Rob Reiner, reflecting on his late father Carl’s 2024 autobiography I Remember Me and daily dinners with Mel Brooks, traces comedy’s golden age to mid-century writers’ rooms—Woody Allen, Neil Simon—and The Dick Van Dyke Show. He praises All in the Family’s balanced liberal-conservative debates, drawing 30–45 million viewers, but slams modern media for profit-driven misinformation. Reiner also discusses his activism post-2008’s Proposition 8 and a Wolf of Wall Street role tied to Jordan Belford’s 1990s fraud conviction, framing legacy as a clash between art’s integrity and today’s fragmented, sensationalized culture. [Automatically generated summary]
I believe when they get in charge, we're going to really make great strides.
I just believe in them, and I'm so glad I have the ability to be president of a university at this moment.
And I get to share friendships with them, and I get to be with them, and I get to try to answer their probing questions and all the rest of it, and to feel their energy, their talent, and above all, their desire to give back.
They're just people with good values.
And so that makes me believe in the future of America.
Another notable person to pass away in 2025 was filmmaker Rob Reiner.
Rob Reiner is known for his long career in film and television, spanning several decades, including movie classics, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and the TV series, All in the Family, among others.
Up next, Rob Reiner, in his own words, from a 2013 conversation hosted by the Commonwealth Club of California.
Here, he talks about his career in Hollywood and political activism on a variety of social issues.
Good afternoon, and welcome to today's meeting of the Commonwealth Club of California, the place where you are in the know.
You can find the Commonwealth Club on the internet at CommonwealthClub.org.
I'm Dan Ashley, news anchor for ABC7 Television in San Francisco and a member of the Commonwealth Club Board of Directors and your moderator for today's program.
It is now my pleasure to introduce our distinguished speaker today, Rob Reiner.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
From his starring role as Meathead on the popular 1970s sitcom.
On that wonderful program, All in the Family, to his blockbuster films, and he has so many.
Boy, when you look at his list of films, it's really remarkable.
The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, a Few Good Men, just to name a handful, there are many more.
Reiner has been entertaining audiences for decades with his singular humor and artistic vision.
As a director, he's worked with A-list actors, Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, Kathy Bates, as well as celebrated writers Nora Efren and Aaron Sorkin.
Son of comedic genius Carl Reiner, he grew up in a political family where civil rights were a frequent topic around the kitchen table.
As such, he has become not only a Hollywood legend, but a political activist as well.
After November 4th, 2008, when California passed a constitutional amendment banning marriage for gay and lesbian couples, Rob Reiner co-founded the American Foundation for Equal Rights as a way to challenge Proposition 8 in the courts.
In light of the Supreme Court's recent decision to hear challenges to both Prop 8 and DOMA this year, we are delighted to have Mr. Reiner here with us today to discuss his views on the future of marriage equality and his incredible contributions to the entertainment industry.
First of all, what I'd like to do is talk a little bit about the entertainment industry and your background, and then we'll move into your social activity.
I mean, they've known each other, you know, 60 years since the show shows.
And I met him when I was four years old.
I met Mel Brooks when I was four years old.
We had a little place in Fire Island, which is a little island off the coast of Long Island.
And my dad told me, and my sister, who was two at the time, there was going to be a man who was going to, we were going to go to bed, and there was going to be a man who was going to be staying over.
So if we woke up in the morning and we found a man, a strange man, just know that there's a friend of ours, this man is going to be sleeping.
And so at five o'clock in the morning, this is the introduction that Mel Brooks has to us.
There's two kids standing, and he's in this little window seat where he's sleeping.
And I'm turning to my sister, and I go, is that the man?
She says, is that the man?
Is that the man?
I said, yeah, that's the man.
That's the man.
That man is the man.
And so she goes and she takes his eyes like this.
She says, that's the man?
Yeah, I said, that's the man.
So that's all.
So the Mel Brooks, was the man, and he's still the man.
Yeah.
unidentified
Yeah.
What a wonderful upbringing to be around these characters.
Well, I didn't know I wanted to be in the entertainment business, but my dad tells this story, and I don't remember it, but he tells it.
I was eight years old, and I went up to him and I said, Dad, I want to change my name.
And he went, oh, he felt so bad because he thought, oh my God, this poor kid, you know, he has to live up to, you know, Carl Reiner and the fame and all the success.
And, you know, this poor kid.
And he says to me, what do you want to change your name to?
And I said, Carl.
And so I obviously wanted to be like him.
I didn't think about show business, but I wanted to be like him.
I remember one time going down to the show of shows and there was the writer's room.
And, you know, we're talking about Neil Simon and Woody Allen and Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbar, some of the most brilliant writers, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, and my dad and everybody.
And I remember as like five or six years old sitting waiting for him to come out of the writer's room and all I could remember was screaming crazy, screaming at each other, you know, because they were fighting for their jokes or whatever.
And I said, that's comedy?
They're making comedy?
Sounds like they're killing each other in there.
But some of the funniest stuff in the world came out.
And if you think about it, the second half of the 20th century, really you can trace back to anything you ever laughed at, really came out of that room because it's all of Woody Allen's work, all of Neil Simon's work.
Joe Stein, who wrote Fiddler on the Roof and Entitling, Larry Gelbot, who wrote MASH and Tootsie and Aaron Rubin, who created the Andy Griffith show and Gomer Pyle, my dad, and Mel Brooks, you know.
So everything, you know, basically the second half of the 20th century comedy was all coming out.
And Mike Stewart, who wrote Hello Dolly, I mean, they were incredible writers.
unidentified
When you think about it, when you put it like that, it's really actually remarkable.
It was a magic time with a very unique group of people creating this media.
Yes, and they called it the golden age of television because it was.
Television was a brand new medium, and you had to have some money to own a television set, quite frankly.
So the fair was more highbrow.
It was an extension of theater.
It was an extension of reviews and satire and a very upscale type of theater that was put on television.
You had Lux Video Theater, the Playhouse 90.
And then television became a mass media, and you saw all kinds of dumbing down of things.
I contest that right now we're in our second golden age of television because of, you know, the cable TV and you're looking at, you know, madmen and breaking bad and homeland and brilliant shows that are done with great writing, great acting, and it's almost like the second golden age of television right now.
unidentified
I tell people a lot who ask me about television that, yes, there is a lot of junk on television now, but there's also more quality on television than there's probably ever been.
And I think that if you look at, you know, AMC and HBO and Netflix, I mean, all of these Apple TV, all these different ways of accessing these niche-type shows, they are really smart shows.
I mean, really, really smart.
Nothing that would have been put on the networks.
I mean, we were lucky in that we got All in the Family on, which was a fairly elevated type of show at the time that it was on, because when we came on the air, you had the Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle, Mayberry Arf, all of the rural type shows, and all of a sudden we had this urban comedy that dealt with issues that came on.
So that was a rare thing at that time.
But now you see all kinds of really good television on.
unidentified
Yeah, no question.
Let's talk about All in the Family for a moment before we move on.
Do you find people then or even now sometimes it was progressive for the time?
Obviously, did people understand that it wasn't celebrating bigotry, it was ridiculing?
We basically shone a light on the ignorance of a bigot, and that's what we did.
But it was, you know, we didn't just, you know, go outside the box or go to the edge of the envelope.
We destroyed the envelope, we broke the box, everything.
I mean, CBS had a disclaimer on before we came on, which essentially said, we don't have anything to do with this show.
You want to watch it, it's up to you because we don't know what the heck this is.
And despite that, we were able to succeed.
And I think in large part, because aside from the fact that it was funny and we dealt with issues, there were real people that people could identify.
They saw themselves.
They either saw themselves in Archie or they saw themselves in Mike.
We presented two points of view.
Norman Lear talked about how growing up, his favorite play was Major Barber by George Bernard Shaw.
George Bernard Shaw was a liberal, but if you didn't know he was a liberal and you went to see that play, both the Hawk point of view and the Dove point of view were presented with equal eloquence, with equal intelligence, and then was let up to the audience to make their minds up as to what they believed.
That was Norman's feeling.
Let's just throw this out there and let's get a dialogue started.
And at the time, there was no VCRs, there was no DVR, no TiVo, nothing.
So it really did promote a dialogue.
If you wanted to watch the show, you had to watch it when it was on.
That meant that you were having a shared experience with everybody else who was watching it at that time.
And I've made this point before.
We at the time were a country of about 200 million people.
And 200 million, of the 200 million people, anywhere between 30 and 45 million people at one time were watching that show.
Now we're in a country of over 300 million.
And if you have a show that does 10, 15 million viewers, that's a major hit right now.
So, and you're not watching it at the same time as everybody else because you've got it on your DVR or your TiVo and you're, you know, so you're not.
But Saturday night, if you watch the show, that meant Monday, people were talking about whatever it is we talked about.
And that shared experience, I think, was a very good thing for our country.
unidentified
It's hard to cut through the noise now as a programmer.
And I've often said that I feel with the internet, with 24-hour day cable news service, we have, I think, the potential of being less informed than being more informed.
Because when TV became a, when TV News became a profit center, it changed everything.
I mean, there was a big deal when Walter Cronkite was on CBS and the broadcast went from 15 minutes to a half hour.
That was a big deal.
It was like, oh my God, a half an hour?
That meant that CBS was throwing away a half hour of revenue.
Because news outlets were a lost leader.
You didn't make money on news.
And all they did was report the news.
There was no commentary.
There was no, you know, you had that for your newspapers.
You can get your op-eds from newspapers.
Then 60 Minutes came along, which is a brilliant show.
It's a great show, but they started making money.
And all of a sudden, it was in the 19 late 60s, early 70s, they realized, uh-oh, we can make money off the news.
And then you had big corporations taking over the TV outlets and news outlets, and it all became about profit center and bottom line.
And it, I think, has made us less informed.
I really believe that.
It's hard to find real accurate reporting.
I mean, how many people read the New York Times?
And a lot of people argue that that isn't, certainly the people at Fox would argue that's not, they're biased, you know, or something like that.
But, you know, that's another.
unidentified
That sounds like some of my talk that I've got to talk about.
I always found it odd that, I mean, I walk, like I said, I made the joke, you know, you're the first, you know, that's the first person to call me meathead today.
I get called that virtually every day, even now, and I don't even look like anything that I look like on television.
My kids watch the show and they said, Dad, it sounds like you, but it doesn't look like you, you know.
But I get called that all the time.
And I used to find, it strike me funny that the guy who was espousing my point of view, who was clearly, whether or not you agreed with him or not, on his liberal point of view, he was probably more schooled and intelligent than Archie, was being called the meathead.