Nuñez remembers 'Ruby in Paradise'

Allison Dean and Ashley Judd are working-class women trying to scrape by in a Florida beach town in Victor Nunez’s 1993 film “Ruby in Paradise.”
Allison Dean and Ashley Judd are working-class women trying to scrape by in a Florida beach town in Victor Nunez’s 1993 film “Ruby in Paradise.”

In 1993, Florida-based writer-director Victor Nuñez had a hit with a movie that didn't fit neatly onto any shelf at a Blockbuster video. Was it a drama? Maybe. Because it features a female lead (a then up-and-coming Ashley Judd plays the title character), it often got placed in the romance bin.

Actually, her relationships in "Ruby in Paradise" don't fit easily into that box, either.

When I bring that up with Nuñez on a Zoom call from his native Florida, he says "Well, maybe [it's a romance] in the bigger sense of the word. It's about thinking about each other and sizing each other up. You could almost say it is an anti-romance because its about someone finding themselves as opposed to letting the chips fall where they may."

Nonetheless, Judd won an independent Spirit award for her work in the movie, and Nuñez won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. A remastered version of the movie is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime and Vudu through Quiver Distribution.

Nuñez recalls it wasn't easy getting backers to take an interest in his movie about a blue-collar woman who flees a bad relationship in Tennessee to restart her life in Florida. As relatable as Ruby's struggles to keep a roof over her head may seem, distributors were skittish.

"When I tried to pitch 'Ruby in Paradise' to people, I was told flat outright -- and these were very reputable distributors of independent films -- 'no one is interested in a film about a female shop clerk in Panama City.' Now, you can say what they really were saying was 'shop clerk Panama City,' but the message was a woman, you know, as in the lead role," he says.

"I considered it being like 'Robert in Paradise,' and it was not a very interesting story to me. For one thing and I think it's changing to some degree, American men, by and large, don't allow as many vulnerabilities to be acknowledged and to be explored. I'm trying not to make sweeping judgments, or statements or observations here, but by and large, women have to confront them. I grew up an only child with my mom and I got to know and observed from a very early age the kinds of issues that people of that gender face. They just seemed more resonant and deep and aware of consequences, more than then we guys, whatever that means."

The Working Life

The film also features a different take on Florida. For example, Ruby arrives during the tourist town's off season, making job hunting even more difficult. The shops aren't so much fun if you're working behind the counter.

"The people that live there don't go away," he says. "That was one of the things that interested me, coming from about an hour away from Panama City."

For tourists, "it was a break, swimming, fun," he says. "And yet you go into a shop and get a Coke, and there'd be somebody working. That was genesis of this story. What's their life like? You live in a place that's an escape place, but for those of us who live there it's home.

"It's interesting to me how rarely what people do for a job is presented. It's either just in passing, or I'm not interested. We are so informed by what our work is and how we manage it, how we let it overwhelm us or refuse to let it overwhelm us, it seems like it's an important part of developing a character. In many films -- I don't want to be accused of generalization here -- it has little meaning whatsoever in the lives of the characters."

Even though iPhones hadn't been invented yet when 'Ruby in Paradise' debuted, the story feels strikingly current. Ruby dates two very different men: Mike (Todd Field, who went on to direct "In the Bedroom" and "Little Children"), a greenhouse employee obsessed with preserving the land the buildings around him and Ricky (Bentley Mitchum, Robert's grandson), a man whose stock deals might not be legitimate. His transactions seem suspiciously like the ones that later led to the events in 'The Big Short.'

"Bentley is a charmer," Nuñez says. "In 'Paradise Lost,' Satan has a golden tongue. She falls for him hook-line-and-sinker. And she knows it."

The Real Ruby

While he's quick to praise his leading men and Dorothy Lyman, who plays Ruby's boss, Nuñez is quick to credit Judd for the film's success. Her earlier roles included an appearance on 'Star Trek: The Next Generation.'

"She came into the casting kind of late," Nuñez says. "We recently traded emails. She came in late, and about an hour later, she brought back the Judds (the singing duo of her mother Naomi and sister Wynona). I had heard of them, but I was so buried with the movie. She said, 'Just one more vote for me, Victor, this is my family.' I thought that this was such a charming quality. I thought she understood. She was from Tennessee. When we started the movie, she chose to drive from Tennessee to repeat Ruby's route, just to feel like what it was like to arrive that way. I knew she had it in her. I'd love to say, 'See, I was right,' but the film gods were really very kind to us."

Judd also appears to be as resilient as her character. She was one of the first women to publicly condemn Harvey Weinstein for his sexually predatory behavior and recently survived breaking her leg in four places during a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"She kept her presence of mind when she said, 'If I was not a white celebrity, I'd be dead,' and she just talked about the needs of the people in that area," Nuñez says. "I just thought, 'That's Ashley.'"

Echoes

In some ways, "Ruby in Paradise" seems like a precursor to Chloé Zhao's "Nomadland,'' where Frances McDormand plays a more mature woman surviving by taking a variety of gigs across the northern Midwest. The film is unique in that it never asks viewers to pity her.

Nuñez is happy with the comparison.

"I have seen it," he admits. "I love that there's this little core group of filmmakers who are surrounded by this huge machine, but they were smart enough to let them make their movie. It's a Hollywood movie, but it's a surprise. I enjoyed it. I liked the director's previous film 'The Rider' as well. I'm actually developing a project right now. It' about an English professor who's about a year out from widowhood, and she has a relapse of grief. This notion of someone in the middle of life confronting a profound transition I guess is something that interests me a lot."

Hearing that Nuñez has managed to stay in touch with his past collaborators isn't surprising. His "Ulee's Gold" starred Peter Fonda as a beekeeper, and helped the "Easy Rider" star find a new audience. The director casually mentions how the beekeepers who helped inspire that movie are still in business.

Getting "Ruby in Paradise" to where it could be seen again, however, was a major challenge. He said, "It's fully restored. It wasn't 'they.' I did it, the yeoman's share. We had all the original quarter-inch tapes. They took the camera original and scanned it on an ARRI state of the art scanner. This process started 10 years ago. Larry Blake, who is based in New Orleans did a Dolby 7 surround mix. The sound and audio are vastly superior."

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