It was a sad day in Hollywood – an unimaginable, upsetting and shocking day – when the director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle may have been stabbed to death in their own home, allegedly by someone very close to them.
Details are hazy and initial reports are almost impossible to follow. It is clear that in the coming days the scandal is likely to overshadow the career of one of the industry's most beloved directors, a man widely admired for his work, his activism and his infectious optimistic spirit. IN “The 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time” list recently published DiversityReiner was responsible for no less than three entries.
I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that among American studio talent, I consider Rob Reiner to be the best director to never be nominated for Best Director. Just look at his achievements. This guy was the Billy Wilder of our generation: a director with a comedic flair who could work in a variety of genres, making films with big, larger-than-life characters you instantly recognized and felt like you'd known your whole life.
Reiner wasn't a stylist like Martin Scorsese, the filmmaking icon on whom “director” Marty DiBerga's This Is Spinal Tube was based (and for whom he finally got to star in The Wolf of Wall Street, playing Leonardo DiCaprio's father). He was not a visionary technological innovator like Robert Zemeckis, the pioneer of performance photography who took The Polar Express, a project Reiner pioneered with Tom Hanks, and made film history with it.
But he made at least six Hall of Fame films, virtually back-to-back over the course of 11 years (a number forever associated with him). Reiner began his directing career with the endlessly quotable spoof rock doc This Is Spinal Tap, immediately reaching new comedic heights in 1984 by satirizing an absurd (but believable) heavy metal band. Two years later, he made the greatest of all coming-of-age films, Stand By Me, a film about kids who actually act like kids and confront the concept of mortality for the first time.
Then came the movie that I've long considered my desert island movie – like the only movie I'd keep if I were exiled somewhere with a projector, a screen, and a single print I'm sure I'll never get tired of watching: The Princess Bride. More on that in a minute. I was exactly the age when this post-modern tale was released with its head in the clouds and its heart on its sleeve, but adults at the time were going crazy for its down-to-earth sequel, When Harry Met Sally…, which almost single-handedly revived the romantic comedy genre.
There are four films here that defined the '80s, and we haven't even gotten to two of his most famous works: A Few Good Men, the decade's most quotable (and certainly most rewatched) legal drama in which Jack Nicholson screams, “You can't handle the truth!” from Tom Cruise's smug military lawyer. Three years later, Reiner reunited with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin on The American President, another compelling Hollywood romance, this time with enough idealism to inspire The West Wing.
I know I'm not the only one who loves all six of these films, although it's telling that none of them are the kind where you immediately think of someone saying “action movie!” Sorkin's fingerprints are all over the last two. This Is Spinal Tap is usually associated with Christopher Guest, who went on to make several more improvised mockumentaries along the same lines. Nora Ephron often gets credit for When Harry Met Sally…, even though the script was based on where she and Reiner were in their romantic lives at the time.
If Reiner gets too little recognition, it's because he had the wisdom and grace to subtract himself from the equation – I mean, when watching a Rob Reiner film, audiences never thought about the director: how brilliant that shot was or how clever the editing was. He wanted our attention to be focused on the characters, paying particular attention to making sure each role was played by exactly the right actor, and then trusting those performers to bring more to their roles than the script dictated.
There must be an instance somewhere in Reiner's filmography where someone wasn't right for the role, but I can't think of an example (then again, I've never seen North). Instead, I'm reminded of the dozen surprisingly inspired choices in The Princess Bride: From Andre the Giant to Mandy Patinkin and Wallace Shawn, these actors fit their characters like a six-fingered glove (at least in Guest's case).
With The Princess Bride, Reiner accomplished the difficult task of combining several classic Hollywood genres—fairytale romance, fantasy adventure, swashbuckling action, and kids' comedy—even though the studio didn't know what to do with it at the time. As with This Is Spinal Tap before it, it took a while for audiences to embrace the film. Rest assured, these two cult favorites eventually found their followers, to the point where Reiner broke one of his rules and finally made a sequel (“Spinal Tap II: The End Continues”) this year.
You can't watch a Rob Reiner film and reverse engineer the man's genius the way you can with a Spielberg or Kubrick film (though I would argue that Stand By Me is a better Stephen King adaptation than The Shining). In my opinion, there are three subtle but vital qualities that made Reiner's films so compelling.
The first was the way he worked with actors, asking them to improvise. This was the basis of Spinal Tap's success and proved useful throughout his career.
Secondly, as the son of Carl Reiner – and the star of the incredibly successful 70s sitcom All in the Family – Rob either inherited or imbibed the principles of comedy, incorporating humor into all of his films (I believe that all Hollywood films are comedies, at least to some extent, and it is this constant sense of humor that distinguishes American cinema).
And third, he worked carefully on the scripts with his writers. He created some designs using Castle Rock shingles and refined others through careful brainstorming. Sorkin often credited Reiner's process for turning A Few Good Men into the solid film that it is. These days, too few studio directors polish their scripts to the same degree, worrying not just about dialogue but about structure, stakes and what makes a character feel real.
It makes sense that Reiner would be strong on these fronts. He met Mel Brooks when he was just four years old. Little Rob grew up at the feet of showbiz legends (his father, Carl, wrote Sid Caesar's “Your Show of Shows”), and he made his mark by studying theater at UCLA, watching and learning from Norman Lear, and directing television films before moving on to film.
Reiner's career has stalled somewhat in the 21st century, although two years ago he made HBO's very funny, disarmingly intimate portrait of Albert Brooks' best friend (no relation to Mel), Albert Brooks: Defending My Life. And of course, this year saw the release of the sequel, Spinal Tap, which not only has some exciting moments, but also some epic cameos from the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John.
Can a director be both loved and underrated? Rob Reiner was there. When thinking about what happened to the 78-year-old mensch and his wife this weekend, one word comes to mind: unimaginable.
