Rob Reiner, I love you.

an essay written in December 2025

This week I had planned to do some writing about my Christmas indie Merry Good Enough. I was excited; I had started a draft of a piece—some of which I’ll still share later, probably. It was the first time I’d actually written about the experience of making a movie, of what draws me, or drew me, to movies—lately I am feeling in the past tense about it, but trying not to—about the surrealness of watching your own vision on screen. And yet actually not even experiencing it as that surreal, because the actors and all the other people along the way have added their own DNA to create this new, magical, third thing. And then you just get to enjoy it.

And all the while I’m writing that piece, I’m thinking about When Harry Met Sally. It is my favorite movie, the movie I always return to, something that means so much to me, it’s hard to put into words. Literally. I actually don’t quite know what to say!

What the hell is it about that movie that makes me love it so God damn much? Is it the shared experience of watching it, time and time again, alongside my best friend when we were growing up—each of us with a VHS copy in our respective homes, the memory of its weight in my hands? Is it Sally saying “very cold, hard Mexican ceramic tile”? Is it Bruno Kirby’s mustache? Harry Connick Jr’s singing? The old-couple monologues? The sneaky vulnerability of Billy Crystal’s performance—one of the best leading man performances of all-time? The woman’s heels on the street before Carrie Fischer runs off—sprints—to the cab? The wave at the Giants game? The grapes? The batting cages? Baby fish mouth? Why does this one piece of art—not that I’d ever though of it as a piece of art before, though it is—endure? And how come, whenever I’d think about it, I rarely actually thought - oh, it’s a Rob Reiner film, or really even thought about Rob Reiner? It was always just When Harry Met Sally to me. (Later on, when I was sixteen or so, I began to hear about this Nora Ephron woman, and I become enthralled by her. But for years—truly years—it was just the story to me, the movie itself, just these characters I loved.) At the end of the day, I think movies are just very complicated, very expensive, very risky songs. And if the song works—if it really works—you get to sing it yourself, and it stays with you and becomes a part of you. And you can sing it with other people, too, because everyone knows the same words. It’s pretty incredible.

About six or seven months ago, on a very random day in LA, I was wearing my UT hat and standing on a curb. The child I was watching was sleeping. A man was walking toward me with his dog, and he made a comment about my hat and the UT football game that weekend. I told him I didn’t really watch college football—more pro, but not really even that anymore—and he stopped and we struck up a conversation. I shared that I had gone to UT for grad school, for screenwriting. He nodded. He was in film, too, he said. He seemed weathered, a little chagrined. He was about fifty-five, maybe (though age is getting harder for me to estimate, these days) and he was wearing a Jimmy Buffet t-shirt and flip-flops. He had recently wrapped on Spinal Tap 2, he told me, but other than that, work had been very sparse. Things had not been good. I shared that I had made a small indie film myself, but we had had trouble getting any money for it, any marketing, though I believed the actors—mostly all unknowns—were all really quite something in it, and that the movie, overall, worked. Still, I could not even find an agent. He told me a friend had recently asked if he’d speak to their son, who was about 20 and looking to get into movies, and he’d said he would probably tell him, “Well, maybe don’t.” I stood there in the warm, perfect Pasadena sun feeling this strange sadness I have often felt these past couple years—a literal sense of loss over a shared, meaningful thing—combined with another feeling I often feel alongside it: well, here I am! Here I am having this conversation! With a man I could somehow imagine working with one day. We kept talking. The man told me he was lucky that his girlfriend was a lawyer—they lived around the block, in her house—because he hadn’t worked this little in a very long time. I shared that I had another indie movie I maybe wanted to make one day, called 4 Screenwriters and A Baby, sort of about all these things we were talking about: movies and where they were going, and if caring about them so much matters, or can be enough, now, or maybe ever. It would be shot mostly in a house (ideally in Maine) though a few other locations would be necessary. I wasn’t sure the tone was quite pitch-able; I didn’t quite understand this whole “pitch” thing yet. (I feel like you knew what the song was once the song was done, not ahead of time?) Anyhow, I got the man’s email. I had this weird sense I wanted to stay in touch and that if I ever finished the script, found backers, found the right actors, got the vision right, he was someone I would want around—that I’d be lucky, that that would be huge for me. He walked away. Almost on cue, the child I watched—a three-year-old I found as funny as Chris Farley; a real star if there ever was one—stirred from her nap.

Weeks after that interaction, I began to think more about Rob Reiner, like a bearded, smiling lightbulb going off in my head. (Like always with Mr. Reiner, it hadn’t been the first thing I had thought of when talking to this man, which is obviously kind of crazy. It’s like there was always space around Reiner, space for you, or in this case, me, and my own projects, my own visions, to make their way in first.) But this man on the street, with his decency and movie-making talent and his girlfriend’s dog, well, he clearly knew Rob Reiner. They had just worked together, closely. If I was to follow up with him—and I wanted to—maybe I would throw something in a P.S. Such as, “If you can, please tell Mr. Reiner how much his movies mean to me.” Or, “Please tell Mr. Reiner I also have another more traditional rom-com project I’m trying to make, that’s really all because of him and the movie he made, his movie that has so much friendship and love in it, so much realness and rated-R adult maturity and complexity in it (how sexy!), and also so much beauty and relief. It is my north star.”

More months passed. I finally finished a draft of the indie about screenwriting and babies, but then couldn’t seem to go in for round two. I tried to see if a streamer would license our holiday indie for any money—would even take a phone call—but they wouldn’t. I thought how to move forward with the biopics I want to make, but also with the life I want to have (shared with someone who needs me to get something at the grocery store. Some steadiness. Not just all what-ifs.) I thought about the dissonance between what I want to do, how to do it, the changing world, my shifting priorities. Then, last week, when I was walking home from yoga—this sounds like I do yoga “out” a lot; I, in fact, never do; this was the first in-studio class I’d gone to in years, and I was so out of shape I sprained my wrist during it, and it’s still hurting right now, but that’s another story—I saw a car with a license plate that said RRZ on it. I smiled and stopped and immediately took a photo of it. It was a little foggy out, a little cold, but a perfect December night in California. I felt this weird woosh of goodness come through me that I feel sometimes, that I’m always grateful for when it comes. What a funny little moment. What a beautiful random night. I texted the photo to some friends.

RRZ, if you don’t know, stands for Rob Reiner Riz. I don’t remember when I came up this term—a few years ago?—but it was around the time I realized I had, in addition to everything else, a huge f*cking crush on Rob Reiner. (I think it probably came to me when I was rewatching Sleepless in Seattle for the umpteenth time, and I thought, to myself: “Um, forget Tom Hanks—I love this man. Like, A LOT.”)1

Anyhow, it soon turned into a joke with my friends. And a serious question, though, too: who was their RRZ crush? The one that caught them by surprise? One was always on the look-out for that quality, honestly in anyone, including dogs, or babies. To me it was a joie de vivre, maybe mixed in with some light groaning. A little buoyant complaining. It was an energy, mostly. It was something that both did and didn’t make perfect sense. It was Rob Reiner Riz, and when you felt it, or saw it, you had to celebrate it and call it out. I got home and wrote down a reminder to send that email to my Jimmy Buffet friend.

But, I didn’t.

Like so many people, the sadness I have felt from this Sunday’s tragedy has been overwhelming. (It does not feel over either; it is a profound loss for our shared cultural history, and our sense of morality, and like any loss, it is ongoing.) In January, after that horrible plane crash in D.C., where many young people died, I spoke to one of my best friends back home. She has young kids, she has a really stressful job—she was having trouble dealing with the sadness and senseless of it all, and that we didn’t pause to publicly mark it in any way. And that it would be “weird” of her to start crying on a zoom work call or something, because all of these fellow Americans that had just died so suddenly. And it’s true, we don’t really mark things anymore. We don’t communally mourn. Mostly, she had nowhere to put her grief, because no one was leading us. And we certainly don’t have any leadership right now, either, to guide us through these mounting tragedies—the abrupt, violent deaths of a national icon and his talented, also-loved and beloved wife; the terror that young people feel simply going to school in this country, and what a huge, huge loss that is in our simple ability to function as a nation—how dare we let this happen to our young people? how dare we, the people who got to grow up not being scared of being murdered at school, allow this to become normal?—the anger and hopelessness people feel at the direction it seems like things are headed, anger that comes from a deep love and understanding that it doesn’t have to be this way. That we are more than this, more than just a nation of short attention spans and spite and greed. But, truly, where are the real leaders? And where are the real men? Who is saying enough is enough, when it comes to the most vile, most inhumane reactions to the most sacred, shared things? To literal human love and life? But I guess I’m supposed to be glad Jeff Bezos is funding a documentary on Melania Trump. I guess I should admire that man (because he’s rich?) and keep my mouth shut, and ignore the silence and complicity of all the people—the men and the women—who do have the power to do and say something, but do not.

I’m sorry, I’m just feeling sad and a little cynical right now. But I am smart enough to know that that is not the way to live, and also, it’s not the truth of who we are, or our capacities. I think Rob Reiner’s movies endure, and will endure forever, not just because they’re comforting—though they are that—but because they are true. People are good. People do love each other. People do work together. People do take risks and are capable of change. People are more than just greed and manically planning for some future that isn’t even here yet. Also, the shrieking eels of Florin are real. I know it and you know it. The best stories do reflect these things, and they are not schmaltzy or less than because of that. They are the best ones.

I want to end by saying that thirteen years ago my friends lost their two young children to a horrifically violent crime. They were children I had watched and known and loved, and Sunday’s events have brought those memories to the surface. It’s something I think about a lot, that I’ve tried and failed to write about before. Honestly, it’s just too much to take in most of the time, though I know that what I have returned to, in my wanting to speak about it, is actually the memories of support and grace that were a part of that experience, too. Anyhow, after the shock and the dust had settled, and the memorial for my friend’s children was over, and a new wave of profound sadness seemed to settle in, I sent my friends some movies in the mail. I didn’t know what else to do. I sent them not a Rob Reiner movie, but A League of Their Own, my other OG favorite film—so crazy to me, directed by Penny Marshall, Rob’s former wife! I can remember crying and dragging it into the shipping cart and how lost and grief-stricken I felt, and also a little stupid, but also how glad I felt to have something, anything, to send them. They texted me later, thanking me for the gift. They had watched it. Somehow they were alive.

How strange, to want to comfort myself now, by watching one of Rob Reiner’s films. How strange to know it’s not just comfort, not just an escape I am looking for, but a remembering of what is true. I carry within me the memory of the strength I felt through my own loss those many years ago—and the experience of standing in witness to my friend’s unspeakable one —a strength that seemed to come not from within myself, but from the love and grit that emanated out from those that protected and comforted me and stood with me through it. In the middle of all the anguish, it was quite the thing to behold. The love was more true than any of the darkness.

My heart goes out to all of Rob and Michele’s family, friends and colleagues who are suffering through this deeply tragic and far-too-soon goodbye. May the support and love of their fellow man and woman provide them them with strength and solace.

Thank you Rob. Thanks for your movies.

xo

Caroline