Carl and Rob: Like Father, Like Son

When we think about talented show business families, we think the Barrymoores, the Redgraves, the Douglases, or even the Cusacks. One other name that would fit that bill would be the Reiners. Like all show business families, the Reiners have many generations of talent. Carl and Rob, in particular, both have exceptional skills in telling funny stories, though they also have other talented people in their families and in my own personal view, their range of talent hasn’t been given all the attention it deserves, so I thought we could explore that.

Carl Reiner was born in the Bronx, New York City on March 20th, 1922. He started on Broadway in his early 20s, performing in musicals like Inside U.S.A. and Call Me Mister, but ultimately worked his way up to television as one of the regular performers on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows (1950-1954). (Prior to his career as an entertainer, at 21 years old, Reiner married Estelle Lebost, who was eight years his senior.) Five years after “Your Show of Shows,” he developed a television pilot titled Head of the Family which was to be sit-com that parodied his real life with himself in the lead role of Rob Petrie. But CBS, who was to distribute it, disliked him in the leading role and suggested that he find someone else to play himself. Reiner then discovered Dick Van Dyke, and cast him along with Mary Tyler Moore as Laura, and Head of the Family was renamed The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966). Reiner cast himself as Rob, and his writing buddies, Buddy and Sally’s prima donna of a boss, Alan Brady on “Dick Van Dyke.” 

During and after “Dick Van Dyke,” aired on television, Carl Reiner also wrote and starred in the Doris Day/James Garner film The Thrill of It All (1963), and began a career in directing with the romantic comedy Enter Laughing (1967) based roughly on an autobiographical play that he wrote for Broadway in ’63. He also starred in the war comedy, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! (1966). Reiner also directed Steve Martin in four movies, The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), The Man with Two Brains (1983), and All of Me (1984), the middle two of which he also wrote with Martin. Reiner is also an accomplished author having written 16 books. He announced his 17th book, Too Busy to Die in 2017. 

Rob Reiner was born on March 6th, 1947 in New York City, New York. Rob made his acting debut in “Enter Laughing,” though the role that made him a household name was that of Michael “Meathead” Stivic in the sit-com All in the Family (1971-1978). Though he was talented as an actor, Rob Reiner aspired to follow in his father’s footsteps to be a director, and he became a true revolutionary of a director when he directed the very first film ever that defined the genre known as the mock-documentary or “mockumentary,” when me made This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. He followed that film with The Sure Thing (1985) and then the cult classic The Princess Bride (1987) and When Harry Met Sally (1989). Although his career as a director skyrocketed throughout the ‘80s, he never completely went away from appearing in front of the camera, alongside good friend Billy Crystal in Danny Devito’s Throw Momma From the Train (1987) and in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) which was written and directed by Nora Ephron (who also wrote “When Harry Met Sally.”) He achieved the highest honor of his career when A Few Good Men (1992), a film that he directed and co-produced was nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. 

Both “Princess Bride,” and “When Harry Met Sally” were special projects for Reiner because “Bride,” was based on his all-time favorite book and he was more eager to make it than any of his other movies. “When Harry Met Sally,” was also special because he identified with the character of Harry Burns in the sense of what it was like to be a bachelor after his divorce from Penny Marshall. He cast both his mother, Estelle, and his adopted daughter from his marriage to Marshall, Tracy Reiner, in small roles in “When Harry Met Sally.” Estelle is the woman in the Katz Deli scene where Meg Ryan “fakes it” and the woman next to her says “I’ll have what she’s having,” and Tracy plays the woman who is dating Harry in the “Pictionary.” Ironically, while making the film, Rob Reiner met his second wife, Michele Singer, which inspired he and Nora Ephron to have Harry and Sally get together by the end of the movie. He and Singer were married on May 19th, 1989, two months before “When Harry Met Sally,” was released to theaters.

The Reiners have a special legacy of humor in the entertainment industry. No doubt film and television audiences will continue to benefit from it.   

Women Directors: Great Work for a Long Time

Women have been directing films for nearly as long as men have, but unfortunately they haven’t always received all the credit they deserve for their talent and achievements. Alice Guy-Blache became the first female director ever in the history of film when she directed the French short Les demoilisseurs in 1896. Dorothy Arzner later became the first female director in Hollywood when she directed the drama Fashions for Women in 1927. Before Vincente Minnelli’s movie-musical version of Lerner and Lowe’s Gigi in 1958, there was a French version of that film, produced nine years earlier, directed by a woman named Jacqueline Audry. Let’s look at some of the finest female directors and the work that proves their skills as exceptional as their male counterparts. 

1. Penny Marshall made her directorial debut with an episode of the show Working Stiffs (1979) and various episodes of her own sit-com Laverne & Shirley (1976-1983), which was produced by her brother, Garry, her directing mentor. Then she moved to movies, directing Whoopi Goldberg in Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986) and Tom Hanks in Big (1988) which earned Hanks his first Academy Award Nomination for Best Actor and made Marshall the first female director to make a movie that grossed over $100 million dollars. Marshall and Hanks reunited on the film A League of Their Own (1992) which also made over $100 million. Her last theatrical film as director was Riding in Cars with Boys (2001) with Drew Barrymoore, though she continued to direct for television with episodes of According to Jim (2001-2009) and the television movie Women Without Men (2010). She also directed a documentary called Rodman (2019) about NBA Hall of Famer Denis Rodman before her unfortunate death on December 17th, 2018.      
2. Nancy Meyers co-wrote the screenplay for Private Benjamin (1980) with Harvey Miller and her then-husband Charles Shyer. The trio received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Screenplay as a result. She and Shyer officially married in ’80 and continued writing and producing in films such as Baby Boom (1987), and Touchstone’s remakes of Father of the Bride (1991) and Father of the Bride part 2 (1995), all of which starred Diane Keaton, with Shyer directing. Meyers, was also interested in directing, but remained focus on raising her family, until she received the offer by Walt Disney Pictures to direct the remake of The Parent Trap, released in 1998. Meyers and Shyer unfortunately divorced in 1999, but she continued to direct exceptional romantic comedies, including Something’s Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), and The Intern (2015). Most recently, she produced Home Again (2017) with Reese Witherspoon, and was directed by her daughter, Hallie Meyers-Shyer.     
3. Nora Ephron, before becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, began her career as a newspaper reporter at The New York Post. While there Ephron did a re-write for the script of All the President’s Men (1976) with her then-husband, Carl Bernstein, (who Dustin Hoffman plays in the movie). Although her script was not used, her efforts caught the attention of Paramount, who offered the chance to write the television movie Perfect Gentlemen (1978). This ultimately led to Nora Ephron's opportunity to write the screenplay for Silkwood (1983) starring Meryl Streep and it earned an Oscar Nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The same year as “Silkwood,” she wrote a novel called Heartburn which was based on the trauma she experienced while pregnant with her second child, only to discover that her husband was having an affair with their mutual friend. Heartburn was eventually made into a movie in 1986, which again starred Meryl Streep along with Jack Nicholson. Ephron wrote When Harry Met Sally in 1989 earning another Best Screenplay Oscar Nod and she worked her way up to directing in This Is My Life (1992). Next, she directed Sleepless In Seattle (1993) which reunited her with “When Harry Met Sally,” star Meg Ryan and was her first pairing with Tom Hanks. Ephron, Hanks and Ryan teamed up five years later, in 1998, for You’ve Got Mail. Her last film to write and direct was Julie & Julia in 2009, which was her third reunion with Meryl Streep. Before her sad death on June 26th, 2012, she wrote a Broadway play called Lucky Guy which reunited her for the third time with Tom Hanks and premiered after her death at the Broadhurst Theater on April 1st, 2013.      
4. Kathryn Bigelow became the very first female director ever to win a Best Director Oscar as well as the Best Picture Oscar when she produced and directed The Hurt Locker in 2009. The other four director nominees were men that year, one of whom ironically, was her former husband, James Cameron who was nominated that year for the blockbuster smash hit, Avatar. Bigelow originally was a painting student at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts, though she entered the film program at Columbia University, where she earned her Masters and while there directed her first film which was a short called The Set-Up in 1978. She made her official directorial debut three years later in 1981, co-directing The Loveless with Monty Montgomery which catapulted Willem Dafoe to stardom. She married James Cameron in 1989, though they divorced only two years later in 1991. Despite their divorce, they collaborated together on the Crime Drama Strange Days (1995) starring Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett. Cameron wrote and produced the film while Bigelow directed. Bigelow also directed The Weight of Water in 2000 and K-19: The Widowmaker in 2002. Three years after her two Oscar wins for “Hurt Locker,” she directed Zero Dark Thirty in 2012, which earned another Oscar nod for Best Picture.

Pixar Animation Studios have produced a total 20 feature length films and nearly 40 shorts that have been collaborative efforts with Walt Disney Studios. And they usually are directed by men. But in 2012, Brenda Chapman co-wrote and co-directed Brave with Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film, making Chapman the first female director ever to win an Oscar for directing an animated film. And this past year, Domee Shi wrote and directed the Short film Bao (2018) which played in theaters in front of Incredibles 2 (2018). In addition to being a story writer on several beloved Disney classics (i.e. Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996),) Brenda Chapman also co-directed The Prince of Egypt (1998) for Dreamworks with Simon Wells and Steve Hickner. Domee Shi was a story artist on The Good Dinosaur (2015), Inside Out (2015), and “Incredibles 2,” before she worked her way up to directing “Bao,” and she is currently scheduled to direct an untitled Pixar film to be released in 2022. 

Thankfully, there are many fantastic female directors working today, and not enough time to make this an exhaustive discussion of all of them. Greta Gurwig (Lady Bird), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), Dee Rees (Mudbound) and Ava Duvernay (Selma) all come to mind…no doubt movie fans everywhere are benefitting from their continued contributions.        

1961: The Beginning of the End

The 1960s was an incredible decade in our nation’s history, especially in the year 1961. On January 20th of that year John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was sworn in as President of the United States of America. On April 23rd of ’61, Judy Garland performed her legendary “comeback” concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and on August 5th the theme park Six Flags Over Texas officially opened in Arlington, TX. The 1960s was also the decade that all movie studios had to modernize their styles of filming because the “counterculture” revolution began. Cultural and political perspectives around the globe were beginning to change the way audiences viewed movies and they demanded more from their films. So, Walt Disney made his contribution to the ‘60s by producing films that experimented with new technology. 1961 is a year full of special films, along with some other notable accomplishments. 

On January 25th, 1961, Walt Disney produced 101 Dalmatians. The film was a major ordeal at the studio because it was their first animated feature since Sleeping Beauty (1959), which unfortunately had been a flop two years earlier. It was also their first animated feature to be completely produced using “Xerox photography” instead of their usual “Ink and Paint photography” which was used on every animated film prior to “Dalmatians.” Walt’s long-term friend and business partner, Ub Iwerks was the inventor of the “Xerox,” process and in inventing it, he made it possible for drawings to be applied to Xerox cells as opposed to a piece of paper. He actually first applied it to the dragon fight sequence in “Sleeping Beauty.” “Dalmatians,” was a huge hit for Disney, thanks to the new technology. It received a great deal of critical acclaim, some of whom said it was the closest to a real “Disney” film in years. They had never seen that many animated characters…just think about all those spots.  

In ’61, Disney also released both The Absent-Minded Professor and The Parent Trap. Like “Dalmatians,” both films were the studios first uses of a new technology. Petro Vlahos, who is credited with having invented the sodium vapor process (live actors performing on a set piece surrounded by lights combined with background footage filmed at a completely different time). Vlahos had originally invented it for Ben-Hur (1959), but came to Disney in the ‘60s where he recreated his process. The sodium vapor process was first applied to “The Absent-Minded Professor.” Robert E. Mattey and Eustace Lycett also added miniatures and wire-supported mockups to Vlahos’s work and the film was nominated for a Best Special Effects Oscar as a result. “Parent Trap,” combined the sodium vapor process with split-screen technology, which is what created the “twins” illusion even though the twins were played by one actress, Hayley Mills. Disney continued use of the “sodium vapor process” in Mary Poppins (1964), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and various other films during the 1970s and ‘80s.

’61 was also the year that Walt Disney had the Disneyland Monorail System extend to the Disneyland Hotel. It was also the year in which he co-founded the California Institute for the Arts, or CalArts for short. CalArts was established as the first degree-granting institution of higher learning in the United States for students of visual and performing arts. Several people who attended later became employees of the Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios. Famous alumni include Tim Burton, Brad Bird (writer/director of The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007)), and Glen Keane (supervising animator of Ariel in The Little Mermaid (1989) and the Beast in Beauty and the Beast (1991)). Bird and Keane were both mentored by Walt Disney’s Nine Old Men.

Walt Disney achieved many other “firsts” until the very end of his life, which sadly would only be five years later, in 1966, at 65 years of age. But 1961 was a unique year for the studios, and helped set the stage for more to come.