Rob Reiner: Six classic movies from the ‘big-hearted genius’ director

Rob Reiner, the son of the legendary comedian Carl Reiner, was one of Hollywood’s best known filmmakers.

As an actor, he became a household name on the 1970s sitcom All in the Family and later appeared as the father of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street.

But it was as a director that he’ll be best remembered. He made a string of classic films across a range of genres, including the cult mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men, as well as The Princess Bride, Stand By Me and Misery.

Here’s a look back at his life through the lens of some of his best-loved movies.

Spinal Tap
Following his acting stint on All in the Family – where he earned the Emmy Award for best supporting actor twice for portraying Michael “Meathead” Stivic, a 1960s hippy – Brooklyn-born Reiner turned his attentions to directing on the 1974 TV movie Sonny Boy.

But his first big success came with the 1974 mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, which chronicled the misadventures of a fake British heavy metal band.

Created alongside comic actors Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean, Reiner himself played documentary maker Marty DiBergi.

Much of the deadpan dialogue was improvised and the film became a classic, coining phrases such as “turn it up to eleven”.

Reiner told the BFI in 2022 that DiBergi was based on Martin Scorsese’s work on the concert film The Last Waltz.

“A lot of it is,” he said. “He had put himself in The Last Waltz, and I thought, ‘That’ll be the way I’ll do it.’ When he first saw it, he was a little upset I was making fun of him, but now, over the years, he loves it. He’s come to love it.”

Reiner once said Sting had told him he had seen Spinal Tap 50 times, with the English singer adding: “Every time I watch it, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Just a couple of months ago, Reiner reprised his role as DiBergi In Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, which he also directed.

Stand By Me
The 1986 coming of age classic, Stand by Me, followed.

Adapted from a Stephen King story, it told the tale of a group of young friends in the 1950s who embark on a two-day journey to find the body of a missing boy, Concerned with the bittersweet transition from childhood innocence to adulthood, it helped to establish the likes of River Phoenix and Kiefer Sutherland as stars.

Reiner told the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast: “This one meant the most to me because it was the first time I ever did anything that was so far afield from anything my father would have done.”

He added: “This was the first time that it was something really reflective of my personality – it had humour in it but it also had some melancholy and nostalgia, and so I thought, this is really the kind of thing I want to do.”

The Princess Bride
His next hit was the 1987 fantasy fairy tale, The Princess Bride, based on a novel by William Goldman.
It threw actors Robin Wright, Cary Elwes, and Billy Crystal into a world of adventure, romance and satire.

A woman once told Reiner how the film had saved her life, recounting how when she and several other skiers had been trapped by an avalanche, she quoted every line from the movie to keep herself and everyone else awake.

“That was the best line I ever got,” Reiner told Variety. “The Princess Bride saved my life.”

When Harry Met Sally
In 1989, Reiner effectively set the standard for the rom-com genre with When Harry Met Sally.
It paired Billy Crystal with Meg Ryan as two friends who fall in love, climaxing in one of Hollywood’s most iconic restaurant-based scenes.

After Ryan’s Sally fakes an orgasm to prove a point, it prompts another customer, played by Reiner’s mother Estelle, to declare: “I’ll have what she’s having!”

Sydney Sweeney recently delivered the line in a Hellmann’s Super Bowl advert, which acted as a nostalgic parody of the film.

While directing the film, Reiner was introduced to photographer Michele Singer. The meeting influenced his decision to change the film’s ending.

He told Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast: “We started seeing each other during [the making of] this film, and one thing led to another and, you know, I changed the ending of the movie. I didn’t figure I was ever going to be with anybody, I couldn’t figure out how to be with anybody, and I had it where Harry and Sally don’t get together. They run into each other in New York, they talk a little bit and then they walk in opposite directions.

“But I meet Michele and I said, ‘Well, I see how this works’, and I changed it. I reshot the ending where you see Billy running and seeing Meg at the New Year’s Eve party.”

Reiner and Singer were soon married, going on to have three children together.

He had been married before, to actress and director Penny Marshall in 1971, adopting her daughter, actress Tracy Reiner.

Misery
The director’s work took a darker turn in 1990 with Misery, another adaptation of a King novel.
It starred Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, a crazed woman who imprisons her favourite writer, played by James Caan.

Bates won the best actress Oscar for her chillingly humane performance.

During an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, Reiner recalled how he had a feeling at the time that Misery might be the one and only thriller he would ever do.

“But I studied Hitchcock,” he said. “I studied every thriller I could to see what is the grammar for film thrillers. ‘Cut to the insert of the key.’ ‘The foot hits the ground.'”

Bates, then a theatre actor, feared she had blown her big screen audition. But her director had no such reservations.

“She read like two lines, I think, two or three lines, and I said, ‘that’s enough, you can do this,'” Reiner said, according to Entertainment Weekly. “She was like, ‘what do you mean?’ I’m cutting her off. I’m like, ‘no, no you can do this, I know you can do it.'”

“And she went, ‘really?'” he continued. “And as she walked out of the room, she said, ‘can I call my mother?'”

A Few Good Men
The 1992 courtroom drama, A Few Good Men, concerned the court martial of two marines for the death of a fellow soldier.

It saw Reiner direct the Hollywood stars Tom Cruise, Demi Moore and Kevin Bacon, as well as Jack Nicholson.

Nicholson played a colonel, who, while testifying, delivered the immortal line: “You can’t handle the truth!”
The actor enjoyed delivering the line so much he kept doing so with gusto even during every off-camera take when Reiner was shooting Cruise’s character’s reaction.

“Every time we did the scene, Jack did it perfectly,” Reiner laughed. “After a couple of takes, I said, ‘Jack, maybe you want to save a little bit for when we’ve got the camera on you.’ And he replied, ‘Rob, you don’t understand – I love to act.'”

The film received an Oscar nomination for best picture.

‘Known for speaking up’
Away from the big screen, Reiner was also known for his political and social activism, often speaking out on issues ranging from climate change to gun control.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 live on Monday, LA-based entertainment journalist K.J Matthews described him as “a big hearted genius behind so many of the classic stories we love”.

“So many people have been touched by him and his generosity,” she noted.

“He was really known for speaking up for members of the LGBTQ community, [and] trying to help lower income people in various neighborhoods in Los Angeles.”

She added: “So he wasn’t just a figure in front of the camera and producing and known for giving us great films throughout the years… He really was a humanitarian.”

Reiner campaigned for early childhood education and health care, as well as gay rights.

His other movies included 1994’s North, starring Elijah Wood, and 1995’s The American President, starring Michael Douglas and Annette Bening; as well as the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi about the trial of Byron De La Beckwith, who killed civil rights activist Medgar Evers.

The filmmaker returned to form, following several commercial flops, with 2007’s The Bucket List, which starred Nicholson alongside Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men who set about fulfilling their life ambitions before they die. It helped to popularise the now widespread titular term.

In 2015, the semi-autobiographical Being Charlie, co-written by Reiner’s son Nick, looked into the painful relationship between a young man dealing with addiction and his father.

Two years later, Reiner directed and appeared in the 2017 film Shock and Awe, about a group of reporters covering the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

He also played the father of Zooey Deschanel’s character in New Girl and versions of his larger than life self on TV shows like Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, 30 Rock, and Happyish.

Reiner, who also appeared as a movie studio executive in the 2020 miniseries Hollywood, was once quoted as saying: “If you are a creative person, you try to create things that are an extension of yourself.”

By BBC News