Perhaps few Northbrook area residents were waiting with bated breath when the Emmy Awards nominees were announced on July 16.
But in Los Angeles, Northbrook native and Glenbrook North High School alumnus Alexander Rubinow was watching on his computer. And typing.
“I slowly started typing the letters of my last name, and it came up. I thought it must have been a mistake, but there it was,” said Rubinow, a graduate of GBN’s class of 1997, who is an editor with the production company behind “Deadliest Catch” on the Discovery Channel.
Rubinow and colleagues Alex Durham and Josh Earl, all of Original Productions, LLC, a FremantleMedia Company for the Discovery Channel, are nominated in the outstanding picture editing for reality programming category for the season premiere episode, “Deadliest Catch: A Brotherhood Tested.”
They’re up against “The Amazing Race” episode “Morocc’ And Roll”; part two of the season finale of “Project Runway”; the “Project Runway All Stars” episode “Something Wicked This Way Comes”; the first episode of “Shark Tank”; and “Survivor Warfare (Worlds Apart).”
“We’re really excited,” said Decker Watson, the show’s co-executive producer and showrunner, who has an Emmy under his belt for outstanding unstructured reality program. “Alex has been on the show for a really long time, and this is his first time being nominated. There are a ton of really great editors in that category.”
Rubinow said he traces his passion for TV production back to his dad shooting family films with a Super 8 camera and a summer school session at Northbrook Junior High School.
“The first class that spoke to me was a production class, and that was at 10 or 11 years old. I was always drawn to that,” Rubinow said. “I was always interested in watching movies and watching television and drawing cartoons, and thought I might go into that. The thought of picking up a camera and shooting something just really clicked in my head.”
And, as his personal website makes clear, the late John Hughes was also a major influence.
“Definitely a spark was lit when I realized he went to the school, and the ‘Save Ferris’ water tower was painted while I was there,” Rubinow said of his cinematic hero and fellow Northbrooker and GBN grad.
Rubinow said he was struck by the way Hughes opened a window into the suburban teenage world of the 1980s and ’90s with movies he shot in the north suburbs, including “The Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” the “Home Alone” series, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” “Pretty in Pink” and “Sixteen Candles.”
“Just how authentic his movie-making was in capturing real teenagers in real high schools, and that’s what we’re doing now,” he said of his work on “Deadliest Catch,” which chronicles the lives and travails of Alaskans who fish for crabs in the Bering Sea.
“We tell their stories in ways similar to how Hughes captured the high school experience in the 1980s,” Rubinow said.
Former GBN teacher Vince Pinelli, who helped launch Glenbrook North’s TV program, said Rubinow stood out among several students because he was one of those “driven to do it. It’s in their DNA.”
“Basically what we tried to do was give students the opportunities and equipment and guidance to tell their own stories, and Alex was really good at that,” Pinelli said. “Whatever you asked Alex to do, he would do. You learn by doing. If you want to become an artist, you don’t read a book on how to paint. You try your hand at painting, and the more you paint, the better at it you get.”
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Rubinow seemed to truly enjoy the work, said Pinelli, who retired from Glenbrook in 2008 and is currently the drama director and fine arts chair at Benito Juarez Community Academy in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood.
“The more you do, every job you do teaches you to do all the other jobs better,” Pinelli said.
From high school to the University of Iowa – where a computer science degree was plan B, in case TV production didn’t pan out – Rubinow stuck with his craft, he said.
His first real world job was, appropriately enough, on MTV’s “Real World XI: Chicago.” He also worked on the 2003 Joe Mantegna movie “Uncle Nino” that was filmed in part at The Glen in Glenview and in Northbrook, Northfield and Arlington Heights, he said.
Rubinow has been in L.A. since late 2002, where he lives with his wife, Jennifer, and 3-year-old son, Jacob.
IMDB.com said Rubinow worked on “Bering Sea Gold,” “Black Gold,” “Modern Marvels” and “Food Tech,” among other TV shows, before he landed a job on “Deadliest Catch.”
The Emmy Awards will air on Sept. 20 on the Fox Network, but the technical awards will be presented in a separate ceremony on Sept. 12.
While the nomination is an honor in and of itself, Rubinow said, it’s more important to love what he does.
“I’m in this because I love working on the show and love what I do,” he said. “It’s all up to the voters now.”
Jon Davis is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.