Remembering Rob Reiner, a Lovable Hollywood Hitmaker

The director and actor, who was found dead Sunday at age 78, got his start in TV comedy

When Rob Reiner was a little boy, he told his mother he wanted to change his name. Caught off guard, Estelle asked him what he wanted to change it to. “Carl,” he said.

Rob Reiner onstage at a screening of ‘Misery’ earlier this year.

If anything, Rob Reiner—who died on Sunday alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, in an apparent homicide—even surpassed the accomplishments of his famous dad, a beloved actor, writer and director of such films as “The Jerk” who died five years ago at age 98. Sharing his name with one of his father’s most famed creations—Rob Petrie, the central character in a sitcom based on Carl Reiner’s life called “The Dick Van Dyke Show”— the younger Mr. Reiner was born in 1947 and grew up in a household where the funniest people in the world were forever turning up: Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Sid Caesar and other colleagues his father had worked with on “Your Show of Shows.” But his talent wasn’t obvious to everyone. Mr. Reiner later recalled that Norman Lear was the first grownup to say he was funny, when he was around 7 or 8. His dad didn’t believe it. This kid? He was a brooder. He was gloomy. In one of the most successful sitcoms of all time Rob Reiner essentially played the young Lear, whose father used to call him “Meathead.”

‘All In The Family’ cast members: Mr. Reiner, Sally Struthers, Jean Stapleton and Carroll O’Connor.

It proved to be a nickname hard to shake for Mr. Reiner. “I could win the Nobel Prize and they’d write ‘Meathead wins the Nobel Prize.’ I’ll never get past that,” he would say. His 1971 to 1979 role on Lear’s seminal sitcom “All in the Family” as Archie Bunker’s live-in son-in-law, Michael Stivic—a shaggy-haired, outspoken liberal—was meant to signify to the audience every pot-smoking, draft-dodging, flag-burning, college-poisoned hippie. And though Mike, as the show’s conscience, tended to make entirely reasonable arguments, it was Archie’s insulting dismissals as he called him “Meathead” that earned the laughs.

In the 1970s, there was a well-guarded barrier between TV and movies that only a few artists managed to cross; after his TV career it took years for Mr. Reiner to find backing for a crazy idea for a movie. He found himself returning to Lear, and Avco Embassy Pictures, to deliver an impassioned speech about why he thought “This Is Spinal Tap” would work. Mr. Reiner’s directorial debut was not a big success at the time but proved a major influence on the direction of comedy, away from set jokes and toward a more improvisational eccentricity where the audience would decide for itself when to laugh. It also began one of the most phenomenal runs any director has ever had, one movie after another establishing itself as a warmly remembered exemplar of its kind: “The Sure Thing” (1985); “Stand by Me” (1986), which Lear put up several million dollars to fund; “The Princess Bride” (1987); “When Harry Met Sally. . . ” (1989); “Misery” (1990); and his most notable foray into serious drama, the film version of Aaron Sorkin’s play “A Few Good Men” (1992).

That Mr. Reiner didn’t receive an Oscar nomination for directing any of these efforts, though he did get one for producing “A Few Good Men,” was perhaps partly due to the lingering stigma of his background as a TV actor. But more likely it was attributable to what you might call his TV style as a director, which is no style at all. Mr. Reiner never engaged in the kind of flashy cutting, unusual camera movements or dazzling set pieces that characterized, say, the work of Martin Scorsese, whom he mocked as “Marty DiBergi” in “Spinal Tap.” (“Initially, Marty got mad, but over the years he’s come to love it,” Mr. Reiner later said.) As if to prove there were no hard feelings, Mr. Scorsese cast Mr. Reiner as the dad of Jordan Belfort in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Like his father, Mr. Reiner started out as a writer (his early work included a stint on one of the first alternative comedy programs, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” where he was teamed with another untested youngster, Steve Martin, who would later star in four films directed by Carl Reiner). His directorial method was to make the words work rather than to dazzle the audience with images; putting story first meant he was comfortable in any genre, from fantasy to romcom to horror to courtroom drama. Via “Stand by Me” and “Misery” he nudged Stephen King movies from grotesquerie to character, and his company, Castle Rock Entertainment, produced the glorious King adaptation “The Shawshank Redemption” (not to mention “Seinfeld”).

Inspired by Lear, Mr. Reiner took an early and enthusiastic turn into liberal politics, earning him predictable and unending catcalls of “Meathead” from detractors. But only a few of his movies carried much of a political message, notably his 1995 film “The American President,” written by Mr. Sorkin and a sort of dry run for his “The West Wing.” Mr. Reiner said of Lear in a PBS “American Masters” interview in 2015 that he was “like a second father”— not only in his work, but in how he proved that “you could use . . . your power you had as a celebrity and actually, you know, help make some change in the world.” In 1991, he bought Lear’s Brentwood house, which had previously belonged to Henry Fonda, and on Sunday he died there.

Mr. Smith is the Journal’s film critic.