The first time I met Rob Reiner, back in the summer of 2018, in a restaurant near his home in Brentwood, I mock reprimanded him for setting the bar too high for us, the kids who grew up on his movies. If the first comedy you watch is This Is Spinal Tap, you are doomed ever after to disappointment. “Aw, but it really was all Chris and Michael and Harry,” he insisted, referring to Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, the film’s leads. When I asked how he made arguably the only truly feminist rom-com, When Harry Met Sally, in which the male and female characters are treated equally, he protested again: “But that was all Nora!”—as in Ephron, the film’s screenwriter. “In order for it to be funny, it had to be honest on both sides, and Nora taught me how she saw men.”
Oh, how lucky were we, those of us who grew up on Rob Reiner’s movies. I was in kindergarten when This Is Spinal Tap came out, so my first Reiner movie was—of course—The Princess Bride, a movie my sister and I watched so often on our parents’ Betamax that we can still recite the whole thing. Now, my own children do the same (minus the Betamax). Next I watched Stand by Me, then Spinal Tap, then The Sure Thing, then When Harry Met Sally, then Misery, then A Few Good Men. Name another director with a run like that. That’s right; you can’t.
