Remembering Rob Reiner

(I’ll talk about the scheduled Silver Screen Sleuths movie, The Long Kiss Goodnight, next week, in conjunction with its natural double feature, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.)

When I was 22, my boss pulled me over to an alcove in our office building. I was working at a very well-respected Hollywood PR firm, and someone had just signed a contract with a new voter registration organization. “You have to meet the founder,” my boss said.

So then I met Norman Lear.

I was familiar with his importance (obviously) and was already a huge fan of Maude and everything he and my soul sister, Bea Arthur, had done to normalize abortion access. But I went home and tried to mainline as much of Lear’s oeuvre as I could, in a time before streaming and ready access to media that was no longer airing. I had known about Reiner as Meathead on All In the Family, and how tall he stood up in the face of Carol O’Connor’s Archie, a cartoon bigot who seems less cartoonish today.

We, as a PR firm, were entrenched in the politics of the moment as well– it was 2008 and we were daily consumed with Prop 8 and the fight to save marriage equality in California. What I didn’t know until yesterday, when eulogies began pouring in for one of the most celebrated and beloved people in an industry town, was how completely Reiner was behind the push for LGBTQ+ rights in my state. Like father and adoptive father, like beloved son.

I only made a passing glance at writing how much respect I have for Rob’s father, Carl Reiner, in my piece about Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. But in an era in which it seems almost required that we sneer at “nepo babies,” I think the Reiners exist to remind us that film and TV are multi-billion dollar industries, yes, but also: art is family heritage. Some families crusade against fascists through any available means. The Reiners remain that family today, despite everything.

The Reiners (and the Brookses and their entire co-hort of comedians, whom I hold in my heart as a pantheon of the greatests there ever were) exist in my mind as a reminder that any piece you put out in the world, no matter how charming or lighthearted, needs a clear point of view and a clear message about the state of things. Rob Reiner was never, ever, ever afraid of making someone mad, even in goofy-ass movies that were mostly meant to make you smile.

I have a somewhat unpopular favorite Rob Reiner movie: The American President.

I love The Princess Bride and I love Spinal Tap and I love much of his work but, my god, do I love The American President. Michael Douglas is a widowed president named Andrew Shepherd who begins a relationship with Annette Bening’s character, Sydney Ellen Wade, in spite of the fact that she is what every president fears: an environmental lobbyist. It’s written by Aaron Sorkin, whom everyone seems to hate, and it’s a moony-eyed view of how easy it is to pass any kind of progressive legislation in modern America.

And my god, I love it.

Like every single one of Reiner’s movies, The American President has something that many movie watchers have grown to despise: sincerity. Sorkin and Reiner both believe, in this movie, that love and doing the right thing will win in the end. They sincerely believe that good things can and will happen if enough people put aside their sardonic, negative approach to getting things done. Martin Sheen and Michael J. Fox co-star as Douglas’s jaded underlings (and it makes me truly wonder if Fox would have ousted Bradley Whitford as Josh Lyman on West Wing if his Parkinson’s hadn’t advanced so quickly) and exist as a brilliant foil to Douglas’s powerful presence as a man who knows The Truth. Andrew Shepherd has lost (he is a widower), he as struggled (he has a young daughter and is president), and he will win. It is not because he is white and male and Correct, but because it is important to fight and in movies, you are allowed to see good people win a fight. Rob Reiner believed that. Sincerely.

Spinal Tap is so sincere it’s almost unbearable. Nigel and David are so sincere in their belief that they are worthy of this documentary, that they are successful, that the deaths of their drummers are normal occurrances. They are sincere in their belief that the show must go on and that they will deliver entertainment to their audiences. Reiner, as the “straight man” director, Marty Di Bergi, sincerely holds them up as the legitimate subjects of a documentary. The entire movie– one of the greatest send-ups of rock stardom and the entertainment machine ever made– approaches every joke with a sense of realness.

Stand By Me is sincere in the way that it loves the boys onscreen. When Harry Met Sally is sincere in the way that it wants two people to uncompromisingly fall in love. The Princess Bride sincerely believes in love– romantic, familial, platonic– as the anchor in face of a storm of overwhelming greed and selfishness.

Rob Reiner put bucketloads of money where his mouth was, and I don’t think he was naive enough to ever say that “Love is all you need!” to stop fascists. No, you also need as much funding as humanly possible, good lawyers, and an unflinching resolve to make the fascists angry. One of my other favorite comedy teams, Kiwi Smith and Karen McCullah, wrote a wonderful line in a silly movie that I think applies here: “Kindness is just love with its work boots on.”

We’ve lost a lot of the greats in the past few years: Norman Lear and Carl Reiner, and now Rob Reiner has taken from us before his time. I wish he could have lived to 100. I’m sure he did, too. But because I love people, because I love my city, because I love the industry of this industry town, and because I love this country: I will continue to put my boots on. And tell jokes while I work.