Fin: Talking to Rob Reiner

Revisiting "Happy Valley," the Ed Zwick memoir, the Beatles biopics, and more in this week's notes column

A couple of weeks ago, I got to have a Zoom call with Rob Reiner, which resulted in this JTA story about the new documentary that he produced, God and Country. The movie is about the rise of Christian nationalism, especially in conjunction with the Trump era. I was able to get the interview in the day before Reiner was getting on a plane to start shooting the sequel to This is Spinal Tap. 

I always appreciate the chance to talk to someone whose work I’ve been aware of and enjoyed for my entire life, and if I’d had unlimited time I’d have had numerous questions for him about The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, and a half-dozen other things (Most people I told about the interview seemed to go first to Reiner’s acting role as Leonardo DiCaprio’s father in The Wolf of Wall Street.)

I did mention to him that I had just watched the 1970 movie Where’s Poppa for the first time, which was directed by his father and featured an insane courtroom scene in which Reiner appears. (TW- many, many racial slurs, as well as open confessions of war crimes.)

(The third act of that movie, by the way, when it comes to being problematic, makes Blazing Saddles look like Elmo in Grouchland. You can watch it on Pluto TV.) 

Anyway, it was a very good interview, in which he shared a funny story about the only time he’s ever met Donald Trump, which was after a fight at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City, where Reiner and Billy Crystal talked briefly to the Donald and were shocked at just how arrogant he was. 

I appreciate the folks at Oscilloscope for putting the interview together. And once again, you can read the piece here.

Leading up to the interview, there was one question I sort of agonized about whether or not to ask Reiner, and ended up not asking. 

As I’ve written before, there’s an annoying tendency for Jeffrey Epstein obsessives and Qanon types to just make up lists of people in Hollywood and the Democratic Party who have supposed ties to Epstein, and for some reason, one name that always lands on those fake lists is Reiner’s. I’m not sure why, probably because he’s both a longtime Hollywood figure and also a visible, outspoken Democrat. Either way, I can’t stress enough that Rob Reiner has never been named at any level of any real Epstein investigation, in the recent revelations or any other time, and there’s absolutely nothing in the realm of real-life evidence tying him to Jeffrey Epstein. 

So I thought about asking what it’s like to constantly get accused, with zero evidence, of horrific crimes. He’s seen his own Twitter mentions, I’m sure and has to know about this. Does it bother him? Is there someone he can sue?  

But for some reason, it just wouldn’t have felt right, in speaking to a man of Reiner’s stature who had gone out of his way to grant me this interview, to say, “Hey, a lot of people for some reason think you’re a pedophile- what do you think about that?” 

As for pedophile conspiracies that aren’t fake…