Rob Reiner

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This is the best interview I've ever had.

Why?

Because we're just talking.

Suck on that, Conan.

Okay.

Welcome back to Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

I am so happy to be talking to today's guest, director and writer Rob Reiner.

He has just a magnificent body of work.

The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Spinal Tap, Stand By Me, A Few Good Men, and much more.

And by body of work, I don't just mean his movies.

I'm talking about his career of advocacy, which we'll also get into.

Many of you will be excited to know that Spinal Tap 2, The End Continues, which Rob directed and co-wrote, hits theaters this weekend, September 12th.

There's also a companion book that's out now called A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever, The Story of Spinal Tap.

So let's meet him now.

Rob Ryner.

I'm actually very excited to talk to you.

Thank you.

You're one of my heroes.

I never saved your life, though.

That's what a hero does.

I don't think I should be in that category of hero.

All right.

You're part of a lineage that I am part of too, but way down kind of the line of a tribe of funny people

who I am so grateful to be considered part of that tribe, even though I'm down the line a little bit.

You know, it's funny.

You know, I have a picture in my office, and it's the

people who have written for Sid Caesar, the old show of shows.

And I look at that and I think, oh my God.

First of all, there's Mel Brooks, Neil Simon Woody Allen Larry Gelbart my father Joseph Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roof I mean

every anybody who made you laugh in the second half of the 20th century is represented and I thought wow that's the world I come out of Exactly.

And I got to be introduced to some of that world because Jimmy Burroughs,

whose daddy, who directed, Jimmy directed all the cheers and co-created.

but his daddy Abe Burroughs right was if not part of that team was around that team doing this

absolutely Jimmy Burroughs uh directed the first his first TV movie that he directed was a movie that I did with Penny Marshall and every morning he would come in and I'd say it's Abe's boy

and then he would say hi it's Carl's kid

I love Jimmy

still doing great

Speaking of Penny Marshall, I spent one lovely day making out with her.

Really?

Non-stop in front of cameras.

I'll give you that.

It was Laverne and Shirley, and I played the fireman who she was going to marry, and then he burned.

Oh, he burned up.

Yeah.

Oh, that's so sad.

But there was one scene, literally, where all we did was in the background kissing.

Wow.

Fondness for her.

See, I didn't know about that.

No, but I might have gone to the set and observed had I known.

Probably not.

No.

Okay.

There's so many things I do want to talk to you about.

So here's,

it's not a confession, but I am pop culture and I are just,

you know,

I'm just now starting to say, oh, snap and think, oh, what a wonderful phrase.

I last night for the first time, Mary has seen it many times, saw spinal tap.

Oh, really?

It was one of those things I've lied about over the years and said, of course, of course I have.

You don't want to admit that you hadn't seen

this spinal device.

Yeah.

And I am obsessed with it.

I laughed my ass off.

It is amazing.

And everybody knows this because everyone else has seen it.

But what I loved was

take me through it because it first was

an existing group.

Because you in the 70s, you brought them on to just sing a song before they were.

But it wasn't existing.

And basically, we created it for this TV special I did for ABC.

It was called The TV Show.

And it was on in, I think it was 1979.

And it was, the show was a satire of all different things in television, sitcoms, commercials, you know,

everything.

And one of the things we satirized was a late-night TV rock and roll show called Midnight Special.

And on that thing, I played Wolfman Jack, introducing this band that we created for the special called Spinal Tap.

And they did a song called Rock and Roll Nightmare, which was

like an MTV video live mix of things.

And they started improvising off-camera in these British rock and roll

characters.

Harry, Michael,

Harry Shearer, Michael McKeon, and Chris Guest.

And we thought, gee, what great characters.

It would be great someday to find another venue to explore these characters.

And we put it aside.

We said, ah, you know, that was that.

We went our separate ways.

Harry and I started working on an idea for a movie.

It was called About the Life of Rhodes.

The backstage, you know, was a tour and how they get from one city to the next.

And then we

read that there was a movie going to come out called Roadie with Meatloaf.

And we said, okay, forget that.

We put that aside.

Meanwhile, Chris and Michael did a little video of these two British rockers running into each other in a hotel in a lobby and vaguely remembering that they played in a band together at some point and they were improvising.

And they showed us the video.

I said, wow, what a great thing.

What if we, instead of

a tour told by, you know, from the Rody's point of view, we do it.

as the band's point of view.

And the four of us got back together and said, let's see if we can come up with an idea of how to do it.

And we had this idea to do a rock and roll documentary, like a satire of The Last Walls and those kinds of rock and roll documentaries.

I went to a guy over that ran Marble Arch, which was Lou Grade's company.

I said, look, give us, you know, we have this idea.

And they said, great.

Here's the money for a screenplay.

The four of us sat down and we realized when we were working on this screenplay, there was no way we could communicate in screenplay form what this was going to be because it had to have a documentary feel.

It had to be cinema verite and all that.

So I went back to the guy.

His name was Martin Starger.

He ran ABC later.

And I said, look.

I said, give us the money that you were going to give us for the screenplay, which was $60,000.

And I said, I'll make you some of the film and it'll give you a sense of what it's going to be.

So he gave us the money and I put in 25,000 of my own money into it.

The guys chipped in 5,000.

We had 90 000 and we made 20 minutes with backstage footage concert footage and interview footage and i put it all together and i showed it to him and i said this is the kind of thing we're going to do he said i hate this i don't like this this is terrible i said oh my god what am i going to do now so we had this 20 minute film and we started shopping it all over town trying to find somebody that would go ahead with Karen Murphy, who was the producer of it,

said we were going from studio to studio.

I had a literally had a can of film under my arm, 20 minutes.

And I said, Karen, if we ever get this made, we're going to be able to tell the story that we went from studio to studio, put a 16 millimeter, 20 minute film and showed people, and we could get, but nobody said it.

Everybody turned it down.

Nobody said, finally.

There's a movie that they're making at Avco Embassy.

Some, you know, like take this job and shove it or one of those types of movies.

And they're looking for a director.

And this guy named Peter Turner who was not my agent he was an agent at William Morris I wasn't even with William Morris he said to this woman who was

shepherding the project Lindsey Durant says what about Rob Reiner and

he said well what has he ever done he hasn't done anything he said I saw this 20-minute piece and you should take a look at it she looks at the piece and she says well forget the movie I'm trying to get what what are you doing with this she dug it and she says what what are you doing with this?

I said, I can't get it made.

I'm trying to get it made.

She said, I can, if you can find some money, I think I can convince the head of Avco Embassy, who was Frank Capra Jr., Frank Capra's son at the time.

I think I can get him to distribute it.

And I said, okay.

Once you have a distributor,

it's easier to get money.

I got a little bit of money.

I went back to her and I said, okay, we're ready.

Let's go.

And then Norman Lear and Jerry Perencio, Norman Lear, who created All in the Family and all that, they bought Avco Embassy.

And what happens oftentimes when you buy a,

they scrap everything that was in development, including ours.

We were done.

So I was very close to doing it.

And then they said no.

This is 81, basically.

This is.

If you shot it in 82.

Yes.

Yes, it's about 81.

No, we shot it in 82.

So it is like 81.

And so I go to Alan Horn, who was running, you know, he was the head of business business affairs and he was became one of my partners at Castle Rock.

I said, Alan, please, let me just talk to Jerry and Norman.

Let me just, please, I, let me give me a, get him a meeting.

He puts together a meeting, Jerry, Norman,

a bunch of other executives there.

And I go in and I go crazy and I'm screaming.

I'm going, it's the best movie.

This is going to be a big hit.

It's God rock and roll.

The kids will love it.

Repeat business.

I'm going crazy like this.

I leave the meeting and I'm told after I left the meeting, Norman turns to everybody else and said, who's going to tell him he can't do it?

You know, so they let me, they let me do it.

And, you know,

then the rest, as they say, is history.

Yeah.

Okay.

A couple of questions going back.

Yeah.

How did, did you know Michael Christopher?

and Harry before you had them write a song?

Yeah, yeah.

We all knew each other and worked together over the years.

And you knew they were amazing musicians as well.

Yeah, we knew I knew everything about them.

Chris was in an episode of All in the Family.

Michael McKeon, his

best friend was David Lander, David Landau at the time.

They were Lenny and Squiggy

on Laverna Shirley.

And so I knew him from that.

And Harry,

Harry dated

my sister for a while.

But this is before that, he was on a show called The Credibility Gap, which was a radio show.

And I did a little guest appearance on that.

So we all knew each other and we all worked together in different ways.

Okay, next thing is I thought maybe I misunderstood that there was a gap between,

okay, this is what we're going to do, but

if you're going to interview and truly do improvisation,

then you need to have a backstory because these people were friends and either bandmates or friends since they were little kids.

So wasn't there a block of time like months or a year or more or something where they literally, you all or they all got together and made up an entire backstory?

Yes, that's true.

But we had created the Bible, the backstory, the history of these characters when we were developing the 20-minute piece before that.

So we had,

you know, we knew that Nigel and David knew each other from the time they were kids growing up in Squatney.

We made up a place.

And they, you know, bonded over the music.

So we created all these characters.

We had a good backstory.

We knew the bands that they had played with and all of that.

And when we started the film, we basically just had an outline of what we wanted to have happen.

But all the dialogue was all your questions.

Everything was improvised.

Everything was improvised.

The whole thing was.

They didn't even have the questions.

No, no, no, no.

They never had any questions.

They never knew what I was going to throw at them.

Okay, so I mean, my experience of that kind of filmmaking is curb your enthusiasm.

Right.

But even Curb had to build up on air, I think, a history.

It was, it didn't come in.

You know,

yours was so, theirs was so firmly, you know,

organically in them that there was no acting going on.

It was so subtle and real and in the moment

that I don't think you could get any other way way unless you had built this Bible that they had lived

and we did and we did and the Bible is is fairly thick I mean it talks about all the their their parents and and you know what bands they played with what other activities they did besides music I mean we had a whole we created a whole world for for all of them

but it's interesting you meant you bring up Kerb because you know

I did an I know you were on all the time but I did one episode and it was early on in the in the run and it was, I think that Larry started making him a little bit more

formed as he went along because it was very, very loose when he first did it.

Yeah.

It was, you would get a call.

What are you doing tomorrow?

Yeah.

And then you would bring your own clothes.

Right.

And almost everyone.

So

you're essentially playing a version of yourself.

And Larry is playing a version of himself.

I was playing a function.

My function was to push him into a corner and piss him off so he would explode more coming out.

But anyway, I'm so knocked out by,

I mean, really, a lot of times when you see actors improvise and you know that they have a script and then the director says, okay, go ahead and do one and improvise.

You can see it

sometimes, you know, no matter how good they are, there's a, oh, they just did an end of the scene riff.

Right.

You know, and it feels funny and maybe you get a good laugh.

But this was

impeccable, you know, and so believable.

I'm full of it because I literally watched it for the first time last night.

It was amazing.

Well, you know, it's interesting because people always ask me, well, it's your first film and you did it without a script.

I don't know.

How would you do that?

And I always say that that was easier than doing one with a script for me because that was my background.

I was raised in improvisation.

I was with.

Wait, wait, tell me that.

What do you mean?

You know, I had my own improv group that I started.

And

when I was in college, at UCLA, I started a group called The Session, and I acted in it and directed it.

Larry Bishop, who was Joey Bishop's son, was in it.

Rick Dreyfus, Richard Dreyfuss was in it.

And we were together for a year.

Then I was performed with the committee, which was a San Francisco-based improv group that came from the second city.

And in Los Angeles, I was with them for a while.

So that was my background.

And it was also the background of, you know, Harry, Chris, and Michael.

So when we were thrown together, it made all the sense in the world to do it that way.

It felt comfortable.

It's like jazz musicians, you know, you get together and you may not even know each other.

But if you, one guy plays the bass, one guy plays drums, one guy's the piano, one guy plays sax, whatever, and you fall in.

You just fall in and you just start riffing with each other.

Sorry, let me just.

The whole drummer and one of them explodes.

Yeah, well, yeah,

spontaneously combusts.

Right.

I thought it was.

Which happens a lot more than you think.

Right.

Yeah.

Just a little green something left.

Yeah, a little green globule left on his drum seat.

I thought it was a very funny moment, very funny line.

And then in the middle of a concert later,

yes.

Well, you want to hear the crazy part about that?

So we have, you know, obviously Spinal Tap has a series of drummers.

And by the time we do the sequel, 11 drummers have passed on.

12, 11.

Yeah, we don't, 11, we think.

But

in this one, we had, you know, one guy choked on vomit.

It was somebody else's vomit, but they couldn't dust for vomit, so they don't know whose it was.

Somebody exploded at the Isle of Lucy Jazz Festival.

Somebody exploded on stage.

You know, somebody

died in a bizarre gardening accident, which oddly enough.

actually happened to one of the guy on in in toto percaro he died because he was gardening and he had some bad you know pesticide or whatever but the point is we have all these drummers dying.

And we wanted the drummer that we had before at the end of the first film, they wind up in Japan because they get resurrected.

They got a hit in Japan.

They're going to go there.

And we found, and this is totally serendipitous.

We found when we were putting the film together, there is a flash pot that goes off.

in the in Japan in front of the new drummer.

And so we said, wait a minute, if we marry that, if we marry that to the other to the other drummer and we put it together, it looks like the drummer that they had blew up.

And then when the smoke clears, the new drum, the guy in Japan, is there.

So it's a weird luck.

We lucked out with that one.

So a couple of things.

It was not necessarily

received as the second coming that it has become.

No, when we first came out, we previewed it in Dallas, and people just didn't get it.

They thought,

they came up to me and said, I don't understand.

Why would you make a movie about a band nobody's ever heard of?

And they're so stupid.

And they're so dumb.

Why wouldn't you do about the Rolling Stones or the Beatles?

I mean, what is this?

I try to explain, it's a satire.

We're trying to make fun.

And the cards, you know, they have cards where the people fill out after the movie to tell you what they think of the movie.

And so I looked, first of all, we had like 20%, 30%, 40%

recommend.

It was the worst, worst cards ever.

But I was a little bit

heartened by the fact that I found in these cards five different ways that they spelled the word movie.

And so I thought, okay,

so it was M-O-V-I-E, M-O-V-E-Y,

M-O-V-E-E.

Easy mistake.

Yeah.

And my favorite one was M-O-V-E.

Move-E.

So to me, I said, okay, maybe they're not such geniuses here.

They didn't get it.

Also, you've had people

over

years come up to you, rock and rollers, sting, people like that come up and go, I don't know.

I watch it and I laugh, but I also cry.

Yes.

And I'm not sure which.

And it does have that.

Yeah.

Well, every, it became,

it slowly became part of the rock and roll scene where bands on tour would have the tape of the DVD on their tour buses and they'd watch it religiously.

And

I think of it as we created this fictional band and this kind of parallel universe.

And then all of a sudden the real world started creeping in.

And it's like this weird.

Mobius strip where it keeps folding into itself.

So these real bands all of a sudden start saying, yeah, I have that same moment.

I have the same rock and roll moment that these Spinal Tap guys have.

And then the guys are playing Wembley Stadium.

They're playing Glastonbury, Royal Albert Hall, Carnegie Hall, and they become part of the rock and roll world.

And real rockers start playing with them.

So it's like,

and that the second movie that we made, the sequel, you know, The End Continues,

we have Paul McCartney in there.

We have Elton John, you know, in there.

So it is kind of a weird hybrid.

Okay, you moved on.

So let's move on.

Well, it's not the sequel, or is it?

Yeah, it's a sequel.

It's sequel 40 years after the first one.

Right.

It's not just Spinal Tap 2.

It's Spinal Tap.

Spinal Tap 2, the End Continues.

Right.

But the two, isn't that?

The two is a Stonehenge, a little Stonehenge thing that looks like a two, yeah.

Okay, so what changed your mind?

Because I know you were asked by hundreds, you know, thousands, when are you going to do a second one?

And now you are and have.

Yeah.

It comes out September 12th, right, by the way.

September 12th.

But it's funny because we never wanted to do a sequel.

We always said, ah, we did it.

You know, it's done.

We're not going to do it again.

And just time went by and it became part of the, it went into the National Film Registry through the Library of Congress.

It became

a phrase that goes to 11, got into the Oxford English Dictionary.

All these things happened.

And then Harry, and God, God bless him, Harry Shearer,

we never got any money.

We never got anything.

And it's going to sound really weird, but over the years, over 40 years with DVDs and videos and foreign sales and all that, we each got 82 cents.

I'm not kidding.

It sounds weird, but that's what it was.

And so Harry says, this is ridiculous.

How come we never?

He sued the company to get the rights back.

And after many years, he was able to win and got the rights to the thing.

Now we have the rights.

What are we going to do with it?

And we said, well, I don't know.

What should we do?

We said, should we make a sequel?

And they said, no, we've, we've, that's passed.

We're not going to do it.

We sat around, talked, talked.

And then an idea started coming out of

a real place, which is they hadn't played together for 15 years, the guys.

The guys.

They hadn't played.

And they hadn't, you know, so we said, oh, what if it's a thing about these guys haven't played together in 15 years?

They haven't talked to each other in 15 years.

Maybe there's bad blood.

What could that be?

And we started exploring all that, and it grew out of a very natural place.

We said, okay, let's revisit them and see where they are now and what would force them to have to play.

And is the bad blood talked about or is it, do you actually see bad blood?

we kind of allude to it

and we say something, you know, as David says, David saying, how is Michael McKinney, but he says, there was a stick in the spokes, and we don't say what it is.

And you find out over the course of the film what it was, what was going on, and why

they went their separate ways.

But they're forced together

to do a concert.

All of them are great musicians.

Play their instruments.

For me, because I did work with Michael recently.

two or three years ago, and he's brilliant.

I love him.

I love his acting.

It's amazing.

I had no idea he was like a rock star when he sings.

Oh, no, no.

They're all great musicians.

And what's interesting is everybody thinks when you see a movie, oh, somebody's playing for them or blah, blah, blah.

No, no, these guys can really play.

And there's a moment in the second film that's coming out where Elton John is talking about it.

And I said,

I'm so curious that you would.

want to play with these guys.

He says, no, no, these guys are real musicians.

He says, no, is that you, Rob?

Are you the...

Me, as Marty DeBergey, I'm asking Elton John on camera, why would you pick to play with me?

He says, these guys are real musicians.

He said, they're not like normal heavy metal musicians.

He says, you don't see a guy in a heavy metal band playing a mandolin, which Chris Guest plays very well as Nigel.

So these guys can really play.

Every note that you see in the first film and second film is played by them.

Yeah.

You can forgive the people who thought, why would you follow such a dumb film?

Yeah, because it's so real, intensely real.

Totally real, yeah.

Okay.

So you did it.

Have you seen it?

Obviously, you have.

What am I saying?

But is it?

It's good.

Are you glad you got back together?

Yes, I am.

And what we found is, first of all, they love to play with each other.

So even if they hadn't played long, they fall right back in.

And just like old friends, you know, you haven't seen a long time, you fall right back in.

And Chris Guess calls it schnadling, where you, you know, started doing schtick with each other, you know, and by play back and forth.

And we fell right back into that, right back into what we always did.

Yeah.

My experience was cheers, 11 years.

Yeah.

You don't see people because of lives and the way they are sometimes for a year or two or three.

But as soon as you see them.

You're madly in love,

giggling your ass off.

And falling back to the same roles, not necessarily within the characters, but how you were with each other in the making of the show.

Didn't you find that?

Yeah, very much so.

I mean, that people don't.

Yeah.

That happened to me on the, you know, I was writing on the Smothers Brothers show when I was

when I was 21 years old,

you know, I was one of the, I was the youngest writer.

Steve Martin was the other young writer, and we were kind of thrown together.

I was 21, he was 23, whatever.

And

we, you know, we were the youngest guys.

Then they had a 20-year reunion for the smothers brothers and we were all brought back and it was so weird because we fell back right into the roles that we played back then no no steve martin at that you know at that point had become a huge star i had gone on and become successful and all that and so but when we're back together I'm getting coffee for them.

Steve is going, you know what I mean?

We were the young, we were like the nobodies, you know, again.

Yeah, Mary always, my wife, Mary,

when we went back to this prep school that I was back in Connecticut, I was 13 through 18.

And some of these, you know, we were 13-year-olds and we go back and Mary goes, Ted Danson, who she's only known as cheers and whatever degree of success and all of that that I have had, you know, when I step back and I'm 13,

terrified.

Absolutely.

Don't know how if they're going to accept me.

Absolutely.

All of that just comes flooding back.

Why the book?

The book came because they called, said, Simon and Schuster said, what about a book you can write?

At the same time you'd done the

sequel?

Well, yeah.

I mean, you know, we wrote, I wrote most of it, you know, with the help of the guys and also the guy named David

Kamp, who was really helpful.

But

nobody had ever put down

the history of what we talked about, how this got made and how the sequel got made.

And also, we said, but we also want to talk about the history of the band, this Bible that we created and who these guys were.

So

we suggested, let's do a book that's in two parts.

And

on one side is called A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever, which is my favorite line in the first film.

And that's written by me and the guys.

And then if you flip the book over, the other side is called Smell the book

yeah see if you look oh my god i'm doing it right now see one is smell the book that says fine line

and smell the book is written by is is an interview marty de berghi the character i play in the film interviews the guys in character and they talk about their lives so you get both you get the the good for you yeah good for you

okay and it's a fun read you'll have a lot of fun reading that thing if you haven't it's really copies it's really yeah one of which you'll sign.

Yeah, if you're nice to me and you've been very nice to me.

So far, very nice to me.

So I think I probably will sign.

You'll have to sign it twice.

Smell the book and the other side.

Okay.

All right.

Sure.

I'll sign one as Marty and one as Rob.

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Okay, Carl Reiner.

I heard of him.

Was one of my heroes, Dick Van Dyke.

I used to love watching.

I grew up without a TV, hence the pop culture thing.

My first TV was Stanford University.

Wow.

Freshman year.

That's valuable.

That may be good that you did that.

Maybe, but I am behind.

Yeah.

Well, I, I, we, I've told this story, but

my father was on television before we owned a television.

Yeah.

And so, so, so I, I, we bought a television so we could look at him, you know, on Saturday night when he was on with Sid Caesar.

That was the world I grew up in.

When, where, were you sports, young wise?

Yes, I, I, I was sports.

I was good with sports, uh, play baseball mainly.

I was a good baseball player.

And I, we, we moved to California and, you know, they they made fun from New York.

And they made fun of the way I talked.

They say, say coffee, say balls.

Say, you know, so they made fun of me.

And the only way I could fit in is

I could play baseball.

So

I was able to fit in in that way.

Okay.

That took you.

When did you bump into, oh, I...

Maybe I want to follow my dad's or if not my dad's football.

I want to do something in that.

You know, they, you know, they, my folks told me the story.

I don't remember doing it, but they they said that one day I came to them and I said, I want, I was eight years old at the time and they said,

I said to them, I want to change my name.

And they thought, oh, this poor kid, he's worried about being, you know, in the shadow and having to live up to his father and all this.

So they asked me, they said, well, what do you want to change your name to?

And I said, Carl.

And so I obviously,

I looked up to him.

I thought he was the greatest.

I mean, he is.

He was.

He was a genius and he was brilliant and he had so, you know, the Van Dyke show is like, to me, still one of the best sitcoms ever made and was groundbreaking at the time.

So I wanted to be him.

And as a kid, when I was off from school during the summer, I went with him every single day for three months.

I would go with him to Desilu Studios where they did the Van Dyke show.

And I spent all day there.

And I'd watch how he worked with the actors and rewriting, and all, and I sit and how they positioned the cameras and everything.

It was like, uh, you know, it was like school for me.

I think I was probably a pain in the ass to him because who wants it was like bring your kid to work

every day.

You know, how old?

I was, uh, no, I was uh 14, 15, 16.

And, you know, during

high school.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And the famous story, which Mary Tyler Moore told in her book.

So I'm not saying anything out of school.

One, I think I was about 14 years old.

And I don't know what possessed me.

I mean, she was gorgeous.

She wore those capri pants, and I grabbed her ass.

Just nothing.

I couldn't help myself.

And she told my father on me.

She said, you know, and my father called me in.

He said, did you grab Mary Tyler Moore by the ass?

Yeah.

And I said,

yeah.

He says, don't ever do that again.

And we had a kind of a smile on his face.

I think he wished he could have done it.

But anyway, there's a great payoff to all this.

And she wrote about it, told it on Letterman's and all this stuff.

Years later, they're doing a reunion show, Van Dyke.

Now, if you remember, if you watched the old Dick Van Dyke show,

Laura Petrie, which is Mary's character, she used to say, Oh, Rob.

She always would ever say that like that.

So now they're doing this reunion show.

And over in the CBS and the Valley, I go there, and now I've already, you know, been on all the family, I've directed movies and stuff so I'm and I I walk in they're finishing up a scene where Dick is in a tuxedo

Mary's in an evening gown it's very formal and they finish the scene I tell the camera I said just keep rolling keep rolling don't don't stop and so I walk in there and I say to Mary I said Mary look I just want to say I've never apologized.

I've always felt bad about what I did when I was 14.

I really feel bad about it.

And I said, but you were so beautiful and my hormones were raging.

And I said, look, you're beautiful now.

I mean, if I wouldn't get in trouble for sexual harassment, I, you know, she then literally bent over, stuck her tush out.

I grabbed her tush and she went, oh, Rob.

And it was a 20-year payoff to what happened before.

That TV that I got when I was at Stanford University, turned it on, my first TV, turned it on.

And no exaggeration, it was 11 o'clock in the morning, reruns.

Dick came out and tripped over the ottoman.

That was the first thing I saw really.

Oh, really?

Wow.

And I was hooked.

I was hooked on the show.

I was hooked on Mary Tomorrow.

I was hooked on Dick Van Dyke.

I used to stalk him during my cheers years.

And Dick is amazing.

He's 100 years old.

We both were part of that.

I remember that evening.

Oh, yes.

When they did the tribute.

Yeah, that was great.

He was 99 then, I think.

Yeah.

And then we all went to his house.

Oh, yeah, in Malibu.

And he's just sharp as a teacher.

It's so funny.

Amazing.

He's amazing.

Well, you got, he's going to be, he's 100 this year, and Mel Brooks is 99 this year.

And they, you know, these guys are still incredible.

Yeah.

Watching your dad and Mel Brooks was one of my great joys, too, later on.

I mean, it was usually something I saw in a rerun kind of thing.

Yeah.

Was it a 100-year-old man?

A 2,000-year-old man.

Yeah, yeah.

You made him a lot younger.

He'd be happy to hear that.

He's only 100%.

No, 2,000-year-old man.

That to me, if you look at, listen to those albums, they're the most brilliant comedy albums ever done.

And as a kid, I used to come home, listen to it every day.

I would listen to it, and

I would know whether or not I could be friends with somebody if

they got that.

That was a bond.

You could know, okay, if they dug that,

then

I could connect with them.

Okay, going back one more second, how come Smothers Brothers knew to hire you to write?

Okay, so I was with the committee

in Los Angeles, and

one day, Tommy Smothers comes in to see the show.

We were on the Tiffany show.

And they're on TV doing their show.

No, they're on.

As a matter of fact, he was going to produce a summer show and it was going to be called the Summer Brothers Smothers Show.

And it was to star Glenn Campbell.

It was the first thing that where Glenn Campbell became, you know, what he became.

And so he was looking for writers.

He was looking for people that, you know, were music oriented and comedy.

And he saw me on stage and Carl Gottlieb, who was a good friend, and he was one of the members of the committee.

And he just plucked us out of the out of the cast.

And Carl Gottlieb and

myself, and we went to work on Smothers Brothers for Glenn Campbell initially for the summer show.

And then we were hired, you know, for the, when it came back in the fall in 69, we were hired back for that.

This is pre-all in the family.

Oh, yeah.

This is, yeah, this is, I would say, this is two years before All in the Family.

One more thing while we're, I think, in this era was you said your dad wasn't overly

complimentary or whatever, but you did something.

Was it a play that you directed?

Yes.

First of all, I just want to say something before we go further.

This is the best interview I've ever had.

Why?

Because we're just talking and, you know, whatever background you have,

you know, they always, everybody, they look at notes, they ask a question that's on a list.

Now that I've said this, I'm probably going to fuck you up here, but I didn't mean to do.

Anyway, you're going to fuck me up because I have tears in my eyes because I so respect you, where you've come from, all of that.

No, but but I'm being dead serious.

I mean, I never had a thing like this.

Anyway, so no, I mean, when I was young, I don't think he thought.

Can we just stop one second?

Yeah.

Suck on that, Conan.

Okay.

Conan's very good.

Don't get me wrong.

He's very good.

Very good.

He's my hero, but go ahead.

No, he saved my life.

Yeah, no.

Anyway, oh, he did?

So that's a real hero.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

You'll tell me later what that was.

But

no, he was.

So, yeah, no, when I was young, he didn't, he didn't really think or he didn't see me the way, you know, others did and the way Norman Lear did, obviously.

But I was in a play in the in summer theater when I was 18 years old.

And they did a production of Enter Laughing, which is a...

based on his book.

It was a play that Joe Stein wrote based on his book.

And I got good reviews.

People seemed to like it.

But he thought, uh-oh, you know, and he never had, he didn't ever say anything that, you know, but you could, I found out later from Martin Landau, who was a good friend.

He said, you know, your father always thought, I don't know what to say to this kid.

I don't know if he's, you know, he wants to do this and I don't know if he can do it.

And then when I was 19,

and oh, and then he was doing the film of Enter Laughing and he was directing it.

And I auditioned for a part, not the main part that went on, but the part of a friend of his.

And I, in front of, he rejected me.

And so, you know, I auditioned for him and he said no.

And I thought, oh my goodness, you know, it's not, there's no bigger rejection

from, you know, your father to say, you're not, you know, you can't do it.

So then time goes by.

And then I'm 19.

And I direct the production of No Exit of All Things, a John Paul Sartre play.

And Richard Dreyfus was in that production, was in the theater here in Los Angeles.

And my father father came to it and he came backstage afterwards and he looked me in the eye and he said, that was good.

No bullshit.

Just like that.

It's the first time I ever heard, you know, validation like that.

And then I went and visited him the next day at his house and we're sitting in the backyard and he says, I'm not worried about you.

You're going to be okay.

Whatever you decide to do, you're going to do it good.

And that was that was a big deal.

That was a big deal.

But it was like, not until I was like 19 or 20.

Yeah.

And then, you know, I went on and then he would say, you know, you're a better director than I ever was.

Oh, this is interesting.

So one year

when This is Spinal Tap came out, this is in 84,

he had a movie called All of Me with Steve Martin.

And he did four movies with Steve Martin, but this one comes out.

And you know how they have these top 10 lists at the end of the year, the best 10 movies of the year?

And all of me and this is Spinal Tap were on a ton of lists together.

And I thought, wow, this is really cool.

When has it ever been that a father and son directed movies that were in it?

And we looked back, none.

That never happened.

That's never been.

And then we have our

Walk of Fame in Hollywood, the thing, the star thing, and they're right next to each other.

And then a few years ago, you know, they brought us the Grauman's Chinese, you know, and you put your hands and your feet in the cement and the both of us did it at the same time.

So it's so cool to me, the whole thing of, you know, I love him so much and I and I think about him every day.

And he still guides me to this day.

His voice is in my head.

And when anything I ever do, he guides me.

Forgive my ignorance.

I'm assuming your mother passed away.

Yes, my mother passed away a few years before my dad.

My mother was eight years older than my dad,

but she died at 94.

He died when he was 98.

Having been together.

65 years.

65 years.

And my mother, on her 60th wedding anniversary, people were asking her, what's the secret?

What keeps you together?

How do you marriage together this long?

And she said, the key is find somebody who can stand you.

Not somebody you can put up with, somebody who can stand you because that's what it is.

I mean, you know, I mean, every marriage, you know, you got to accept the other person.

That's the only way it works.

Yeah, yeah.

The only time I get really mad at Mary is when I'm wrong.

Yeah.

It's only when I'm wrong.

And if she's wrong and I see it, it's like, oh, that's sweet.

You know, she's wrong.

But does she admit she's wrong?

Yeah, but not in the moment, but

later on.

She's incredibly trustworthy to turn around very shortly.

Well,

that's a great, great quality.

Oh, it's that is a great quality.

Because otherwise,

you're not going to grow because you're not going to tell your shitty little secrets.

Right.

And do you admit when you're wrong?

Only when it just becomes so blatantly funny that I'm trying to not, you know.

Yeah.

And listen, I'm wrong a lot.

Yeah.

I'm wrong a lot.

And

I usually admit it pretty quickly.

I mean, not always, but pretty quickly.

But that's the key.

I mean, you're living with somebody and you just have to accept.

Listen, everybody's got issues.

They all have to be with.

You have to accept that those things are working.

My father said when I was young, he said,

if there's something about the person that you're with that

annoys you.

Know for a fact that that is never going to go away.

So if that annoying thing is something you can live with, he said, it's like a fly buzzing around your ear.

You're okay, you'll be okay.

But if you expect that annoying thing to disappear, then you're going to be in for trouble.

Yeah.

It's like we're all imprinted with all this

pile of stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

And that doesn't go away.

No.

You can choose or learn not to have a knee-jerk reaction and to be that person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Look what we're descending into here.

This is becoming, you know, a.

I'm not saying that I'm gonna make you cry i'm i'm kind of the barbara walters of the thing

okay wait you did all these amazing films the first one it sounded sounds like stand by me is the one that

made you go oh

I can be this other thing, which is touching, moving,

real, funny, amusing, but something really impactful later.

Yeah, that was the first film.

And people always ask me, well,

what is your favorite film of the ones, you know, make make 21 22 film whatever and like i always make the oh yeah well you love all your children even the crappy ones you know i mean so the film but the one that means the most man i don't know if it's the best whatever the one that means the most is stand by me because the first film was this the spinal tap which is a satire and my father had trafficked in satire his you know life the second one is the sure thing which is essentially a romantic comedy for young people and my father had done romantic comedies with doris day and James Garner and all this.

So I was in playing in a similar sandbox to what he was.

Stand by Me was something way, way different than anything he would have ever attempted.

It was, and it was a real extension of my sensibility.

It had humor in it.

It had nostalgia in it.

And it had melancholy in it.

It had all these things.

And

I said, this is really a representation of the way, of the kinds of films I would like to make.

And so if it's accepted, then, you know, if it's rejected, then I'm in trouble.

If it's accepted, then

I'm getting validated.

And it got accepted and it did well.

And I was, okay, okay.

These, I can marry humor with drama and it can be okay.

And I remember when I was 17, I was a, I was a, uh, an apprentice.

at the Bucks County Playhouse.

They were building scenery and that kind of thing.

And the first, one of the first plays they had there was A Thousand Clowns, which was a Herb Gardner play.

And it's very funny and very moving and dramatic.

And I'm looking at this and I'm going, wow, you can take something really dramatic and have real big laughs in it and marry them.

I said, if ever I get to do anything, that's the kind of thing I want to do.

So

I'm bad with names.

In my defense, not just age.

I've always been bad at names.

But who was in the movie of Thousand Clowns?

Thousand Clowns.

The Amazing.

Okay, it was

James Whitmore, I believe.

In the movie.

In the movie?

Yeah.

Oh, oh, Jason Robarts.

Jason Robarts.

James Whitmore was in the, was in the thing we did.

Oh, oh, no.

Jason Robarts.

One of my favorite.

Jason Robarts.

Yeah, yeah.

And Marty Balsam is in it.

So an amazing movie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, it's, it's a great, it's a great film.

And, and, oh, and Hurt Gardner once said to us, he came to a to a uh a run-through of all in the family we used to you know like you guys would do cheers you know you'd have your run-through before you went on camera you know you'd do your run-through and then afterwards you take notes you know they come and they give you notes and da da and we had a thing where we all contributed you know i had written a number of scripts for the show and you know carol was a writer so When we did our

notes session, we'd all be sitting around, the writers, the producers, Norman, the actors, and we'd all trade notes, you know, and I'd say, hey, if you take that line and cut that and give that to Carol and maybe we lose that, you know, we'd all contribute.

And Herb Gardner is used to the theater where you don't change a word unless the author says it's okay.

And he's looking at this and he goes, wow, this is like creative communism here.

What are you doing?

You know, but he was like astounded by it.

And then the other thing he told me, he had directed a film.

I think it was a, I'm Not Rapperport, which was a, I think that's the film he directed.

And he said to me, he said, do you ever hear the

crew members say the silent schmuck?

And I said, what do you mean, the silent schmuck?

He says, well, you know, you're working and the cameraman will, you'll say, this is where I want the camera to be.

And the cameraman will say, you sure you want that?

Schmuck, schmuck.

Under the brush

because they think, they think they know better.

And so, yes, you hear the silent schmuck from everybody, the director, because everybody thinks that they know the best.

And yeah, so you're the silent schmuck.

I'm the perfect actor.

I have never, I do not have the brain, the storytelling brain.

I don't have the desire to be a director.

I want the directors to be way smarter than me.

But that's the best kind of actor because

then you're totally focused on what it is you have to do and what they want you to do.

I don't like acting and directing so much, but I was always, when I was doing All My Family, I was always looking at the other actors, thinking where the audience is, where the cameras are.

It's not the way to do it.

The way to do it is the way you do it.

You're in training to be a director.

Yeah, I was.

I was.

But I remember doing a Woody Allen movie.

I acted in one

called Bullets Over Broadway.

And I show up and I see that it's, you know, it's very dark.

It's outside at the Minetta Lane, you know, areas a little cafe.

And I'm saying, boy, this is really dark.

I don't know, unless they've created some kind of film stock I'm not aware of.

I don't know how to see it.

But it's Carlo de Palma, the D, is the director of photography.

It's Woody Allen.

I'm not going to say anything.

I'm an actor.

I don't want to, you know, I don't want to say.

So I go in there, I just do it and whatever.

Then I get a call the next day.

They looked at dailies.

They said it's a radio show.

We can't see anything.

It's black.

We have to reshoot it.

But, you know, you don't want to insinuate yourself if you're, you know, if it's somebody else's.

Isn't he or wasn't he, I don't know if he still does it, but the, wasn't he the

a third of his budget would be to reshoot?

Yes.

Yes.

He always, he always looked at the movie as a first draft.

Yeah.

And I remember Jeffrey Curlin when we were leaving said he says, see you at the reshoot.

Yeah.

He always knew that there was going to be, yeah, there's going to be a reshoot.

Tell me quickly, because I want to get to Norman.

How did you get hired?

Do you remember that moment?

Yeah, I mean, for all in the family.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, they had done two pilots at ABC that were rejected before it went to CBS and was done at CBS.

They came from England, right?

It came from England.

It was a show called Till Death Us Do Part, and it was very much,

you know, it's very much the way Archie Bunker's character is portrayed.

And in the first two pilots, they had two different sets of Mike and Glorias.

They had two actors that played, and those pilots got rejected.

And I think I auditioned for one of them, but I was not developed yet as an actor.

Then they were going to do it for CBS.

In the meantime, I started to work for Andy Griffith.

He had a new TV series called Headmaster, and I was one of the writers along with my writing partner, Phil Michigan.

We wrote some episodes, like four or five episodes for the new show.

One of the episodes we wrote was about a young teacher who falls in love with a student, a high school student.

And I played that character in the show norman saw that and he thought oh he's developing i mean he's developed and so they had me come back in i went back in and i auditioned uh with penny marshall who i was

i was living with at the time we were about to get married and

penny obviously didn't get the part and i got it because they said penny looked more like she would be gene stapleton's daughter but Sally Struthers looked more like Carol's daughter.

So

as you mentioned Penny, I want to mention Michelle.

So you guys met

during the shooting of?

Of when Harry Met Sally.

And this is an incredible story because what you see at the beginning

throughout when Harry Met Sally is all these stories of how people met.

And

it was, it came out of something very natural when I asked Alan Horn's father, you know, who was at a dinner party, says he was quiet.

I said, I said, Mr.

Mr.

Horn, how did you and Mrs.

Horn meet?

And all of a sudden, he lit up.

A guy who was not talking, and he said, I was in a Horn and Hearted restaurant, and I

saw this woman come in.

I turned to my friend.

I said, see that woman?

I'm going to marry that woman.

Two weeks later, we were married.

It's 50 years and we're still married.

I put that as the first story.

So all these stories are great.

And whenever you talk to people, how they meet.

So I'm in pre-production for when Harry Met Sally.

I'd been married for 10 years.

I'm now single for 10 years, making a mess out of my dating life, in and out of relationships, which became the basis for When Harry Met Sally.

And I'm looking at a picture on a coffee table on a premier magazine, the cover of premier magazine.

There's Michelle Pfeiffer.

And I thought, you know, I had had lunch with her, a professional lunch number months before, and I heard she was getting divorced.

I said, yeah, maybe

I'll call her.

I say this to Barry Sonnenfeld, who's the director of photography, who's now become a director.

He was a DP at the time.

I said, maybe I'll call Michelle Pfeiffer.

And he said, no, no, you're not going to call her.

I have a friend in New York.

Her name is Michelle Singer.

You're going to marry her.

I went, what?

Who is Michelle Singer?

Said, she's a friend of mine.

She's a photographer.

And the first question I asked, does she smoke?

And he said, yes, because Penny Marshall had smoked, you know, like I say, the state of North Carolina every day of her life.

But so I didn't want to, so we didn't meet.

And she didn't want to meet me because she heard I rejected the smoker.

So we didn't meet.

Now we're three quarters of the way shooting the picture.

We're on outside on a brownstone on the Upper West Side, and we're about to break for lunch.

I look across the street and I see Barry's, at the time, girlfriend, Susan, who's now married to him, and this other woman, and very attractive.

And I looked, I said, Barry, I said, Who's that with Susan?

He says, That's Michelle Singer.

I said, That's Michelle Singer.

He said, Yeah.

He said, I said, What are you doing?

He said, Well, when we break, we're going to go for lunch to docks.

You know, it's over on the west side because you break for lunch in New York.

You go to whatever's closest.

I said, Well, maybe I'll join you, you know.

So I go to the lunch and I'm sitting there with Billy and Meg.

No, Meg wasn't there.

Carrie Fisher and Nora Efron, Bruno Kirby, and Nora Efron and Michelle are talking over in the corner there.

And Michelle says, I can make better vichy soise than this.

And I'm thinking, boy, what a bitch.

I'm really attracted to her.

May I remind you that she's actually in the other room listening to this?

Okay.

Yeah, no,

I just thought maybe you'd forget.

But I'm really attracted to her.

So

after lunch, lunch, I kind of walk up to her and chat her up a little bit.

We talk a little bit.

And I thought, oh, you know, and so I asked Barry, I said, you know, find out if it's okay if I call her.

I said, he said, it's okay.

I call her.

And we started seeing each other.

We didn't, you know, during this film.

And

one thing led to another.

And,

you know, I changed the ending of the movie.

Yeah, because at the end, I had, I didn't figure I was ever going to be with anybody.

I couldn't figure out how to be with anybody and i had it where harry and sally don't get together they run into each other in new york they talk a little bit and then they walk in opposite directions but i meet michelle and i said well i see how this works and i and i changed it so that they you know i reshot the ending where billy you see billy running and seeing uh meg at the new year's eve party Thank you, Michelle.

Yeah, thank you, Michelle.

And what I hear, and this is what I've heard, is that people who like that movie will put it on at 10.30 at night so that it ends with the Happy New Year thing.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah.

Isn't that a cool thing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that what we do for a living does affect create community and a sense of belonging out there in the world.

And I think it used to do it more than it does now.

I agree.

And we have to be careful.

And I think, because, you know, I've told this story many times, but when All in the Family, and and by the way, a lot of young people didn't even heard of All in the Family.

This is a show that was number one for five years straight.

They never even heard of it.

But when we were on, we were number one in the country for five years.

And every single week,

a country of 200 million people,

40 to 45 million people would watch that show.

Unbelievable.

And there was no DVR.

There's no Ti-Vo.

There's no...

There's no tapes.

If you wanted to watch it, you had to watch it when it was on.

That meant 40 to 45 million people are having a shared experience.

And it is community.

It is a communal thing.

And then you talk about it the next, you know, when you ever saw them or at the office.

Now you have a show on, whether it's, you know, on cable, I mean, or I mean, on streaming or it's on the air.

And if you get 10 million people, that's a big hit.

And they don't even see it at the same time.

They see it at different times.

You can't even.

discuss a show.

Did you see the latest white lotus?

No, no, don't tell me.

I'm only on episode number thing, or I only saw the first two seasons, whatever.

And so that communal thing that you're talking about, I think I worry that

it's fraying.

I do too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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This is a good place to switch gears for me, if you don't mind.

And if we don't have to go here, if you don't want to, but this has been your life.

You are a political,

not partisan necessarily, but political animal.

Politically active.

I have been.

And Norman is one of my heroes, what he did in life with his success.

And he was always encouraging to me when I started being an ocean advocate.

He was always there, always encouraging.

And

I did not have the, obviously, the relationship you did, but I literally would, you know,

just about get down to my knees when he was sitting and talk to him whenever I could.

And I know you had this, he had the same impact on you.

What do you think was the first, do you remember back of first overtly?

Oh,

I'm going to take this on and do it.

I know you did a lot with education,

but was there stuff before that?

Well,

what I got from Norman, and he was like a second father to me.

He really was.

I was closer to him.

The only one, my father was the only one I was closer to.

But when he started People for the American Way, which was all about a separation of church and state, which is about, you know, everybody should be allowed to pray and believe how they want or not believe at all, and that it should not be brought into the public, into the schools and public places like that.

When he started People for the American Way, I saw, oh, I see.

You can use your platform,

your show business platform, and whatever fame you got, and you can put it towards something you believe in and make a difference.

And that was the first time I saw that you could marry those two things.

So the first thing I did was a thing on early childhood.

I passed a thing here in California, Practice in 10.

Yeah.

And I made, I took it upon myself to

make sure that I was not thought of as just an actor.

And at the time, a meat head, you know, who was from all the family.

I studied and learned everything I could.

It was a natural progression from what I felt could be done to help

society.

If you could nurture children early on in their lives, they're less likely to become drug addicts or early pregnancies or,

you know,

go into crime in some way.

And I learned everything I needed to know about it, about how the brain develops in the first three years and so on.

So that when I faced reporters, I could answer second, third, fourth, fifth tier questions.

I could answer everything.

And I knew they could not go, oh, he's an actor, he's a thing.

And so I got this thing passed.

And we went up against the tobacco industry in California.

Because the idea was, well,

we're going to tax tobacco to use money for early childhood for the first five years.

And I got it passed barely because they had 40 million bucks they threw at us.

We had a very small budget.

And then Governor Davis at the time asked me if I wanted to chair the state commission that oversaw the implementation of the act, which was at the time about $750 million a year.

It's now much less because part of it was to raise cigarette taxes and that reduced people smoking, which was also a good thing.

So I did that for seven years.

I was up in Sacramento all the time and I worked on this.

And the first time I,

you know, commissioned a meeting and was chairing the meeting, I said to everybody, and it's public hearing, they're public, I said, look, I said, I'm an actor.

I said, today I'm going to act like a commissioner, but I will become a commissioner.

I will understand how this.

So I did it for seven years.

And we got a lot done.

And it's still, the first five is still going on here in California.

Then after that, I worked environmentally to stop Washington Mutual from building a city in the Santa Monica Mountains.

And

it's still now pristine there and Amiston Ranch.

And then we, with Michelle, we filed the first lawsuit, first federal case that made it to the Supreme Court to provide marriage equality, which is

which now is the law of the country.

And that one is in danger a little bit, just like

everything is in danger now, just like they gutted the Voting Rights Act and they've gutted, you know.

Education Department.

Yes, all of that,

we're going to see gay rights being attacked as well.

And so we're in a very, very, very tough time right now.

And, you know, 250 years it took to build this democracy in fits and starts and not always pretty.

And, you know, but we've always managed managed to move forward.

I'm hoping that this is a massive step back that we're taking right now in hopes of us moving forward.

But it's scary because it may not be.

I mean, there's it's much easier to break some, it takes six months.

This guy's breaking 250 years of constitutional democracy down.

And I don't know if we're going to be able to build it back so quickly.

It's scary.

I mean, you know, I talk with, you know, my wife.

Her mother was in Auschwitz, and she lost her entire family in Auschwitz.

She was the only one that survived.

And

my uncle Charlie, my dad's brother, was at the D-Day, part of the D-Day invasion and fought in 11 major battles in the Second World War.

And millions and millions of people died so that we could preserve democracy and so that we could say, never will this form of fascism be on our shores.

And here we are, 80 years later, and we're in the midst of it.

And make no mistake, that is what is happening right now.

And to people who go, oh, that's

an exaggeration or unfair comparison, you say what?

Well,

it's only an unfair comparison when you think of exactly what Hitler did.

I mean, Trump is not, you know,

invading countries and doing all that.

But what he is doing is trying to turn America into an autocracy in the model of Vladimir of Putin.

And if you look at what Putin did when he took over, he made the oligarchs pay.

Any deal that they wanted to cut,

he would get a piece of.

And if you've seen lately, Trump is basically trying to partner with the big corporations, you know, the national

American-based corporations and others, so that the government gets a cut.

And I'm sure it means he will get a cut.

And what it does then is it starts to control not just, he's controlling the courts, he's controlling

the universities, he's controlling

law firms, he's doing everything he can to control everything.

Once he has business on his side and not pushing back, then you have the danger of becoming an autocratic state.

Not in the way Hitler did it, but in the way

the modern autocrats like Putin, like Erdogan, like, you know, those.

Right.

Yeah.

I sit here.

I mean, LA, it's

kind of vibrant right now because of immigration and ICE and how they're going about it and not really trying to fix the problem, but just use it as a fear.

tactic, I feel.

And I go, okay, and because I see friends, people I've known, people I admire, people who work hard,

staying in their homes.

You know, well, afraid to go out.

I mean,

it is about fear and it's about cruelty.

This is, you know, playing to a very, very specific base.

It's a white Christian nationalist base that wants to have a white Christian nation, believes that America was founded as a white Christian nation.

We did a documentary called God and Country, which is about that.

But, you know, if you look at his coalition,

it's those people who are, you know,

want

to push their religion or push their ideas on it.

Then you have a group of very, very wealthy people who are selfish and who don't care about anything but that.

And he's put this coalition together.

And a lot of people who are ignorant and don't, you know, racism, the racism is at the core of a lot of this.

And that's a very dangerous cauldron

of a constituency that he's put together.

Right.

So I question myself.

So I look at myself and go, well, wait,

what are you really doing, Ted?

Are you hiding behind your, well, I will try to put light and good and caring and nurturing out into the world.

And I do and I want to.

And that is kind of who I am.

Well, so what?

Is that enough?

I keep looking at what do you do?

But you can only do what you can do.

I mean, you know, we have, we're limited with our power, whatever.

I always look for, you know, this is something, this is a conversation that my wife, Michelle, and I have had every day since Trump was elected.

What do we do?

What can we do?

And I keep saying, what can we do?

I don't know.

I initially thought, okay, if we win the midterms and not just win them, but win them by a large, you know,

swamping 30, 40 seats, whatever, then it at least sends a message that says the country is not behind what you're trying to do.

But now he's gerrymandering in Texas.

He's gotten the Texas legislature to agree to flip five Democrat seats into becoming Republican seats.

Gavin Newsom is fighting back here in California, which I admire immensely, and he's trying to fight fire with fire.

But the truth of the matter is, if you look at the map and every state decides to do, to go down that road,

we're not going to win.

We're not going to win if everybody does that.

So they can gerrymander us out of, because all of our

constituents are in urban, mostly, mostly not all, but many of them are in urban areas.

And so

it makes the carving of these borders to skew towards the Republicans.

So if we don't win in the midterms, then

I don't know what you can do except to win big in 2028 and then start to turn the ship around, which is going to take years, if not decades, because he has taken such a wrecking ball to our democracy and to our Constitution and to the rule of law.

He doesn't care about the rule of law.

He breaks it every day.

And if there's a ruling he doesn't like, he doesn't pay attention to it.

He won't live up to it.

And, you know, it was said when they were finished, the Constitutional Convention, when people came out, they said, what do we have?

What have you guys given us?

And they said,

you know, a republic if you can keep it, because it's fragile.

Democracy is fragile.

It's all based on whether or not we all share a set of values and that we all honor the rule of law and that we all honor the Constitution.

But if you don't care about the Constitution, if you don't care about the rule of law, then

what avenue do you have?

If you don't have a legal recourse because you have somebody who says, screw the law, then where do you go?

It has to be some kind of political movement, and the political movement has to happen hopefully in the midterms.

But I don't have a lot of faith right now.

But if not, then in the next presidential election, and who's going to emerge?

Right now, Gavin Newsom is the, you know, and J.B.

Pritzker are the only two that I see on the horizon.

Gavin is fighting like a dog.

I mean, he's out there calling every lie out and hitting very hard.

So,

you know, we've got to get behind somebody who's willing to fight to, you know, to keep this democracy.

I mean, we want it to survive.

We want it to be the beacon to the world.

We want it to be the shining city on the hill.

Because if it succeeds, what it means is that a diverse group of people, religions,

gender,

nationality, sexuality, all can live in one place.

And if we can show that, that means that bodes well for the whole world.

It says, yes, you can put all these people in one place and we can live together.

Right now, Trump is making it so we can't live together.

He doesn't want it.

He's trying to divide it, and he's doing a pretty good job of it.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

Get me off my soapbox.

No, no, no, no.

Spin on that.

The end continues.

September 12th.

Get back to that.

No, it's good.

It's good to talk to them.

So I feel like I should be talking to people on both sides of the fence to try to literally understand because I don't.

And I do know that

I can be a condescending judgmental dick sometimes when I look at people.

I go, wait, why are you doing this?

You know, this is, you're hurting yourself.

You're hurting your farms.

You're hurting your.

Well, you know, if if you look at the...

But I do, but I am a, I do know that if I were on the other side of my condensate, condemn, you know,

yeah, that I would be pissed too.

Yeah.

I'd want to flip me the bird.

And I know there's a lot of that.

Yeah.

Well, you know, you know, the elected officials,

the Republican elected officials, many, many, many of them know what's going on.

They know better, but they're also worried about their power base and they're worried of not getting elected and all that stuff.

It's a show of real weakness.

There's no profiles in courage coming out of the Republican Party right now.

Some of them are true believers.

Don't get me wrong.

Some of them are true believers and believe exactly what Trump is putting forward.

But a big chunk of them are saying, no, no, this is ridiculous.

You listen to what J.D.

Vance said about Donald Trump or what Marco Rubio said about Donald Trump or what Lindsey Graham said about Donald Trump before he was elected.

You just play that.

They've done 180s.

Every one of them has done 180s because they're frightened.

They're frightened of losing their power base.

Yeah.

Ha ha.

You know, it's okay.

Here's something I got.

I mean, in my desire to have everyone like me.

Yeah.

Well, I like you.

Thank you.

So for one down,

it's good to remind myself,

yes.

Yes, it's good to be nurturing and caring and loving and try to provide hope.

That is who I am.

But there's a big, big real world out there.

So don't be naive, Ted.

And this is a little bit of the real world.

So I appreciate it.

Thank you for talking about it.

Yeah, no,

I'm happy to do this.

I'm

happy to do it.

I mean, I've been speaking out for a long time.

And, you know, I was on Twitter.

I've been not on Twitter anymore, but I used to be on Twitter.

And I built up a pretty good following.

I had like two and a half million people.

And all I did was talk about politics.

That's all I ever did on that thing.

And

the reactions I got, it was just astounding.

My kids would read it and they go, Dad, what are they saying about you?

You know, it started out libtard, libtard.

That's okay.

I don't care about that.

But then they started saying, pedophile, and you're on Epstein's Island and all this stuff.

And it's just, you know, the power of social media and disinformation is, and AI is frightening, frightening, because

that's the

basis for an autocrat to be able to take over is you control the media in such a way that you confuse people and they don't know what's true and what's not true, what's real, what's not real.

And you can't believe your eyes.

Yeah, and so you want to say, he comes along and says, I'm the only one who

can point you in the right direction.

Sorry, forgive me.

Do you have grandchildren?

No.

not yet not yet.

But you have children.

I do.

And

okay, I think, you know, well, I can't turn to my grandchildren and say it's kind of hopeless.

You have to turn to your grandchildren and go, here's the hope.

Here's hope.

Here's love and hope.

Well, there is hope.

And here's where I think there is hope.

In every single one of us, there's good and evil.

I mean, the greatest story, Star Wars, it's a good versus evil.

And there's that battle.

It goes on.

in the in the world it goes on within each of us where we have evil impulses and we have good impulses.

And the hope is that good impulses, the better angels, as they say, win out.

And I believe they can.

You know, history will show that there's always been wars and so on.

But, you know, in fits and starts, America has become better and better over the years.

So like I say, this may be a huge step back that we're taking, but ultimately, I think, I know that the positive part of me thinks we can go forward and we have to preserve this.

We have to have an example that we can show the rest of the world to say, this is the way we should all live together as one.

People, I was just in the UK and people are looking at like, what's going on in America?

What is happening there?

You know, we used to look to America as the place of the beacon of hope.

Now it's like you've gone to the dark side, you know, and

you can't argue it.

They're right.

But the light side, the force and the evil and the Darth Vader, we can win.

We can win, but we have to stay.

We have to jump in.

We have to jump in and stay vigilant.

And you tell your grandkids that, you know, you and I may not leave this world seeing it where we want it to be, but ultimately it can be there.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Really fun talking to you.

It was great to talk.

Smart, smart, smart.

Thanks.

Thanks.

It was great to talk to you.

I love talking to Rob Reiner.

I love the community that I am privileged to be part of, those people who try to make the world giggle.

It was really fun to talk to him.

Thank you.

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