Then an unexpected twist happened in his own life: he wrote a script for a Christmas movie himself, and he made a movie out of it.
It lasted 40 years.
On Dec. 11, when the film Ruberry wrote, “Single and Ready to Jingle,” premieres on Lifetime, he’ll be watching from his couch with his wife and adult children in Kensington, Maryland. The film is about a woman who books a trip to a singles resort and instead finds herself in a Christmas-obsessed town in Alaska — and falls in love with a man there.
“When people find out that I write films from Kensington, Maryland, I have to say they’re surprised,” Ruberry said. “But they’re not as surprised as I am. I always thought that I would end up playing football.
Four decades after Ruberry first dabbled in scriptwriting for movies, the former public relations agent hits the stride at 66.
“If you want to be a writer, you have to realize that you’re going to see a lot of rejection,” he said, noting that he was turned down more than 100 times before his first TV movie script was accepted in 2021.
“All this rejection made me more determined to prove everyone wrong,” he said.
“Single and Ready to Jingle” will be Ruberry’s second film this year.
He also wrote the screenplay for “The Attraction Test,” an UPtv film airing in April about a college professor who answers her own dating quiz. And another one of his romantic comedy scripts recently made it into the movie “Stepping into Love.” A network for that one has yet to be announced.
Ruberry spent his early years in the Chicago area, and as a teenager moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where he played on the football team at Bishop Ireton High School, a private Catholic school.
“I had absolutely no interest in writing, but I was a good athlete and football was my passion,” he said.
When he was on the James Madison University football team as a linebacker, Ruberry had high hopes that a successful college career might one day lead him to the NFL.
Then, in his first year on the team, a shoulder injury sidelined him.
“I couldn’t play football anymore and I wasn’t cutting it as a biology major either,” he said. “When we got to chemistry, math was over my head. So I decided to major in English.
One of his professors submitted his short stories for an annual academic award at the university, which Ruberry said he won two years in a row.
“Just like that, I found this new passion,” he said. “When I graduated, I decided I wanted to write sitcoms for television.”
They were fun storylines and he had always enjoyed watching TV shows like “Get Smart” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show”.
In 1981, Ruberry earned a master’s degree in film from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. But he soon learned that breaking into Hollywood as a screenwriter was a frustrating job full of endless rejections.
“I missed my girlfriend, so I moved back to the DC area,” he said. “I wrote a musical called Monster of Muldoon that played for a month in Georgetown in the late 80s, and every once in a while I would write a script and try to sell it.”
There wasn’t as much time to write after he took a job in public relations, got married and had two kids, he said.
When his marriage ended in divorce, Ruberry eventually found love again with Helen Beven, a personal trainer he met in 2005 when they were both training for a marathon.
Beven said Ruberry’s marriage proposal was out of a Hollywood script.
“He proposed to me at the end of the Cherry Blossom 10 miles in DC,” Beven, 57, said. “He ran the whole race with the ring, and when he finally caught up with me, of course, I had to say ‘yes.'”
Beven said she was impressed with Ruberry’s passion for writing and her sense of humor.
“Every year he would write this hilarious Christmas letter and send it out to everyone,” she said. “And since I’ve known him, he’s been working on scripts.”
Then in 2019, Ruberry decides to try again to sell a screenplay.
“I had read in a magazine that Hallmark and Lifetime make dozens of original TV movies every year,” he said. “I don’t like the kind of writing with a kiss at the end. But I like romantic comedies. So I wrote one after watching a few Hallmark movies.
Many rom-coms follow the same three beats: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and boy gets girl back, Ruberry said.
“I decided to keep my new script as original as possible and write a romance that could actually happen in real life,” he said. “No one I’ve ever met has met someone on the street and started a romance, so I stayed away from that. My goal was to put comedy back into romantic comedy.
The parcel for his screenplay was about a record store owner who rents out his guest house for the holidays, and his new tenant – a country singer – helps save his shop from financial trouble. The two, of course, begin a romance.
Ruberry said he contacted the screenwriter who wrote the story from the magazine he saw, and she offered to take a look at this script.
“A week later she emailed and said, ‘I think we can sell this,'” he said. “It only takes one person to open the door. I couldn’t believe I could get paid for something I had wanted to do all my life.
While that script hasn’t sold yet, UpTV, an uplifting cable channel, picked up the script Ruberry wrote for “The Attraction Test” last year. Ruberry said that after this one sold, he decided to keep the scripts coming.
Barbara Fisher, producer of “The Attraction Test”, said she was intrigued by Ruberry’s ideas and asked him to write a screenplay using “Single and Ready to Jingle” as the title.
“If they wanted a story for it, I was ready to find one,” Ruberry said.
The next morning, he said he woke up with an idea about a woman who is a single toy company executive. She decides to escape Christmas by traveling to St. John in the Virgin Islands, but instead an assistant books her a flight to St. John, Alaska, where the town celebrates Christmas 24/7. .
“And of course she meets the brother of the innkeeper where she is staying,” Ruberry said. “And there is a snowstorm, which prevents flights from taking off.”
His screenplay was an instant hit with the producer.
“People want to get away with something fun on vacation,” said Fisher, executive vice president of scripted content at Real One Entertainment.
“Every network now has Christmas movies because it’s something the whole family can watch,” she said. “Nobody seems to get tired of it.”
Fisher said she didn’t hesitate to hire Ruberry to write another Christmas script for 2023 after she completed “Single and Ready to Jingle.”
“Brian is a talented writer with great ideas, and easy to work with,” she said. “Maybe it’s something that comes when someone reaches a certain maturity.”
Ruberry said he often draws on experiences and connections from his own life.
He is now in front of his keyboard eight hours a day and can knock out the first draft of a screenplay in three or four weeks.
“If you have an idea, chances are it’s been done before, so you have to do some research,” he said. “The ‘wife goes back to her small town and starts over with her old boyfriend’ theme has been done a thousand times.”
Looking back, Ruberry said, there may have been a moment in college where he showed a hint of things to come.
“I didn’t have time to read a book for a book report, so I made up a whole story about pirates,” he said. “My teacher, Sister Thomas, thought it was wonderful and posted it on the bulletin board.”
He is grateful that she encouraged his creativity, he said, which he mixed with a healthy dose of stamina.
“It’s been a long time coming for me,” Ruberry said. “But it was worth the wait.”
