Martin Scorsese honored the late Reiners in an essay published in The New York Times, writing, “Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michele. From now on, I’ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness. But there’s no other choice.”
The Reiners, aged 78 and 70, were found dead in their Brentwood home on Dec. 14 with knife wounds. Their 32-year-old son, Nick Reiner, has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder.
Scorsese first got to know Rob Reiner shortly after moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when he started going to get-togethers hosted by George Memmoli and filled with comedians and actors.
“Rob and I were both Eastern transplants, in a way,” Scorsese wrote. Reiner came from show business royalty, his parents being the performers Carl and Estelle Reiner. “This was 100 percent New York humor, and it was in the air I breathed.”
“Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other. He was hilarious and sometimes bitingly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over the room,” Scorsese wrote. “He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh. When they honored him at Lincoln Center, Michael McKean did a bit, which was a brilliant parody of solemn official tribute speeches. Before he got to the punchline, Rob laughed so hard you could hear it throughout the auditorium.”
Scorsese’s favorite film directed by Reiner is “Misery,” which he described as “a very special film, beautifully acted by Kathy Bates and James Caan.” And he wrote that “This Is Spinal Tap” is “in a class of its own … an immaculate creation.” When Scorsese was casting his 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he “immediately thought of Rob” to play the father of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort.
“He could improvise with the best, he was a master at comedy, he worked beautifully with Leo and the rest of the guys, and he understood the human predicament of his character: The man loved his son, he was happy with his success, but he knew that he was destined for a fall,” Scorsese wrote of Reiner. “There’s that wonderful moment where Rob watches as Jon Favreau explains to Leo that he can get out relatively unscathed if he just walks away from his company before the S.E.C. has a chance to charge him with violations. The look on Rob’s face, as he realizes that Leo is hesitating and that he ultimately won’t stop, is so eloquent. ‘You got all the money in the world,’ he says. ‘You need everybody else’s money?’ A loving father, mystified by his son.”
Scorsese added, “I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance when we shot it, moved once again as we brought the scene together in the edit and moved as I watched the finished picture. Now, it breaks my heart to even think of the tenderness of Rob’s performance in this and other scenes.”
The filmmaker concluded his essay: “What happened to Rob and Michele is an obscenity, an abyss in lived reality. The only thing that will help me to accept it is the passing of time. So, like all of their loved ones and their friends — and these were people with many, many friends — I have to be allowed to imagine them alive and well … and that one day, I’ll be at a dinner or a party and find myself seated next to Rob, and I’ll hear his laugh and see his beatific face and laugh at his stories and relish his natural comic timing, and feel lucky all over again to have him as a friend.”
