About the Picture
Without darkness the light wouldn’t seem so bright.
RUBY BY THE RIVER is a story of sex and violence, insanity and addiction, told in whispers and shadows. The journey begins and ends with the river of beauty and pain that runs through us all.
Set in the dark gray world of Eugene, Oregon in the 1990s, the central storyline follows Adelle, a young street poet and folk musician, tangled in an arc of compassion embedded within a tunnel of dangerous obsession. Adelle pursues Ruby, a homeless, armless mute through a vision of dreams, drugs and destruction in a world tinged with spirits and skeptics. Adelle is in turn selfishly pursued by two men: Phil, a 30-something quasi-hipster crankhead, and JohnnyBlue, a coddled hippie from the suburbs.
As Ruby slowly succumbs to alcoholism, she is alternately comforted and tormented by the eloquent spectres who haunt the dark corners of the downtown alleyways she frequents. Through a series of sweeping romanticized memories, we see abstract, dreamlike glimpses of Ruby’s father’s own descent into alcoholism, from the eyes of a little girl who cannot fully grasp the concept.
The central metaphor of the Picture is the river, the timeless trail of water. The river defines the corporeal and the ethereal world, the gorgeous and the sordid, in all manners of fortune and fame. Along this timeless trail, as if seeing her own life—past, present and future—as a reflection in moving water, Adelle becomes obsessed with Ruby, whom she first sees in her dreams, and later in real-time as a denizen of the street. Through her own poetry, pain and dalliances with drugs, alcohol and men, Adelle winds her way through the labyrinth of her own soul and psyche.
Eugene itself is a central character in this story, featured in all its authentic glory throughout the changing seasons of a single year, along with Springfield, Glenwood and the surrounding areas. The world of this movie—the imagery, language and people—has been distilled from actual experience. The fantastic and the prosaic are close neighbors in this world. The grotesque and picturesque are kissin’ cousins.
A note from writer/director Richard Leebrick:
In the early ‘90s, I saw an armless woman outside the downtown bar that I worked in drinking liquor from a straw, and wondered where she’d been in life—what her dreams had been, who her daddy had been. Ruby was the name that bubbled up in my consciousness, and that’s what stuck in my brain. I began to intuit a view of a world beyond my own understanding, and from a voice that wasn’t mine. The sense of reaching, always reaching for the heretofore “why” began to guide this voice, and the character of Adelle emerged, strong and confident enough to pursue her questions beyond where my own imagination ended.
With all this reaching and stretching over the ensuing years, and as I reworked the original script through a series of staged readings and workshop productions on stage, a couple of things became increasingly clear to me: if we are to grow in life, spiritually, we must learn to identify the similarities rather than seeing only the differences. I realized that Ruby is in me too—her desperation, her dreams and deformities are mine in only a slightly different permutation. We don’t all need to hit absolute bottom to heed the message of alcohol and drug addiction. In my case, twenty-five years of seeking was enough. Unfortunately for Ruby, the damage done was irreversible.
As a young person once said to me, “Sometimes we get the test and then we get the lesson.” We do the deed, reap our consequences, and then sort through the rubble of our own self-destructiveness. Along those lines, it has been said that a smart man learns from his own mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. RUBY BY THE RIVER is a story about light and darkness, poetry and plain language, beauty and pain; it’s about reaching for and finding love and truth in unlikely people and places.
Attendant in the arc of this story are some of the many spirit guides and character types who haunted the bars, backalleys and exposed concrete structures of downtown Eugene, Springfield and the overweeded riverview lots of Glenwood before the urban renewal of the 2000s had hit.
That said, RUBY BY THE RIVER has haunted me for well over a decade now; it keeps resurfacing in my consciousness as a story worth telling. The river of beauty and pain which flows through all of us is the guiding central metaphor. Obsession, addiction and a keen sense of seeking are the main psychological tributaries, and life itself is the ocean to which all of these tangled rivulets flow.
