Transcript of The Rob Reiner Story: A Hollywood Tragedy (ABC News Special Podcast)

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We got word from producers in the control room that Air7 was launching.

I started to hear helicopters not far from my house.

One thing here in LA is when there are a lot of helicopters overhead, you know there's either a chase going on or something really bad has gone on.

The LA Fire Department, they got a 911 call for some medical assistance at 3: 38 PM on Sunday afternoon.

Usla Unit, Andrew & Seth Investigation, South Chathorn Avenue, code 2.

It was a call for medical assistance. We were able to confirm through property records that this is a home that belongs to Rob Reiner. Then we found that there were two bodies inside the home.

Sources were telling me right away, they were saying, We know it's a murder.

We are following this breaking news. There is a death investigation at a home in Brentwood on Chadborne Avenue. Right now, we do know that there are two victims we're a 78-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman. The LAPD Homicide Unit is on the scene.

It was the first night of Hanukah, so I was preparing the candles. And so as I was literally putting the candles in and getting ready to start the prayers and all of that, I get a text, Oh, man, this is at Rob's house. And all I could think was, Oh, my God, there's no way this could have happened to my friend. This is the one thing that we all hope and pray will never happen in our lives.

So the Chopper was hovering over this compound in this neighborhood in Brentwood for a good hour or so, and we weren't seeing a whole lot of activity, which almost seemed eerie, given that we knew two bodies were found inside the home.

When this initially happened, the media was pushed way back down the street.

There was crime scene tape up.

We couldn't see the home. When we heard from the LAPD on Sunday, they were a little bit cagey.

We have not identified a suspect at this time.

Well, then shouldn't you be looking for one?

It was almost a combative news conference with LAPD, with reporters asking questions of what is happening inside this home?

Are we safe in Brentwood, the neighbors of the community? Are we safe in Brentwood? I'm sorry. Yeah. So we have officers here at the scene. We're not looking for anyone in the Brentwood area at this point.

Police were almost coy about what they knew and wouldn't say that they were looking at nick Reiner. And it seems that that was because they didn't want to spook him.

They knew what was going on, and they knew who they were going for.

As we watched the news unfold, I was actually the first one who said, I think it was his son. It's awful. It's the worst thing I could imagine.

We begin with breaking news from Hollywood. Actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner's son arrested for murder in the killing of his parents.

It was early Monday morning when we initially found out that nick Reiner, the son of Robin Michel, had been booked into jail and was being held on suspicion of murder.

I was actually on the air in the middle of a report when the producer in my ear said, nick Reiner is in custody. Okay, I'm actually hearing just now from our producer that nick Reiner, I believe is what you said, the son, I believe, of Rob Reiner is now in custody with the LAPD. I believe I'm hearing that correctly from the producer. So that's breaking news just in right now.

I think it leaves people stunned. The tragedy involved here. You have such a storied Hollywood couple killed inside their own home.

We're talking about Rob Reiner, a famous actor, director, somebody who's been just a Hollywood figure for my entire life.

Just everybody knows him.

And his wife, Michelle Singer Reiner, a well-known photographer.

You have seeing Larry David show up, seeing Billy Crystal show up, noticing Billy Crystal looks like he's on the verge of tears.

Just accepting that fact that this could have happened in his home from his own son. It sent shivers and chills down all of us.

Tonight, the new and horrific detail is beginning to emerge, and what we're now learning about the scene inside the home.

This began when Rob Reiner's daughter came to the house and discovered that he and his wife, Michelle, were both dead. It is horrifying, top to bottom, beyond reason and beyond imagination. What the police are telling us is that they believe that nick Reiner murdered his parents at home, and then at some point during the day, took off.

Resources from Robbery Homicide Division, working with Gang and Narcotics Division, were We're able to locate our suspect, nick Reiner.

Obviously, this is a shocking case, but it's not new that there were long-standing issues with the family, particularly surrounding the fact that nick Reiner had a lot of troubles The Reiner's had a troubled relationship with nick Reiner.

Hi, how are you?

Hi, I'm good. How are you? Go in here.

Ten seconds.

I am joined today by the father and son duo, director and writer, respectively, of the new film, Being Charlie.

Some of the writer's documentation of talking about addiction troubles in their own family was the 2015 film that they made called Being Charlie.

The things that cannot change. Charlie, why don't you tell us what you want to thank God for?

Being Charlie is very heavily inspired by Nick's struggles with drug abuse. Charlie, take a seat. Dad, I'm I'm not going to sit here and listen to you tell me what a drug addict I am. But also heavily inspired by his relationship with his father, because there is a strained relationship between father and son as the son is battling substance abuse problems. Here's how it's going to go. You can either head back to treatment or live on the streets. It's your choice.

I get asked this question a lot, Why would you want to put your story out there? It was never that difficult for me to share what I struggled about.

It was just like, I have a lot of experiences that might be valuable to other people.

nick had had gone into recovery and treatment centers over and over again. He said that it was a difficult process, and he didn't think it worked necessarily. It's usually like they get out and they go back several times and they think it's their fault rather than the program thinking it's their fault. They designed it to make it feel like you're the one that's the problem, which you may be, but it's more to it than that.

He became homeless because he refused to get treatment.

Which is incredible to think about. A kid from Hollywood royalty who grew up in a home in Brentwood, homeless and struggling with drug addiction.

I produce and host The Dopey podcast. It was not meant to become a recovery podcast, but it did. So when I heard nick talking to his dad, I just knew it would be good for our show. Hey, what's up? There he is, nick Reiner. How are you? Pretty good. I think there's an unspoken bond between addicts and recovery or addicts in general. So when nick came to my apartment, it was almost like we were in treatment or we were in a detox or we were in a rehab or an AA meeting or something. I wound up having a cocaine heart attack. I got totally spun out on uppers. I think it was coke and something else, and I was up for days on end. And I started punching out different things in my guest house, the TV, and then I went over to the lamp. I think it got very scary for him. I had no idea how difficult it was for him.

I think that when you grow up, living around drug addiction and alcoholism, it's a lot easier for you to accept it and process it when it comes to your own family. When we don't understand the plight of our friends and our family, and we don't understand understand what a slippery slope drug addiction is, it's hard for us to have empathy for it.

He would always describe his parents as very accepting, and he always felt guilty for putting them through any pain. Addiction is an hour by hour, day by day, decision on the addict's part. I think his mother really cared about him. I think his mother took his situation very hard, and I think he really cared about her. I know that she meant so much to him.

Rob was very open about the fact that he regreted taking the advice of counseling colors that they had seen over the years, over the word of his own son.

Just like it says in the movie, anybody with a desk and a diploma, I listen to because you don't know how to handle it. They told us, You have to be tough. It has to be tough enough, which is not my nature. But I did. I'm an actor, so I have to act. I'll act like a guy who is tough.

Being Charlie was an outlet for them to handle some of their family issues that they had experienced and to let people know that this is something that goes on even in families like theirs.

The father character initially was harsh on him, and I, believe it or not, was not wanting the character to be that villain, and it was hard for him for a while to think that I I thought of him that way and to convince him that that's not how I felt. I did think that, and I thought, Oh, God, that's what nick thinks of me. Oh, my God. I thought that was... But then he actually came about halfway through the process. He said, The father should be a little bit more dimensional. Otterly enough, I took that as to me, Oh, he's feeling better about me now.

I think that probably helped his son immensely. I think it helped him immensely as a father and to work through those problems.

It was a father's love and trying to help his son and get out the other side and live happily ever after, and they knew they weren't. Life is not white picket fences and happily ever afters.

I can't tell you how they went from there 10 years ago to where we are today.

nick is in county jail in Los Angeles.

He was being held without bail.

There are eyewitness that we've received that nick was acting erradically.

There might have been some an argument at Conan O'Brien's Christmas party before this homicide occurred.

These charges will be two counts of first-degree murder with a special circumstance of multiple murders. These charges carry a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty. Once he is medically cleared, he will be brought to court to be arrained on these charges. At that point, he will enter a plea of guilty or not guilty.

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Tonight, we complete that challenge. The end of an era. First two episodes now streaming only on Disney Plus. To the left, Rob. Look at that. All right, Rob. Rob, Reiner is synonymous with Hollywood at this point and has been for decades.

He's the son of the icon Carl Reiner. Their stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame are right next to each other.

Rob Reiner was really born into storytelling.

His father famously created the Dick Van Dyke Show.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, starring Dick Van Dyke.

Rob actually lived as a kid in New Rochelle, and anybody who knows anything about the Dick Van Dyke Show knows that Rob and Laurie Petrie live in New Rochelle. His father was the host of the show Within The Show.

Well, hear me out, Allan, you're impatient. I'm not impatient, and your time is up. You have the impatience of genius. Go ahead, finish your thought. From the time we met, we saw comedy in what was funny eye to eye. He was the great human human beings. I think he was probably the best human being as a father and a husband and as a producer and writer. He was perfect. God, we got along so well. It was five years of looking forward to coming to work in the Good morning.

Carl Reiner is a superstar all in his own right. Carl Reiner, we begin within the writers room of your show of shows, the number one show in the nation.

Hello, there's Jerobey, the report of Carl Reiner here at LaGuardia Airport.

It was the Sid Caesar show, a sketch show, a variety show with the greatest writers room in the history of Writers Rooms, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, and Carl Reiner writing these fantastic sketches.

One of his most famous routines is a 2000-year-old man, where Carl Reiner is a straight man, interviewing Mel Brooks, who is a man who claims he's 2000 years old.

Folks, this is my credo on how to live for 2000 years. Be a friend to yourself. Shake your hand and pat yourself on the back. Take care of every part of your body as if it were your own. From the day you fall until the day you die, never leave the house. It might be raining, and there's tough guys out there.

Rob, growing up, would be seeing his father work with the greats here in New York, like Sid Caesar, Imogen Coca, like Mel Brooks, who became his lifelong friend. These are comic giants, and these are all giants that are in his house that are working with his father. And you cannot help but imagine how all of this rubs off on him.

In a conversation with Terry Gross from Fresh Air on NPR, Rob Reiner told about growing up as the son of Carl Reiner.

When I was little boy, my parents said, I came up to them and I said, I want to change my name. I was about eight years old, I guess. I said, I want to change my name. And they said, Oh, my God, this poor kid, he's worried about being in the shadow of a famous guy and he's living up to and all this. And they said, Well, what do you want to change your name to? And I said, Carl. I loved him so much. I just wanted to be like him.

These days, nepo babies get a bad rep. But if anybody can point to a nepo baby really working out and being the Uber nepo baby, it would be Rob Reiner. Talk about a guy born into something and then making the most of it, right?

People would come up to me and say, Your father is the sweetest, nicest man. And all I could think of was, I'm not him. What am I going to do? How do I follow that? How do I be this person that everybody regards as not only is he nice, but He's talented. Everybody says he's the most talented man, and he's the sweetest man. And all those things are true. And it was a very tough struggle for me to find myself and find out who I was and that I was different from him.

On Howard Stern, he said that he felt his father did not think he was funny. What's interesting about that is that most of the laughs that Karl Reiner got was as the straight man. If you fast forward to 1971, And there's Mike Stivik in Archie Bunker's living room, and it's mostly Archie getting the gags.

Archie, you want to play? Nah. What is it? It's a new game. It's called Group Therapy. Is that anything like Monopoly? No, no, no, no. It's an adult game. I ain't playing nothing dirty.

So maybe they were both straightmen down deep after all.

When you were a little boy, your father didn't recognize you as funny. The guy who recognized you as funny was Norman Lear, who was a friend of your dad. That's exactly right. I was like nine, eight years old. I was playing Jacks with his daughter, explaining the rules to her. And apparently I made Norman laugh. He says to my father, You know what? That kid, he's really funny. He's really funny. And my father said, What are you crazy? That little, that guy-So he didn't see it at all. No, I was a brooding kid sitting in the corner. I mean, that's not funny.

Carl Reiner went on and on as a historical piece of comedy forever, and he will have that place, where Rob felt a little bit in that shadow, and it was always important for him to rise above it, rise above being Carl Reiner's son, and find his own identity and niche his own place in history, which, of course, he did. God, I could only imagine the things that he still would have done.

Carl then moves his family from New York to Hollywood to try his hand in the movies.

He graduates from Beverly Hills High School. Among his classmates are Albert Brooks, another comedian, another guy of his generation who becomes famous. If you're charting the different relationships in this, you have to remember the relationship between Rob Reiner and his ex-wife, Penny Marshall. Penny Marshall is the sister of Gary Marshall, who was a TV producer, again, involved in the Dick Van Dyke show, and ultimately in The odd couple in the early 1970s. Penny Marshall had a role in The odd couple. She was Myrna, the secretary.

You should go to bed. Her character's name was Myrna Turner.

He's got an ensemble. Oh, I didn't want to insult him and tell you how terrible you looked, but now I can tell you, you look terrible.

She goes on to become a global star in Laverne and Shirley.

Just try to get to the door. Go on. Try to get to the door.

So Rob and Penny Marshall were basically neighbors while growing up in the Bronx.

Well, we were both born in the Bronx. We lived across the street from each other in the Bronx, except his father was working more than my father. And he moved when he was seven. But you did not know each other in that time? No, he was younger than me then. But she knew a lot of the people that lived in my building.

I knew his cousins, and I knew his father lived there because he gave good trick or treat.

On Halloween, we go to call Ryan, it's a trick or treat.

Robin Penny met just as his career was starting to flourish. She became a really, really beloved filmmaker. He became a really popular actor/filmmaker very quickly.

In what would later be seen as a remarkable power couple of comedic talent, both in terms of being actors and in terms of eventually becoming directors, Rob Reiner and Penny Marshall were married from 1971 till about the end of that decade. She had a child from an earlier marriage named Tracy, who Rob would eventually adopt, and Tracy Reiner would be a part their family.

Their relationship ended rather amicably. Penny was asked for the reasons behind their breakup, and she told people, I just had a conversation with him, and we asked, Are we still happy in this? And they both said basically no. So they decided to end it.

They had probably the happiest divorce in Hollywood history. No stress divorce. And a sense as to what guy Rob Reiner would become is that he had a pleasant divorce. When does that happen?

Hi, how are you?

An unknown Reiner catapulted to fame as part of the bantering and bickering bunkers of TV's All-on-the-Family.

What a four-lack way to blow out a kid.

Oh, there he goes again. That makes Meathead a household name.

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played.

Songs that made the hit parade. Guys like us we hadn't made. Those were the days.

That's Archie Bunker and Edith Bunker sitting at a Bull Piano playing a song that's an ode to nostalgia because their world was changing, and the person who was changing their world was sitting in their living room. It was Mike Stivik, and that character was played by Rob Reiner.

He is the son of Carl Reiner, so he does get TV work, and he's in a lot of guest shots from a lot of shows back in the day. Gomer Pyle, Batman, The Andy Griffith Show. But it's not until 1970 or so that he gets cast in what becomes arguably the most lightning rod show of the early '70s, and all in the family.

There ain't no dice there, no money, no boardwalk, no nothing there. Some little card would write, mother. Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot to tell you, Arch, that's the hard part. You have to know how to read.

It's a family that lives in Queens, a working class family headed by Archie Bunker. Archie Bunker was basically a blue collar worker.

He loved Richard Nixon, loved his wife, loved his daughter, and couldn't stand his son-in-law. You are a meathead. A meathead, dead from the neck up.

One of the great engines of the show is the combativeness between Archie, very conservative, very stuck in his ways, and Mike, meathead, who is lefty, liberal, and always challenging all of Archie's preconceived notions.

You, meathead, turn off the garbage on that radio. Okay. I thought you'd be interested in hearing what King Richard was up to Richard E. Nixon, ain't in the rest of them?

I grew up watching all in the family. We all did. So to me, he was that funny guy, Meathead.

This was based on what Norman Lear's father used to call him. He decided, why shouldn't somebody else benefit from having been called that and being stuck with that for the rest of your life? Thank you very much, Norman, for that. Do you take cream of sugar in your eye?

The comedy was brilliant, but the trues were hard to resist, too. It was constantly talked about as a cultural landmark of the 1970s.

The communists occupy Saigon. The complicated ruling on abortion. Vietnam War, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, sexuality. There was no subject that we wouldn't touch. In many countries, England, for instance, there is a law that says whatever two consenting adults do in private is their own business. Listen, this ain't England. We threw England out of here a long time ago. We thought there would be no way people would accept this show. Cbs basically was very nervous about the show being on and put a disclaimer on which essentially said, Don't pay any attention to what you see here. If you like it, fine. But we don't know these people. We don't want to have anything to do with them. We wash our hands of the whole thing. But if you want to watch it, go ahead and watch it. Sammy Davis Jr. Is gave me the greatest credit to his race. Well, thank you very much. I'm sure you've done good for yours, too. I tried. We were always able to get laughs along with touching on very serious subjects, and I think that's what made the show so good.

It's hard to overstate how popular that show was and how dominating it was, not just as something people watched every Monday night, but how it dominated the debate.

There were no DVRs, no Tevo. So if you wanted to watch it, you had to watch it when it was on the air. That meant there was 40, 45 million people having a shared experience. The power of that is unimaginable. The winner is Rob Reiner, all the family.

He wins two Emmys playing Mike Stibb. One of them, beautifully, is given to him by his father.

Talk about parental approval. He was so proud, and he was almost crying. He gave a hug, and he told me he loved me, and I loved him. This is for your mother.

It's one of those great moments in Hollywood where one generation gives the other generation a recognition of what they've done. So All in the Family ends in 1978. He wanted to become a filmmaker, so he transitioned from being an actor. We all remember Rob Reiner as the meathead on television's All in the Family.

Well, now he has completed his first feature film. It's called This is Spinal Tap. We have Spinal Tap from the UK. You must be the USA. And I'm going to rock you. And I'm going to rock you. And I'm going to rock you. I've been working very hard. I mean, to make the transition from a TV actor to a director took some doing. I had never directed a feature film before. What do you say? Let's boogie.

You want the first mock rock doc? You've got to look at this, this final tap.

There's a flame on that one.

I mean, it's just quite unbelievable. He made something that became a classic that was incredibly unexpected, which was this mockumentary, a term that did not exist at the time, about this bloated, self-absorbed hard rock band called Spinal Tap.

No one had really ever done anything quite like this before. It was really, really clever.

My goal in life was not to go back on television as Meathead becomes an investigative reporter, and to make the transition because I wanted to direct.

We went to movie studios, every major one, with a 20-minute demo of the film, Spinal Tap. This company here is telling us that we can't release the album in. What?

Wait, what are you talking about? Smell the glove. Smell the glove. Which Rob had directed.

And you've never seen blanker stares in your The movie is absolutely hysterical.

Everything from one of the band members trying to go through the metal detector at an airport with a tinfoil stuffed cucumber in his pants to show that he's better in doubt than he might really be, to the classic scene about the amp that goes to 11.

If you can see, the numbers all go to 11. Why don't you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number and make that a little louder? These go to 11. The film is a very unusual film, and we shot the film without a script. Everything you saw there was completely improvised. Just simple lines, intertwining, very much like I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach. It's in between, though. It's really like a Mach piece, really. What do you call this? Well, this piece is called Lick My Love Pump.

Sometimes funny people people don't like to not be the only funny person in the room.

Rob wasn't like that at all.

It's like being in a band.

You're passing the baton around and everybody gets a chance. And it was a sharing experience, and I think he reveled in that.

It's a genius, genius piece of filmmaking. If you watch The Office, or you watch Modern Family, or Abbott Elementary, the documentary Motif that is absolutely straight out of Spinal Tap. Rob Reiner knew how to get the best at a particular actor.

Jack Nicholson delivering that iconic line in A Few Good Men.

You can't handle the truth.

Or you have Cathy Bates in Misery or Robin Wright in The Princess Bride.

As a director, he built that trust, and the way that he did that was like no other director.

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Mr. Reiner is ready to go. My theory about directing is put the audience in the best seating the house. Give them the best vantage point to see what it is you want them to see at a given moment.

Rob Reiner began as a writer and as a comic actor, but maybe his greatest contribution was being a film director.

Is this what you're looking for? You're worried about losing your job? Because this poll isn't talking about my presidency. This poll is talking about my life. As you wish.

A lot of filmmakers do a certain movie, whether it's comedy or dark family drama. He was incredibly eclectic with the movies that he made. So he makes Spinal Taps. So you figure he's going to be a guy who makes comedies the rest of his life. Then he makes Stand By Me, which is a very moving, melancholy story about young men growing up.

I'm never going I need to get out of this town, Am I, Gory? You can do anything you want, man.

I was working on Goonies at the time when I got the call from my agent who said, There's this movie, and it's very serious. It's going to be a very It's a very serious role. It's a very serious movie. It's a Stephen King novella, and Rob Reiner is directing it. And I was like, You mean the guy from All In The Family? And they were like, Yeah, he's a director now.

You little tin weasel, Peckerwood looney, son.

What did you call me? There was two things that he really wanted to prove to the world. One was that he was not a meanhead, and two was that he could stand up to his father's great work.

This was something that my father never would have tried, never would have done, and this one really reflected me. So I said, If people like this, then they're going to like what I have to offer. And they did. I suppose this is fun for you. No, but this is...

When I look back at Rob's career, specifically as a filmmaker, I'm really amazed at how he could hop across genres. Princess Bride, to this day, is so many people's favorite film of all time.

I read this book 14 years ago, when I was 26. I read it and I just flipped out. I mean, it was one of those experiences where somebody Nobody is writing just for you, where they're in your mind and you're reading every page, and it's like, boy, this person knows exactly how I think. Thirteen years later, now I've become a filmmaker, and I said, Hey, don't they make movies out of books? Isn't that something they do? I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains.

You're that smart.

Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?

Yes.

Morons. Really? In that case, I challenge you to a battle of wits.

Princess Bride. Imagine trying to pitch that. Well, it's a comic fantasy. It's got Andre the Giant in it. It's got Wallace Sean in it. Robin Wrights in it, too, right? And Cariel is at the height of his Kareel-ishness.

Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.

How can it possibly work? How can it possibly work?

Inconceivable. Rob had recently split from his wife, Penny Marshall, and he expressed that he was going through a low point in his love life, in his social life, and he wanted to write something about love in the current world, as it were. And so he reached out to Nora Efron.

After I got divorced and I was thrown back into the dating world and making a complete and utter mess of my social life and being utterly confused about how to relate to the opposite sex, that's what became the father for this film.

Perhaps His most popular movie is When Harry Met Sally, which is the ultimate romantic comedy of the 1980s. I mean, it makes Meg Ryan bigger than the world.

What I'm saying is, and this is not a come on in any way, shape, or form, is that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

That's not true. I have a number of men friends, and there is no sex involved. No, you don't.

Yes, I do. No, you don't. Yes, I do. I only think you do.

You see clearly the echoes of what his father taught him, the comic timing, the perfect line.

You know, the first time we met, I really didn't like you that much. I didn't like you. Yeah, you did. You were just so up tight then. You're much softer now.

You know, I hate that remark. It sounds like a compliment, but really, it's an insult.

Okay, you're still as hot as nails.

And of course, like a lot of his movies, there's always one line and one thing that people have come to repeat. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes.

The last line of the scene after Meg goes to this incredible orgasmic experience, she finishes and they cut to an elderly woman sitting at a table.

I'll have what she's having.

That is my mother saying that line.

Rob Reiner met his wife, Michelle, on the set of When Harry Met Sally. She was a set photographer, and he saw her and he said, Oh, she looks like someone I would want to meet.

They fell in love. They fell in love so spectacularly. Particularly, that Rob Reiner had Nora Efron change the ending of When Harry Met Sally because he was a newly born optimist about romance.

I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. Rob Reiner knew how to get the best out of particular actors. In a few good men, you've got to me more.

Now, damn it, let's put Jessup on the stand and end this thing.

You've got Tom Cruise, you've got Jack Nicholson. Now, in the hands of other directors, that might be a little too much to handle. This is a man who knew how to get performances out of people.

Colonel Jessup, did you order the code red?

You don't have to answer that question.

I'll answer the question.

You want answers? I think I'm entitled.

You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth.

Somebody tried to ask Nora Efron to describe Rob Reiner as a director because he never won an Oscar. He was never talked about the way Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg. And she said, You know, it's like when a diver is in the Olympics and a diver goes off the high board and he doesn't do a jack knife, he doesn't do a summer salt, he just goes into the water and there's a tiny splash, and it's perfect. That's a Rob Reiner movie.

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In real life, he was a tireless activist on behalf of the Democratic Party.

Let this President, I really feel we need to focus on.

Louis, how much coffee you drink-A passion he gave voice to in the film The American President.

Mr. President, I really feel we need to focus-Lewis, how much coffee you drink in the morning, I want you to reduce it by half. How do you drink coffee, sir? Hit yourself over the head with a baseball bat.

Would you please? The American President And it's so much fun to watch. It's Michael Douglas, it's Annette Benning, it's Michael J. Fox.

People want leadership, Mr. President. In the absence of genuine leadership, they'll listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership. They're so thirsty for it. They'll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there's no water, they'll drink the sand.

All Sorkin's work has that romance about American democracy and the power of American democracy and what it means. And Rob Reiner buys into that wholeheartedly. And his politics in his real life is reflective of that. He's never one about tearing the system down. He's about working within the system. Maybe it's about the need to make change. And if you go all the way back to Mike Stibbick, you can see that line in there.

Don't you see the party with the money can afford to TV and radio time to get their message across to the people. The other party doesn't stand a chance. Before you know it, you've lost the two-party system. Gee, it's getting like politics in America, it's only for the rich. Who's been feeding you that commy crap all?

Hey, everybody. He's someone who refuses to take no foreign answer to some degree, but is moved by the righteousness of what he believes in. He was a joyful warrior in the world of politics. He becomes a huge Democratic activist, huge Democratic fundraiser. Are you voting for Al Gore?

When I say Howard, you say Dean. Howard. Howard. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now they're talking about governor of California in 2006. Is that true? Well, it's something I think about. Everybody likes the idea of the Terminator versus the meathead. Probably if it was a physical fight, he'd probably win. But hopefully it'll be a fight of ideas, and then maybe I have a shot.

Rob Reiner would not pursue a campaign for a governor of California, but he did pursue the issues that mattered to him most.

He lent his voice to things that he very much felt passionately about did not shy away from.

We know that there's global warming, and that is man We're the worst child care providers of any country in the industrialized world.

I think he saw that as a seamless fabric, going back to his days on all in the family. I think the things he was saying back then were the things he believed in.

We were the first people to put a a federal lawsuit together to challenge Proposition 8, which led to marriage equality for the whole country. Do you know why I'm passionate about this? Because I know it's right.

He was absolutely the example of a wealthy Hollywood person using his wealth and influence. To get change, he thought that was necessary.

He put himself out there, and he knew there would be consequences.

He used his platform to become political to the point that he was actually parodied on South Park.

These poor, innocent children have been seduced into smoking tobacco. So I said, We fight fly or we'll fly. We're going to use these children to bring your tobacco company down.

Rob Reiner, as much as he was an advocate and as powerfully as he spoke, believed in the power of what happens when two people talk. It was the thing that animated so much of his work. Whether it's Lieutenant Caffee going up against Colonel Jessup.

Did you order the code red? I did the job. Did you order the code red? You're goddamn right. I did.

Or whether it's Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal fighting because they found each other on a plane.

Eventually, things move on and you don't take someone to the airport. I never wanted anyone to say to me, How come you never take me to the airport anymore? It's amazing. You look like a normal person, but actually, you are the angel of death.

What happens when two people have dialog is a very powerful thing. I think when you watch these movies, you sense, If we can talk, if we can hear each other, if I can hear your perspective and you can hear mine, maybe the world could be a better place.

There is that sense of humanity. There is that sense of people rubbing against each other, learning things about each other, learning how to succeed. Age-old stories about striving, about persevering. That's what the human experience is like.

When you get to be a certain age, you learn to really love your life. I want to make movies about people who are embracing life.

We've got to do our best to remember all the good times, all the joy, all the laughter, all the fun that Rob brought into our lives.

Find the joy in your life. Find the things that are important to you. Find joy in your relationships with your loved ones, your family and friends. That's ultimately where you're going to find joy and happiness.

I think he's really going to leave a lasting legacy of just being one of the Hollywood good guys. He is someone so loved in his community, so loved by fans. He gives you a Rob as he is, and he's impossible to not love. That's why I think this loss is such a shocking and horrific one, because we didn't really get a chance to say goodbye.

Sometimes the happy endings are only in the movies.

The world won't be as funny with Rob Reiner missing. He had a way of telling a story that was so rich that we all felt something about ourselves. And that is such a gift to be missed.