NEED TO KNOW
- Rob Reiner released This Is Spinal Tap in 1984, the same year his dad, Carl Reiner, released All of Me
- Both films were ranked in several Top 10 lists of that year
- Rob reveals he and his famous father celebrated by taking ads out in the Hollywood trade paper, Variety
When the mockumentary masterpiece This Is Spinal Tap landed on many critics’ best films of the year lists in 1984, the success was doubly sweet for director and co-writer Rob Reiner: not only did his debut film win critical accolades, it shared space on those rankings alongside another widely admired comedy directed by his father, Carl Reiner.
“The year that Spinal Tap came out was the same year as when he did All of Me,” Rob recalls, speaking to PEOPLE exclusively in advance of a 41st anniversary 4K re-release of This Is Spinal Tap on July 5.
“And at the end of the year, they have all these Top 10 lists, the best 10 films. And my dad and I were on a number of these lists together with our films.”
Rob’s film, of course, was a satirical faux-documentary on a fading, somewhat delusional rock band, improvised by stars and co-writers Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, which would over time earn a reputation as one of the funniest films of all time and popularize the mockumentary format.
All of Me, Carl’s fourth film with comedian Steve Martin, was a screwball comedy that saw the soul of an eccentric, high-strung, bedridden heiress (Lily Tomlin) mystically transferred into the body of her ladder-climbing attorney (Steve Martin), leading to a struggle to control, and then share, his physical form – made hilarious thanks to Martin’s gift for physical comedy.
At the time, Rob was attempting to break out of being typecast in his signature role as Mike “Meathead” Stivic in the groundbreaking sitcom All in the Family, eager to break into directing after seeing his father’s long string of showbiz successes.
Carl, meanwhile, was best known as the creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show and a member of the legendary writing staff of Your Show of Shows which led to his comedy duo pairing with Mel Brooks. He also had established himself as a top comedy auteur with his films Oh, God! and The Jerk.
Both father and son were delighted to find their films sharing space on some of the loftiest critics’ lists of the era, Rob, 78, recalled — so much so that they wanted to commemorate the landmark moment by taking out an ad in the Hollywood trade paper, Variety.
“I said, ‘Dad, has it ever been where there’s been a father and a son both have films in the top 10 in one year?’ I didn’t ever remember it,” Rob tells PEOPLE. “And we looked it up – nobody could remember! So we took out an ad. We were both very proud of each other, to be able to be thought of in the same way.”
Hot off the success of This Is Spinal Tap, Rob achieved his dream of broadening his career as a filmmaker, going on to helm an array of now-classic films across a variety of genres, including When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, Stand By Me, Misery and A Few Good Men. He also periodically returns to acting, including a recurring stint in the recently released fourth season of The Bear.
“[Directing’s] always something I wanted to do,” he says. “But when I left All In the Family, at that time, if you were in television, you were looked down upon by people in movies. It was like they were royalty and you were peons.”
He continues: “And so it was hard. You couldn’t get going. And then there was a kind of a breakthrough. There was a class of people that came out of television. It was Ron Howard, myself, Barry Levinson, Jim Brooks, Penny Marshall, and Danny DeVito. We all came out of television, and we were able to start making films. So it was something that I was in my head as to wanting to direct from the time I was like 19.”
Meanwhile, Carl would continue to bask in the spotlight, taking on dozens of acting roles, notably in the Ocean’s Eleven films and in a recurring role on Two and a Half Men, as well as authoring bestselling books and becoming, in his late 90s, the oldest celebrity active on Twitter — now X — with over 300,000 followers. He died in 2020 at age 98, having received many of the highest honors in the arts.
Father and son stayed intertwined, personally and professionally, all the way down the line, Rob recalls, “right to the fact that we both have our stars on the Walk of Fame, and they’re right near each other in the same area.” Rob notes that it was the same case “with Groman’s Chinese [Theatre], they put the footprints and the handprints in the cement, and they had a ceremony where the two of us did it together. That’s always meant a lot to me.”
Rob also notes that Carl actually got into the musical mockumentary genre a couple of decades before his own foray. “If you look at the old Sid Cesar shows, they did a satire of a group called The Three Haircuts, and it was a takeoff of a 50s rock and roll trio,” Rob says, noting that, generational tastes aside, his father’s keen comedic sensibility led him to immediately embrace This Is Spinal Tap.
“He loved satire, and he got it right away, and yeah, he really dug it,” Rob adds.
Tickets for the remastered 4K theatrical rerelease of This Is Spinal Tap are available at https://www.fathomentertainment.com/releases/this-is-spinal-tap/. The restored film will also be available on home video from the Criterion Collection on Sept. 16.
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