Rob Reiner Remembered: One of Hollywood’s Great Comic Voices Meets a Tragic End |
It’s a sad day in Hollywood — an unthinkable, upsetting and all-around shocking day — when filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife Michele could have been stabbed to death in their own home, allegedly by someone so close.
The particulars are hazy, the initial reports nearly impossible to wrap one’s head around. It’s clear that in the days ahead, the scandal will likely overshadow the career of one of the industry’s most beloved directors, a man widely admired for his work, his activism and his contagiously optimistic spirit. In the “100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time” list recently published by Variety, Reiner was responsible for no fewer than three of the entries.
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I’m not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that among American studio talents, I consider Rob Reiner the best director never to have been nominated for best director. Just look at his credits. The guy was the Billy Wilder of our generation: a filmmaker with an instinct for comedy who could operate across genres, making films with brash, larger-than-life characters you recognized instantly and felt you’d known your whole life.
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Reiner wasn’t a stylist like Martin Scorsese — the filmmaking idol on whom “This Is Spinal Tap” “director” Marty DiBergi was based (and for whom he finally got to act in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad). He wasn’t a visionary technological innovator like Robert Zemeckis — the........