What he gave the world of entertainment speaks for itself.
Director (and sometime actor) Rob Reiner is dead, along with his wife. The circumstances are deeply upsetting. Foul play was involved — both were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home. We will learn more about the identity of the suspected killer soon enough, no doubt, but instead of dwelling on senseless tragedy, I want to offer my appreciation for a man who my friend Mary Katharine Ham aptly dubbed the “VHS King” — the director of so many truly iconic films of my childhood, films an entire generation of kids like me watched on repeat at home, with friends, at parties, and sometimes even on dates.
Reiner not only made me laugh repeatedly throughout my youth, he was a part of it: I grew up with Rob Reiner’s movies, in a very personal way, and I don’t think I’m the only one. I didn’t think of them as “Reiner movies,” not when I was so young, but as it turned out his filmography was a roadmap of my own childhood. Each of the films he made from 1984-1990 had (and retains) some personal meaning to me, and they are fused together in my mind now with my own budding identity then, in the way pop culture from your formative years inevitably takes on private meaning because of where you were in your life when you encountered it. For my part, I was a gawky kid fast becoming an awkward adolescent — and that was a damned great time to be watching Rob Reiner.
My parents’ generation of course knew Reiner as Mike “Meathead” Stivic, the left-wing activist son-in-law of Archie Bunker in the legendary mid-Seventies sitcom All in the Family. (Meathead’s overweening progressivism had the unintended effect of setting up a foil that popularized Bunker with disaffected American audiences nationwide.) But I had none of that frame of reference. My mental image — and I remember this because the comparison is perfect “kid logic” in retrospect — was “guy who looks a lot like real comic great Dom DeLuise.” Instead, my first experience with Reiner’s work was settling into a movie theater seat to celebrate my seventh birthday by seeing The Princess Bride with my family.
Can you imagine what a wonderful experience that was for a small, restlessly fidgety but imaginative kid? It was as if the framing device had been crafted to directly address my impatience: I remember being just as bored as Fred Savage was initially — in retrospect the narrative “fourth wall breaks” that Reiner works into the seams of the storytelling are brilliantly paced not just for adult audiences but for the kids watching as well — and then suddenly swept away by a plot I could only just barely follow at the time: pirates, high cliffs, sword fights, revenge, true love, mostly-death, and the subtle mysteries of iocane powder. (I’ve been dining out on Vizzini jokes for decades at this point because of the effect of that one scene alone.)
If you’re my age, you almost certainly have similar memories. I remember my father approvingly allowing us to watch Stand By Me when I was ten years old. To me it was “the movie with Wesley Crusher and Mouth from The Goonies.” To my dad, it might as well have been his own childhood in a small western New York railroad town thrown up there on the screen, and the sort of gang of friends worth emulating. I remember — much later, in freshman year of college — watching When Harry Met Sally while sitting next to a girl I had a very complicated relationship with. Again: You probably do too, and that’s what Rob Reiner gave to us as a director.
Reiner’s career was curiously circumscribed; he dominated the Eighties with a winning streak of films that make him feel like a major filmmaker, but his creative light also winked out just as strangely in the mid-1990s: Maybe you happen to be a huge fan of The American President (you know, if you’re some kind of squish) but most of the critical world agrees that after 1992’s A Few Good Men — a crowd-pleasing megastar-driven Aaron Sorkin script far less memorably clever than the bombast of its most dramatic scene — he lost some kind of creative fire within him. (At this point I suppose I should at least mention the movie that inaugurated that decline, 1994’s star-packed disaster North, which inspired Roger Ebert’s most memorable book title.)
But what he did during that span? Only time and space considerations prevent me from dwelling individually on each of these films. This Is Spinal Tap (1984), the underappreciated The Sure Thing (1985), Stand By Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally (1989), and Misery (1990) — Reiner was cranking out one classic after another on a yearly basis, without so much as a pause for breath.
So why not end with the beginning? I’ve left what I believe to be Reiner’s greatest achievement for last, because it had a special effect on me not just as a filmgoer, but as a music lover. As Reiner’s directorial debut, This Is Spinal Tap is his most daring, arguably his most brilliant, and certainly his most groundbreaking achievement. It would be lazy to say that it “invented a genre” — the mockumentary — because nobody since has ever executed on the premise so successfully, with such effortless-seeming wit and accuracy, not even Christopher Guest himself.
In 1978, when Reiner was working on a forgotten television sketch-comedy show with fellow comedian-writers Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean, the four of them dreamed up the premise of a second-rate U.K. hard rock band fallen on hard times. The characters then took on a life of their own, with the three actors — all of whom had solid musical backgrounds — able to fall effortlessly into the accents and vaguely addled language and logic of dissipated ’70s dinosaur rock-stars. (As Reiner later joked, he wasn’t exactly physically appropriate as a bandmember, and so played their enthusiastic fan and documentarian Marty DiBergi.)
After scratching together an improvised “demo reel” to get studios interested, Reiner turned back to old television friend Norman Lear for funding, and one of the decade’s most creative comedies was shot, on a wholly improvised script, for the penny-ante budget of $2 million. It needed its low budget, too — because what few remember is that Spinal Tap made only the smallest of profits, scratching out a mere $5.8 million during a limited run in theaters.
Its influence instead became legendary via word of mouth, spreading during the VHS and MTV era. Comedy and music lovers alike saw something true and authentic in its improvised, verite style. The gloriously quotidian absurdity of the rock life was laid bare, as the band suffers humiliations both minor and major. (The moment where Marty DiBergi cites some of their older album reviews is unscripted comedy legend — Reiner wrote those himself and sprang them on the actors unprepared, and you can see Michael McKean hiding his face from the camera, barely able to keep it together.)
Even more importantly, rock musicians were alternately fascinated and horrified by Spinal Tap as a frighteningly accurate vision of their own vanities. There are countless stories of rock groups emerging from viewings of this film half-dazed with laughter, half-queasy at how they felt exposed. The band Aerosmith was convinced that the song “Stonehenge” — and the hilariously disastrous set piece associated with it — was intended as a direct parody of their own disastrous 1982 album Rock in a Hard Place, which featured the landmark on the cover. Deep Purple’s Jon Lord could have sued Harry Shearer for stealing his entire look and “frustrated artist” feel. Meanwhile Noel Gallagher of Oasis claims that his brother Liam was disappointed to discover, only a couple of years into the band’s career, that Spinal Tap wasn’t a real band. (They actually do play all their own music, as it turns out.)
The truth is, it doesn’t matter if Rob Reiner lost his “knack” in Hollywood somewhere around the time he ran into Aaron Sorkin. (The same can be said for far too many, just ask Jeff Daniels.) What he gave the world of entertainment speaks for itself: a series of films we treasure to this day. But what he gave to me was nothing less than the movie memories that became fond building blocks of my own childhood and identity. That’s an epitaph any would envy. R.I.P.