As a lifelong baseball fan and Dodgers fanatic, Rob Reiner would appreciate the following statistic more than anyone:
He started his career going seven for seven.
In his first seven at-bats, he had seven hits. No, not just blows, achievements. Consider the following list:
It’s a lumbar puncture
The sure thing
Stay close to me
The Princess Bride (The damn Princess Bride!!!!!
Misery
When Harry Met Sally
Some good men
Seven for seven. Movies that people loved. Movies that people were talking about. Not a self-indulgence setting, just mass popcorn entertainment with intelligence, depth, style and pathos. Seven for seven. An unprecedented record that no director in HISTORY can match. Not John Ford. Not Billy Wilder or William Wyler. Not Hitchcock. And no directors are working today either. NO ONE EVER hit home runs in their first seven movies. But Rob did it. It was an amazing race.
Also, if you sit still for a second, you’ll find that you can quote lines from each of them. Rob’s films weren’t just good, they were memorable. Indelible.
From “As You Want” to “You Can’t Handle the Truth” to Meg Ryan cumming in a grocery store to Kathy Bates obstructing James Caan, Rob has made our job infinitely easier by making people love movies more. I am indebted to him. We all are. He kept his promises to our audience, and they, in turn, trusted us by extension.
I had the privilege of working with him once, rewriting an idea he had started while stationed on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1969(!). Rob didn’t give up easily.
Like democracy. Or defend the Constitution. Or improve public education. All tough fights. He never backed down from any of them, because Rob could handle the truth.
Now he’s gone. I have no doubt that today he is in heaven, sitting on the third base line in a beautiful ballpark with William Goldman, Norman Lear and all the other members of the Hall of Fame, a pantheon to which he greatly belongs. And they probably talk about history, comedy, drama and America. But if the subject of baseball comes up, all these greats will suddenly shut up.
There’s not much you can say when you’re in the presence of a guy who went seven out of seven.
