For some, he was the face of the counterculture, standing up for the ideology of the 1960s against Archie Bunker's silent-majority rants. For others, he was the Hollywood celebrity tirelessly stumping for progressive causes even when (especially when) it wasn't fashionable to do so. The older generation often thought of Rob Reiner as Carl's son, the showbiz kid who went into the family business of cracking people up by playing the straight man. Several generations of movie lovers considered him the sort of versatile filmmaker that could take good material and make it great, and take great material — an old-school fantasy about swashbucklers and princesses, a novel by Stephen King, a play about a military trial — and turn it into the sort of rewatchable classic that you threw on when you needed to laugh, or cry, or do both at the same time.
The details regarding what police are calling a homicide involving Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Reiner, will temporarily overshadow the extraordinary career that the actor-turned-director leaves behind. But when you look back on the filmography of the 78-year-old, the highlights speak for themselves. “This one goes to 11.” “We speak each other's unspoken language.” “In-with-ceivable!” “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12.” “I'll have what she's having.” “I'm your number one fan.” “You can't handle the truth!” Many of these weren't just endlessly quotable lines. They became part of the cultural lexicon.
Reiner grew up watching his father Carl Reiner pioneer TV comedy alongside Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows and create one of the greatest sitcoms of the 1960s, The Dick Van Dyke Show, before getting cast in one of the most groundbreaking sitcoms of the 1970s. From the moment All in the Family aired, it caused ripples by taking the heated conversations of the generation-gap era that were happening in people's households and broadcast them straight into your living room. In one corner was Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker, a reactionary loading-dock foreman who didn't like where all these new freedoms were taking his America. In the other corner was Reiner's Mike Stivic, a college student who represented the youth movement taking to the streets. Every week, the two would battle over hot topics ranging from racial bigotry to religion to women's lib; though Stivic rarely scored knockouts against the main character, Bunker would eventually lose the fights via technical points and the arc of history bending toward justice. The role earned Reiner two Emmys and one nickname, courtesy of his cantankerous sparring partner: “Meathead.”
That nickname stuck with Reiner when he moved behind the camera, and there was inevitably some sort of “Oh look, now Meathead is a director!” comment in the early coverage of his career pivot. But Reiner had been interested in becoming a filmmaker even when All in the Family was in full swing, having directed a 30-minute TV movie back in 1974. Having befriended a number of Laurel Canyon musicians in the Sixties, Reiner was familiar with the lifestyles of rich and famous rock stars. When he was working with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest on a sketch-comedy pilot named The TV Show in the late Seventies, he watched them improvise dialogue as fictional band named Spinal Tap. Later, the three of them started to write a screenplay based on the metal group's misadventures, and realized things weren't quite gelling. Instead, Reiner and his collaborators took the money and decided to simply start filming scenes, improvising exchanges along the way.
The result changed movie history. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) may not have invented the mock documentary — or, if you will, “mockumentary” — but Reiner's directorial debut became a proof of concept about what you could do with the format. Everything from The Office to Borat owes it a huge debt. It replicates the look and feel of an actual rock doc to such a degree that not even the sheer ridiculousness on display can keep you from feeling like you're not watching the real thing; the fact that Reiner went to great lengths to make the “vintage” footage of Tap throughout the eras look as faithful as possible to old Shindig clips, etc., spoke to his commitment to the bit. And Reiner's onscreen appearances as filmmaker Marty Di Bergi riffs on Martin Scorsese's interviews in The Last Waltz to such a degree that even Scorsese, who initially didn't see this imitation as the sincerest form of flattery, eventually came around.
While Guest would eventually dedicate his own directorial career to making these kinds of improv-heavy ensemble comedies, Reiner decided to go a more traditional route. His next movie, The Sure Thing (1985), was a teen comedy starring John Cusack that substituted gross-out gags for heart. Stand by Me (1986) took a Stephen King novella and turned into one of the best coming-of-age movies of the 1980s, and the best to ever feature a set piece filled with vomiting blueberry pie. The Princess Bride (1987) remains the perfect distillation not just of William Goldman's novel, but of balancing a mix of fantasy, romance, derring-do, laugh-out comedy, and a true sense of warmth into pure spun gold. It's a movie about a bedtime story that makes you feel as if you're tucked in and being read one by the funniest grandfather alive.
Reiner then cofounded his own production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, and inaugurated it what may be the greatest modern romantic comedy, or at least the most influential: When Harry Met Sally (1989). Everyone naturally remembers Meg Ryan realistically faking an orgasm in the middle of Katz's, a stand-out moment that probably made life hell for the deli's employees over the last few decades. But watch the way Reiner tees up the punchline and times it for maximum effect — the fact that it's Reiner's mom saying it only makes it that more hilarious. It's easy to dismiss this kind of audience-friendly entertainment as fluff, but Reiner new that actually entertaining audiences was an art form unto itself, and Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan's chemistry didn't happen in a vacuum. Reiner's best movies are all about the lightning captured in the bottle when performers, interactions, scripts, and capital-M Movie moments come together. Most directors are lucky if their film gets one of those. When Harry Met Sally has close to a dozen of them. And Reiner made sure all of them made it up onto the screen.
The same goes for Misery (1990), still one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date and a take on toxic fandom that now seems eerily prescient, and A Few Good Men (1992), an absolute banger of a courtroom drama that gave Tom Cruise a chance to lead Jack Nicholson into going full Chernobyl on the witness stand. Both of those movies showcased what Reiner did best, which was knowing when to hold on actors, when to milk an exchange for maximum effect, and how to showcase the point where things detonated. If his resume began to read a little spotty after that, it was partially because the types of movies Reiner liked to make felt out of step with the blockbusters Hollywood was leaning more heavily into, and partially because he would go back to a few of the genre wells — the rom-com, the earnest sociopolitical polemic — a bit too much. Reiner was the closest the late 20th century had to a Frank Capra, and the best of his work channels Capra's sense of righteousness and love of humanity.
“You write the same things over and over again,” Reiner admitted to the New York Times in 1989, after a journalist pointed out that When Harry Met Sally and The Sure Thing shared similar DNA. “You paint the same things, compose the same things.” And yet, when you look at his body of work as a whole, you walk away with the sense that he knew how to mix up a lot. Reiner was a constant presence over the last 30 years, whether he was a go-to talking head when political shows needed a viewpoint from the left or away supporting roles and cameos in everything from The Wolf of Wall Street to The Bear. Yet when Marty Di Bergi shows up onscreen in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, the long-in-the-works sequel Reiner and his collaborators put out this past fall, you felt like a long-lost friend had walked into the room. It's tragic that we won't get to see him again.
