Biography
Reuben Gonzalez was born and raised in New York City. He earned a BA from Fordham University in 1981, attended the Graduate Writing program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts from 1985 to 1986, and completed an MFA in screenwriting at UCLA in 2009. His articles and short stories have appeared in Black Art Magazine, Mestizahe Magazine, Aries Magazine, Hispanics in America, Bilingual Press, and Arte Publico Press, among others. He is a recipient of an NEA grant for playwrighting.
Reuben’s acclaimed two-act semi-autobiographical play, The Boiler Room, has been produced extensively, including off-Broadway, the premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as in Venezuela, Spain, Puerto Rico, and Tel Aviv, where it was translated into Hebrew. The Boiler Room continues to be performed at high schools and colleges across the U.S. and Latin America. His other plays include Tato and Louie on Fourteen' Street; Dues; Changing Scenes; and One Son Lost, which he directed at venues such as New York’s American Folk Theatre, Henry Street Theatre, and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre.
In television, while pursuing his MFA at NYU Tisch Graduate Writing Program, Reuben was hired as a writer for The Cosby Show to develop a spin-off starring Tony Orlando. He has also written for The Wonderful World of Disney, Nickelodeon, PBS’ Great Performances, MGM TV, Fox, HBO, Showtime, and NBC. At Fox Studios, he wrote the pilot and served as Supervising Producer for Empire, a 110-episode series co-produced by FX Channel and Mexico’s Televisa. During his tenure at Fox, he also wrote a sitcom pilot under a blind script commitment, which led to an overall deal with Twentieth TV President Peter Roth (now President of Warner TV).
Reuben has written screenplays for director/producer Marty Brest (Scent of a Woman) at Universal, as well as for Columbia Pictures, MGM, Disney (including the Roberto Clemente story), New Line Cinema, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Limelight Films, RKO, ShadowCatcher Entertainment, Interscope Films, TYC Records, and HBO. His short film Por Vida (For Life) was an official selection at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. His independent feature Once Upon A Wedding, starring Esai Morales and Rosana DeSoto, was produced in 2005 by Scott Rosenfelt (Home Alone, Mystic Pizza) for LaBoca Productions. Reuben also wrote and directed the feature Mambo Café, starring Danny Aiello, Paul Rodriguez, and Thalía, produced by Kushner/Locke Entertainment.
Currently, Reuben has just completed the feature Tumble Falls and served as script consultant on the independent feature Road to Juarez, produced by Scott Rosenfelt, with a scheduled release in 2014.
