Reiner: amid gloom, triumph and joy in TV and movies

Norman Lear once summarized his friend beautifully:
“To be alone with Rob Reiner is to be in a crowd,” he wrote. “His brain and his mouth, like a chain of Chinese firecrackers, are firing constantly.”
And that brain kept triumphing — as a comedy writer, as one of the stars of Lear’s “All In the Family” and then as the director of classic movies, from “This Is Spinal Tap” to “A Few Good Men” and “When Harry Met Sally.”
Reiner (shown here in “This Is Spinal Tap,” 78, and his wife Michelle, 68, were reportedly found dead Sunday (Dec. 14), apparently stabbed to death. He left an awesome track record.
He also left a great capacity for simultaneous sadness and joy.
Reiner admitted that he had a natural melancholy. In a “60 Minutes” interview, Billy Crystal once said that his close friend always had a sadness. In a Playboy interview, Reiner said he marveled at the way his father (writer-director-producer Carl Reiner) could breeze through life. Seeing his dad with Steve Martin, he said, was like seeing him with “the funny son he never had.”
After Reiner’s successes had piled up, I asked him for an update: NOW wasn’t he happy?
“Put it this way,” he said. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”
But any gloom was kept away from his colleagues. “Rob was like a big kid on the set, laughing, applauding, encouraging and generally acting as a fan as well as a filmmaker,” Cary Elwes wrote in “As You Wish” (Simon & Schuster, 2014), a book about the making of “The Princess Bride.”
Reiner was directing the film in England, with a wondrously varied cast that included Elwes, Crystal, Mandy Patinkin and Andre the Giant. It was a difficult shoot, Elwes wrote, but “Rob is a relentlessly positive kind of guy.”
He brought a hibachi grill into his hotel suite and made hamburgers and hot dogs for the cast each night. There was music, darts games and Reiner’s “deep, booming laugh that carried across the peaks.”
That laughter was an asset. Reiner was a welcome guest in the studio audience of comedies, especially “Seinfeld.”
Yes, his company (Castle Rock) was the benevolent producer of that one, leaving Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David to make the show they wanted. You could count that among a long string of early successes.
“I fell in love with him as a 9-year-old teaching my daughter Ellen to play jacks,” Lear wrote in “Even This I Get to Experience” (Penguin, 2014).
“What was great about Rob was that the person — the actor, the director, the friend, the activist, the star, the husband and the father — all came from the center of his being. If he was talking to you about … a scene (or) the importance of washing your hands (or) the need to do something politically about early education, it all came to you with the same sense of urgency and at the same volume.”
Growing up, Reiner was “surrounded by his father’s comedy world – men like Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar and Dick Van Dyke,” Donna McCrohan wrote in “Archie & Edith, Mike & Gloria” (Workman, 1987). Lear told Carl Reiner he had a funny son, but the dad disagreed.
Rob studied acting at UCLA, did summer-stock theater, was in a comedy duo with Larry Bishop (Joey’s son) and more.
“Tom (Smothers) saw Rob Reiner and Carl Gottlieb when they performed as members of the Los Angeles company of the improv comedy troupe The Committee and hired them both,” David Bianculli wrote in “Dangerously Funny” (Simon & Schuster, 2009).
That was first for Glen Campbell’s summer show, then for “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” Reiner was writing alongside Steve Martin, Bob Einstein (later known as the comic daredevil Super Dave), John Hartford, McLean Stevenson and more.
He was also in the rare position of being to the left of Smothers politically, Bianculli wrote. “He would get into shouting matches with Tom.”
But this was, perhaps, well-informed shouting. Unlike the guy he played in “All in the Family,” Reiner had depth, Lear wrote:
“He takes the responsibility for knowing the history of his subject, and undertanding it in a political, social and economic context. Mike Stivic was his opposite, full of passion absent the facts.”
At first, that role wasn’t his, Lear wrote. “Rob Reiner had wanted to play the part, but I had thought he was too young, emotionally if not chronologically.”
A pilot film was shot with someone else and rejected by ABC. Two years later, CBS discovered it and wanted Lear to try again, this time with a new Mike and Gloria. “This time, he walked into the audition and out with the role within minutes.”
Reiner, then 23, became part of a comedy classic, then began directing movies.
“This Is Spinal Tap” (1984) was a low-budget gem, launching the notion of mockumentaries (fake documentaries). As Christopher Guest, one of the stars , put it, this was a case of people who knew what they were doing, being allowed to do it.
Next came “The Sure Thing” (1984) — bright and fun, yet intelligent — and the beautifully crafted youth film, “Stand By Me” (1986).
“Rob was basically on a winning streak,” Elwes wrote. “His films were all very different in tone and genre, and they all ended up doing very good business …. Rob had earned the right to choose his next project.”
He chose “The Princess Bride” — and suddenly heard no. As Reiner wrote in Elwes’ book: “Little did I know that for 15 years it had been the story that no studio would touch.”
Lear stepped in as producer and Reiner managed to capture the story’s gentle balance between fairy-tale romance, action and sweet silliness. “We opened to some critical success,” he wrote, “but only moderate business. Luckily — through VHS, DVD and TV — it managed to take hold.”
He next soared with “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), giving his mother one of the all-time great movie lines. (“I’ll have what she’s having.”) Then came “Misery” (1990), “A Few Good Men” (1992), one failure (“North”) and then “The American President” (1995).
Reiner named his company Castle Rock as a tribute to Stephen King, whose stories became “Stand By Me” and “Misery.” The company produced many of Reiner’s films, plus Crystal’s “City Slickers,” “Seinfeld” and more. It was sold in 1993, but Reiner revived it in 2021.
Yes, there was a slowdown. The last Reiner film to make an impact was “The Bucket List” (2009), which drew mixed reviews and strong box office. But the impact was there.
Reiner remained vital, Brent Lang, the editor of Variety, told CNN. He was “almost the mayor of Hollywood … such an affable, genial person … warm and outgoing and beloved.”
It was Reiner who brought Aaron Sorkin to Hollywood (to adapt his “A Few Good Men” play) and then to the White House (to write “The American President”). The result spawned “The West Wing.”
It was also Reiner who propelled the whole notion of mockumentaries, now part of everything from movies to “The Office” and “Modern Family.”
His “Seinfeld” lives on in cable and streaming. So do his movies. As he wrote in the “Princess Bride” book: “What a thrill to know that a film you’ve had a hand in is getting passed down to future generations.”