Before I was an MTV kid, I was a Nickelodeon kid. And like Cartoon Network turns into Adult Swim like a Pumpkin, Nick would become Nick at Nite. I loved Lucy, but I loved Archie Bunker. I knew he was always wrong. But I also new Meathead wasn’t always right. Years before Maron would argue that progressives bullied people into fascism, Mike’s delivery, arrogance, or lack of life experience would often undermine his position. But he was always hilarious, and often right.
I also loved The Dick Van Dyke Show. My stepdad clued me in: much like Larry David would do years later with Seinfeld, drawing heavily from his own life and the people around him (he dated Elaine, he lived next to Kramer, he was George), creator Carl Reiner essentially gave Dick Van Dyke his experiences as a TV writer. Carl was Dick’s character Rob, essentially. Carl also directed The Jerk and was Meathead’s dad. It blew my mind.
My stepdad always called him Meathead. Never Rob Reiner. Probably still does.
But not only that. Meathead was a director, too.
Stand By Me was the first meaningful film I ever saw that was meaningful to me. It still means everything to me.
I would put up Reiner’s initial run against most’s: This Is Spinal Tap, The Sure Thing, Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…, Misery, and A Few Good Men. He’d name his company after the fictional town Stand By Me takes place, Castle Rock. A town Stephen King, who wrote the novella from which the film takes place, would write about often. King, maybe not my favorite writer (Vonnegut, Salinger), but the one I’ve read more pages from than anyone, and who wrote about Reiner and Stand By Me this week:
“I was surprised by how deeply affected I was by its 89 minutes… Those kids were my friends. We never walked down a railroad track to see a dead body, but we got up to other stuff. The story was about my reality as I had lived it on the dirt roads of southern Maine. There really was a junkyard dog, although his name wasn’t Chopper. There really was a kid who went swimming and came out covered with leeches in surprising areas, but it wasn’t Gordie Lachance; it was me.
And there really was a kid who was accused of stealing milk money, although his name wasn’t Chris Chambers. He did borrow — we won’t call it stealing — his mom’s Bel Air. With me riding shotgun, he drove it 90 miles per hour down Route 9 in our backcountry hometown. We were 11.
What I’m saying is that in Rob’s hands, it all rang true. The funny parts were really funny… and the dramatic parts hit me where I lived, or where I did live back in the days when John F. Kennedy was president and gas was a quarter a gallon… when I watch Chris Chambers say to the weeping Gordie Lachance: ‘You’re gonna be a great writer someday.’ That weeping boy was me. It was Rob Reiner who put it on the screen.”
I listened to a podcast this morning that begged the question re: The Princess Bride. How many movies are both beloved by seven-year-olds and seventy-year-olds?
And to who else can say they saved the aforementioned Seinfeld? There is also an argument to be made that The Wonder Years doesn’t exist without Stand By Me.
When we were shooting The Dinner Parting, one of our actresses, Jackie, got a call to play a small part in Hollywood, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series. She’d be in a scene opposite Rob Reiner.
There was only one hitch: she would have to fly back to Los Angeles and return in a single day. We made it work. How could we not? It was good for her career, possibly good for us, and she would be working with Rob fucking Reiner.
We shot around Jackie’s absence the next day, quietly terrified her return flight would be canceled . Which, frankly, would have blown up our already tight production schedule. After we wrapped, I gave Taylor Nichols a ride back to his Airbnb. We talked about his work with Reiner, an admittedly small but one of the reasons I’d wanted Nichols in the film. I knew we made the right call letting Jackie go, even if it almost gave me a heart attack and I’d very briefly began to loathe a man I’d so admired.
The fact that she made it back later that night helped.
I never even came close to meeting Rob Reiner. But growing up, I would have never guessed he would have been two co-worker’s co-worker, a great anecdote or a scheduling problem.
In my head, the Stand By Me/Wonder Years narrator says:
If you’re lucky, the shows and movies that raised you turn into reference points you carry into your own work. And somewhere between Nick at Nite and a redeye from Los Angeles, you realize the throughline isn’t just nostalgia. It’s inspiration, craft, generosity, and the quiet hope that something you make might someday mean as much to someone else as those shows meant to you.
