{"id":350164,"date":"2025-12-15T13:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350164\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T13:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:50:07","slug":"from-seinfeld-to-shawshank-rob-reiner-changed-hollywood-for-ever-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/350164\/","title":{"rendered":"From Seinfeld to Shawshank, Rob Reiner changed Hollywood for ever | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a film-maker, Rob Reiner<\/a> championed humour, civility and intelligence \u2013 qualities you suppose would be out of step with the Hollywood of the 1980s where he made his name, and in the 1990s where he scored a series of extraordinary, far-reaching successes. Reiner had a family interest in the workings of on-screen comedy: his father Carl had played a key role on Sid Caesar\u2019s TV shows, which themselves were revolutionary, and helped birth a new generation of screen comics by directing Steve Martin\u2019s film debut The Jerk. Rob had become a household name as Meathead, the liberal foil to Carroll O\u2019Connor\u2019s bigoted Archie Bunker in 70s sitcom All in the Family (the equivalent to Mike Rawlins v Warren Mitchell in the British original, Till Death Us Do Part). But it was as a director and producer that he really made his impact felt.<\/p>\n

In 1984, Reiner released This Is Spinal Tap<\/a>, a \u201cmockumentary\u201d about a fictitious heavy metal band from the UK that rewrote the rules on what comedy could do. It sent up rock\u2019n\u2019roll behaviour and codified its cliches (with Reiner himself doing a hilarious parody of Martin Scorsese\u2019s hosting role in The Last Waltz) and gave us zingers that haven\u2019t lost their comedy power more than 30 years on: \u201cThe numbers all go to 11\u201d, \u201cit\u2019s such a fine line between stupid, and er \u2026 clever.\u201d Its deployment of improvised comedy was revolutionary for a Hollywood feature, and while Reiner wasn\u2019t the first to use the fake-documentary techniques for comedic purposes (that goes back at least to Woody Allen\u2019s Take the Money and Run), it hugely popularised the mockumentary style; subsequent efforts include Bob Roberts, Fear of a Black Hat, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. All these owe Tap a huge debt \u2013 as well as the microgenre of star Christopher Guest\u2019s improv-mockumentaries: Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. Almost incidentally, Spinal Tap became a sort-of-real band, with tours, record releases and a follow-up feature (Spinal Tap II: The End Continues<\/a>), in which the presence of music industry titans Paul McCartney and Elton John demonstrated the high regard in which the original was held.<\/p>\n

Rob Reiner directing When Harry Met Sally in 1989. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Reiner\u2019s next film, The Sure Thing, was not perhaps as pioneering: a teen movie starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga, it was released a month after John Hughes\u2019s The Breakfast Club in 1985, and somewhat overshadowed by it in public affection. But Reiner followed it up in 1986 with a very different type of teen movie: Stand by Me<\/a>, adapted from Stephen King\u2019s novella The Body. By no means the first adaptation of King\u2019s work \u2013 Carrie had been a huge hit a decade earlier, with The Shining, The Dead Zone and Christine solidifying King\u2019s reputation as \u201cKing of Horror\u201d \u2013 but it alerted the wider culture to the author\u2019s more literary output. The Body suited Reiner\u2019s more romantic, nostalgic imagination, and Stand By Me became a film as inserted in the popular mindset as Tap, as well as playing a part in the 80s revival of 60s R&B by using the Ben E King song on its soundtrack \u2013 pushing it back into the Top 10 and prompting its use in a Levi\u2019s commercial<\/a>. Stand By Me also showed Reiner had the chops for drama as well as comedy \u2013 not for nothing did he name his production company Castle Rock, after the fictitious small town that King invented for much of his work (and itself named after the fort in Lord of the Flies).<\/p>\n

Next came Reiner\u2019s third 80s masterwork, The Princess Bride, adapted from William Goldman\u2019s novel; again, it wasn\u2019t the first in the 1980s \u201cstorybook\u201d cycle (The NeverEnding Story came out in 1984), but its brilliant melding of teen romance and comedic cliche-puncturing made it another enormously influential film, particularly in its sympathetic and articulate portrayal of its female protagonist Buttercup, played by Robin Wright. Having seemingly perfected the teen romance, Reiner then went on to release in 1989 one of his most triumphant works: When Harry Met Sally<\/a>, with a script by Nora Ephron. Again, Reiner and Ephron can\u2019t really be said to have invented the modern romcom (arguably Allen got there first with Annie Hall), but they recalibrated it for a new generation \u2013 particularly women, for whom the advent of notional workplace equality in the 1980s was beginning to throw up major life-goal dilemmas. With character weight and screen time distributed equally between leads Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan (as well as creating the epochal fake-orgasm sequence), Reiner and Ephron reinvigorated a classic template and made it newly relevant.<\/p>\n

Rob Reiner (left) and Christopher Guest on the set of This Is Spinal Tap in 1984. Photograph: Moviestore Collection Ltd\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Perhaps inevitably, Reiner\u2019s directing career couldn\u2019t quite live up to those four films in bending popular culture its way, though he did summon up one of Tinseltown\u2019s biggest fears \u2013 stalkers \u2013 for another King adaptation, Misery<\/a>, and gave us an early sighting of Aaron Sorkin by directing two films from Sorkin scripts: A Few Good Men and The American President. (The latter led directly to Sorkin\u2019s hit TV series The West Wing, though Reiner wasn\u2019t involved.) It was as a producer and studio executive of Castle Rock that he would make an even bigger impact. In 1989, the company produced a little-regarded pilot called The Seinfeld Chronicles, which tested so badly even they thought it was doomed to fail. As history records, Seinfeld became one of the most successful TV shows of all time, notching huge ratings, critical superlatives and ushering in the golden age of TV by showing that the medium could produce sophisticated, grownup entertainment for a mainstream market.<\/p>\n

As a producer, Castle Rock reached new heights once again courtesy of King: two non-horror prison movies, The Shawshank Redemption<\/a> and The Green Mile, released in 1994 and 1999 respectively, both became major cult hits, with Shawshank regularly topping audience polls<\/a> as the greatest film ever made. As befitted Reiner\u2019s status as a liberal activist, Castle Rock also brought John Sayles\u2019 politically inflected work into the mainstream with Lone Star and produced George Clooney\u2019s cover-up thriller Michael Clayton; it also gave Larry David his first post-Seinfeld outing with the feature film Sour Grapes, and underwrote Richard Linklater\u2019s endlessly influential Before series of romcoms featuring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.<\/p>\n

Reiner\u2019s influence on Hollywood wasn\u2019t about detonations and superpowers, but about ideas and empathy and wit, and was all the more impressive because of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a film-maker, Rob Reiner championed humour, civility and intelligence \u2013 qualities you suppose would be out of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":350165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-350164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/350165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}