Legendary comedy director Mel Brooks, 99, made his first public comments about family friend Rob Reiner’s murder.
During a post-screening Q&A at the premiere for his biographical documentary, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, the Oscar-winning comedian said he was “glad” that his lifelong friend Carl Reiner was not alive to see his son’s tragic death.
Rob Reiner, l, and Mel Brooks in 2014. Getty Images
“Anyway, with Carl, with what’s happened, I’m glad that he passed away when he did,” Brooks said in the audience Q&A with director Judd Apatow, as first reported by USA Today. “He never could have survived this terrible, terrible thing.”
On Tuesday, Mel Brooks said he was “glad” his friend Carl Reiner was not alive to see his son, Rob, befall a tragic death. Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for HBO
“I loved him. I loved Carl,” he continued.
Brooks became friends with Carl Reiner in 1950 while working on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. The two remained close friends and colleagues for 70 years before Carl passed away at 98. Brooks was with Reiner when he collapsed and died in his home in 2020.
After Carl Reiner collapsed, the Blazing Saddles director spent more than an hour begging paramedics to resuscitate him. “I just didn’t want him to go. I wouldn’t accept it. I loved him so much,” Brooks recalls in the documentary.
Rob Reiner, 78, who was murdered in his sleep alongside his wife Michelle, 70, appears posthumously in the documentary to detail his father’s friendship with Brooks.
“Even though Mel was only like four years younger than my dad, he looked to my dad as a father figure,” Reiner says in the documentary.
Mel Brooks saw his lifelong friend Carl Reiner nearly every single day until Reiner’s death at 98 in 2020. Mel Brooks/HBO
Brooks, who lost his own father by the time he was two, says in the film, “Carl, for all his schtick and insanity, was wise and loving. I just said, ‘That’s my father,’ I felt that Carl was there. I was very close to him.”
At the premiere, Brooks said Carl was “the sweetest man who ever lived.”
The two-part documentary, debuting on HBO Max on January 22, features posthumous interviews with Carl and Rob Reiner, as well as director David Lynch.
The younger Reiner met Brooks when he was just four, and remained close family friends until his death in December. In the documentary, Rob Reiner graciously remembers Brooks’s actions following his father’s death.
Carl Reiner passed five years before his son, Rob, was murdered in his home. Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic
“For months, months, months, Mel came by the house,” Reiner says, recalling how Brooks continued the elderly comedians’ ritual of watching TV and eating dinner together every night.
“He was that close to my dad that he wanted to be close to him, even when my dad was gone,” Reiner adds.
On December 14, Rob Reiner and his wife, Michelle, were found dead in their home. The couple’s son, Nick, 36, has been charged with their double murder. He is set to appear for an arraignment hearing on February 23.
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