies out of it, he says. They were optioning it, but then there were the same arguments over and over They were trying to make a movie I said I was expressly not interested in making. Tim Minchin, who composed the songs for Groundhog Day the musical, puts it more succinctly Rubin, he says, refused to write to their fucking specs. Rubins daughter, Maida, was a kid back then, but she remembers her dads Hollywood travails.