Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me has one of my all-time favorite opening movie scenes. In it, we see an SUV pulled over on the shoulder of a quiet country road as a group of children pedal past on their bicycles, accompanied by a mournful instrumental version of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” Inside the car is Gordie LaChance, portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss before he spends the rest of the movie as its narrator. He stares at a newspaper resting on the passenger seat, its headline reading: “Attorney Christopher Chambers Fatally Stabbed in Restaurant.” It’s immediately clear that this stop was unplanned, triggered by Gordie’s sudden encounter with the news of his best friend’s death. Outside the car, life moves on uninterrupted, while Gordie struggles to steady his breathing and gather his thoughts.
It was impossible for me to not think of that scene as I read the news of Rob and Michelle Reiner’s murder—sandwiched between a headline about antisemitic attacks at Bondi Beach and another headline reporting that the suspect in the Brown University mass shooting was still at large. Scrolling through headlines on Threads is a brutal way to wind down for the night, yet in a world of endless bad headlines and seemingly endless nights of restless sleep, it’s become my routine. So here we are. Yes, I know the two are related.
Rob Reiner has always been one of my favorite directors. But I’m also a bit of a film nerd and I know that saying “Rob Reiner is one of my favorite directors” is usually met with either a laugh or a look of confusion from other like-minded film nerds. “Rob Reiner? The guy who directed North?” I definitely understand. I get it. When we make our lists of all-time great directors, we all put the same filmmakers on there. We have our Kubricks or our Scorseses or our Spielbergs or our Coppolas and Coens. We have Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Steven Soderbergh, et al et al et al et al. We’ve all been in a college dorm room and know what kinds of film posters adorn those walls. Hard to be cool with a The American President poster on your wall, I suppose.
But at the end of the day, Reiner’s filmography, especially the first decade and a half of it, stands side-by-side with any great filmmaker’s filmography over a similar amount of time. He came out of the gate on fire with This is Spinal Tap and created (or at least popularized) the mockumentary film comedy genre in the process. I’m always leery of saying XYZ thing wouldn’t exist without something coming before it, but Waiting for Guffman, The Office, Best in Show, Modern Family, and even Arrested Development (among countless other movies and shows) wouldn’t be the same awesome movies/shows that they are without This is Spinal Tap setting the table first. He followed that up with the criminally underrated The Sure Thing which gave 1980s and 1990s mainstay John Cusack his first big film break.
But then he rattled off the quintessential coming of age story in Stand By Me, the quintessential quirky fantasy story in The Princess Bride, the genre defining and all-time classic romantic comedy in When Harry Met Sally, one of the all-time great Stephen King adaptations in Misery, one of the all-time best courtroom dramas in A Few Good Men, the aforementioned North, which we’ll skip right past, and then The American President, which essentially kickstarted the Aaron Sorkin expanded universe of liberal fantasy politics masquerading as popular entertainment. That run of films is pretty untouchable and would stand toe-to-toe with any great run of any traditionally recognized “great” director.
I completely understand why Reiner wouldn’t be on anyone’s “all-time great director” lists, though. His shot compositions were good but weren’t particularly great. There are very few scenes you could pull from any of his movies to show aspiring filmmakers on what a camera can and can’t do for your movie, in the way you could with any number of scenes directed by someone like Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino (still mad at QT for his Paul Dano nonsense) Paul Thomas Anderson. There are no great oners that track someone through multiple settings, nor were there expansive crane shots that captured widescreen outdoor vistas. There are no great montages set to the music of the Rolling Stones or John Williams orchestral soundscapes. His movies could be kind of corny at times, and when they weren’t being corny, they could feel very workman-like. He was more of a craftsman than an auteur, and we usually look down on the former and revere the latter.
But what he lacked in those areas he more than made up for with that big old beating heart of his that translated from director to screen to movie theater seat. His movies had feelings. Lots and lots of feelings. They made you feel all of the things. Life things. The whole gamut of the human experience was there on screen. And he did this all so effortlessly that it makes one ask; isn’t that the whole dang point?
This is Spinal Tap would have been a game-changing comedy just on the format and the talents of Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer alone, but what made that movie so special, to me, is that you ended up caring about these losers by the end of the movie, too. What they’re doing was always so ridiculous and stupid, yet so undeniably real and relatable, that you ended up feeling embarrassed for them as they stood under an 18’’ Stonehenge or couldn’t make their way through the back corridors of a venue. Or, you felt sad for them as they splintered apart because neither David nor Nigel could break past their stubborn pride to let the other know how much they meant to each other. You were doubled over in hysterics at what you were seeing, but you were also pulling for them, as well.
A couple months ago, I wrote a post about how the movies of 1985 helped get me through the early months of my parents’ divorce. In that piece, I talked briefly about the Rob Reiner directed Stand By Me and how much that movie impacted me then and how much it continues to impact me today. For those who need a quick refresher, Stand By Me is the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Body, in which 4 adolescent boys travel down an Oregon train tracks to search for the dead body of Ray Brower, a teen who had been knocked “clean out of his Keds” by a passing by train while picking blueberries.
It’s a brilliant coming of age story on a variety of fronts, but I’ve always felt that people slightly misinterpret the movie, or maybe just miss something that doesn’t seem as obvious in light of the quest they set off on. Sure, a loss of innocence comes from both the journey to and through the act of seeing a dead human being, and the narrator clearly points this out, but I’ve always argued that the real loss of innocence comes from the various times we’re both told or shown how these young boys had their trust betrayed by people who were meant to look out for them. Whether it’s Teddy recalling how his dad nearly burned Teddy’s ear off while in a fit of PTSD fueled rage, Gordie LaChance recalling how unloved he was made to feel by his parents in the early throes of grieving the untimely death of Gordie’s older brother, or Chris Chambers recalling how he had stolen money from his teacher, felt bad and returned the money, but then saw said teacher return to class the next week with a new shawl while still blaming Chris for the stolen money; each person in the story seems much more impacted by how they dealt with those life events than by the eventual climax of the movie itself.
It’s been decades since I’ve read Stephen King’s novella (from Different Seasons, the same book that contains both Apt Pupil and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), but I do remember it well enough to know that many of those dynamics were absent in the source material. These were story elements director Rob Reiner and screenwriters Raynold Gideon and Bruce Evans added into the story to add emotional depth to what probably just existed between the margins of King’s original work. Rob Reiner also added so much emotional resonance via some really great imagery (think of the iconic shots of the boys walking across fields at dusk or down train tracks into the unknown forests of the Pacific Northwest) and via all-time great performances from Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, and River Phoenix.
But Stand By Me was no exception on the great acting front. Rob Reiner always got good performances from his actors. That’s true of every movie he ever made, good or bad. Being an actor himself, I think he knew what actors did and didn’t want to do on screen and directed them accordingly. He also knew their capabilities and their limitations and let the great actors fly when the scene called for it (think of Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep or Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes – for which she won the Oscar) but also got some really great performances from actors of lesser skill levels. Hard to think of any bad performances in any of his movies, to be honest.
Every behind-the-scenes footage I’ve ever seen from one of his films talks about how much he liked to collaborate with the writers, actors, and technicians he worked with on his film crews. Just this morning I watched two behind the scenes clips about When Harry Met Sally, which is one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time. In one of the videos, When Harry Met Sally screenwriter Nora Ephron talked about the famous orgasm scene and how that scene was originally set to be yet another conversation between Sally and Harry. It was Meg Ryan’s suggestion that that scene happen in a public place and that Sally should exhibit an orgasm to Harry in said scene. It was then Rob Reiner’s suggestion that if they were going to go through with this scene in this new setting with these new dynamics, he’d want to top off the scene off a great “I’ll have what she’s having” line (which Billy Crystal came up with), delivered perfectly by Reiner’s own mother.
In the other video, Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner spoke about how the original ending of When Harry Met Sally was going to be a lot more bittersweet with Harry and Sally going their separate ways and not ending up together. Apparently, Rob was still mourning and grieving the breakup of his previous marriage and had soured on the notion of true love existing and of people circuitously and miraculously finding each other over and over again. It wasn’t until he met his (soon to be) wife Michelle on the set of When Harry Met Sally that he changed his opinion and asked Nora Ephron to rewrite the ending into the iconic end that we all know and love.
True collaboration like that only happens, in my opinion, with big hearted and loving people. You have to be open to great ideas and those can come from anywhere or anyone. These were all big and successful Hollywood legends who worked on these movies, yet they all put their egos aside for something creatively bigger than themselves. These people brought fresh ideas to their work because that’s the atmosphere Rob Reiner fostered.
Each one of Reiner’s movies has stories like this. You read or hear about how Reiner worked with Andre the Giant, Mandy Patinkin, Cary Elwes, and Robin Wright on the set of The Princess Bride and how he’d take each one of their recommendations and incorporate them into the movie. Or you hear about how Jack Nicholson so loved the atmosphere Reiner created on the set of A Few Good Men that he did his famous “You can’t handle the truth” monologue over and over and over again for the sake of the other actors’ reactions in the scene, even though he had nailed it in the first take.
We live in interesting filmmaking times. Between big budget CGI spectacles dominating our big screens and AI slop dominating our small ones, it’s getting progressively harder to remember a time when we flocked to the cinemas to see moderately budgeted movies where the magic on screen was the magic that we felt from genuine human interaction. These were the movies Rob Reiner specialized in. He knew that there was a form of magic that happens between 12-year-old friends that isn’t replicable at any other moment of their lives. He knew that there was magic in a grandfather reading a fantasy book to his grandson home sick with a cold. He knew that there was a form of magic in a multi-decades long discussion between friends debating whether a man and a woman could ever truly be friends or if the gravitational pull of a sexual and/or romantic relationship would get in the way. And on that one, he knew that there was a magic in realizing that in the end, the distinction doesn’t matter as much as we might think it does.
Among many of the countless tweets I’ve read about Rob Reiner in the past few days, I read one in which someone dismissively discredited Rob Reiner’s work by basically saying something to the effect of “the love we’re giving Rob Reiner should be going to Nora Ephron, Aaron Sorkin, and William Goldman, whose scripts were the real stars of the movies he made.” Okay, sure. I get it. Like I said above, I definitely understand why Reiner wouldn’t be on some people’s “best directors lists.” But one final time I’d push back on that notion. Choosing the right scripts, choosing the right actors, choosing the right cinematographers, etc.; that’s what a good director does. That’s literally the number one job of a director; being a good chooser of things.
I’ve often heard it said that we mourn great artists, not because we knew them, but because they helped us know ourselves. Every time I think of my childhood friends, I think of Stand By Me. Every time I crank the volume on my music up past 10, I think of This is Spinal Tap. Every time I’d read to my kids when they were younger, I’d think of Peter Falk. As a young idealistic high schooler and then a bitter one-termer Marine, I can’t even begin to tell you about how many times I’ve thought through the themes discussed in A Few Good Men. When I saw those shiny dress blue uniforms in the opening scene I knew I wanted to be a Marine. When I saw a lot of my Marine peers cheer on Col. Jessep when they should have been repulsed by him, I knew I needed to get out. I once read Stephen King’s Misery while home from school with a horrible flu-like illness and then was pleasantly surprised when the movie basically captured the same claustrophobic and ill feeling I had while reading it.
In their episode commemorating Rob Reiner, the Big Picture podcast made an interesting point in how they’d answer the age-old question; if you could only choose one director’s filmography to take with you to a deserted island, whose would it be? Big Picture host Amanda Dobbins said hers would be Rob Reiner’s filmography. That’s kind of a perfect encapsulation of what kind of varied filmography he had. Some directors lead with their psyches. I’m thinking of directors like Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese here. They take us to the depths of our psychologies to places we may or may not acknowledge as even existing. Some directors lead with their brains. I’d put Christopher Nolan and maybe even James Cameron on this level. Their movies have every detail thought out and have every decision make total logical sense. But my favorite directors are ones who lead with their hearts. My answer to that “deserted island” question would probably be Steven Spielberg. But if for some reason I goofed and grabbed the wrong stack of films as I headed to the island and spent the rest of eternity watching This is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, Stand By Me, and any of the other movies he either directed or produced (there is no Seinfeld, The Shawshank Redemption, or Linklater’s Before trilogy without Reiner’s Castle Rock), I’d be one happy, entertained, and fulfilled island dweller.
Such a loss… rest in peace to both Michelle and Rob Reiner. And thank you both for your activism. As someone who shares many of their political beliefs, I can’t believe I wrote all these words and didn’t mention that once. But many thanks and full gratitude to a great artist. Thank you for directing with your heart for all to see.
An open and shut book 
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