When Every Day Is‘Groundhog Day'

Danny Rubin wrote the beloved movie and, 24 years later, the musical. In between, he lived it.

- S. I. Rosenbaum

ON THE FIRST night of previews for Groundhog Day the musical, as the lights go down, it’s safe to say that most of the audience already knows the story that’s about to unfold. It would be hard to find anyone who hasn’t seen, or osmotically absorbed, the 1993 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 60-year-old with wild wisps of hair, round eyeglasses, and a Hopi-sun-symbol stud in one ear. Danny Rubin is utterly rapt, even though he’s seen this performance more than 20 times; even though he’s lived with this story for nearly 25 years; even though he’s listening to some of the same lines he first tapped out on a Toshiba laptop when he was a young man of 32.

Rubin is the guy who wrote Groundhog Day the musical. He’s also the guy who wrote Groundhog Day the film — both the original script and the version he later hammered out with director Harold Ramis.

It’s still the film he’s still best known for; in fact, to this day, it’s the only film he’s known for. If you look him up on imdb.com, there are just four writing credits to his name. One of them is the story credit for the Italian remake of Groundhog Day (“Stork Day”). Two others are screenplays for a 1993 Marlee Matlin thriller and a 1994 film called S.F.W. that enjoys a solid 12 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The fourth credit is Groundhog Day — a film so beloved, idiomized, and dissertated about that it’s passed into English vernacular. For almost 25 years, that lone film has remained, for good or ill, his calling card.