Rob Reiner famously launched his filmmaking career with the 1984 mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap.” But now, after four decades of features, including such generational touchstones as “The Princess Bride” and “When Harry Met Sally…,” he’s made a legit documentary. The subject is close to Reiner’s heart and has been since they first met as teenagers at Beverly Hills High School: Writer, director, actor, comedian and cultural shaker-upper Albert Brooks.
“It’s like with any documentary, fake ones or real ones, you’re basically writing the film with the pieces of film,” said Reiner during a recent phone conversation as he was getting “Spinal Tap II” ready for a friends-and-family preview screening (“I’m very nervous because I don’t know … I’m anxious to see how people respond to it.”)
“There’s no script,” he continued of “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life” (a play on Brooks’ 1991 comedy “Defending Your Life,” with Meryl Streep). “It’s like putting together a jigsaw puzzle where there’s no picture on the box. For me, it was a little easier because I know the picture is Albert. It’s all going to be about Albert. And I know Albert as well as anybody. They always say, ‘How do you make a sculpture of an elephant?’ Well, you cut everything away that’s not an elephant. So I just made sure I cut away everything that wasn’t—
“Is this a weight thing? What are you talking about?” Brooks, who is also on the call, cuts in.
“No, no, it’s not a weight thing. I could have just as easily said a flamingo.”
“I’ll take snake.”
“OK, snake. So I cut away everything that wasn’t Albert.”
Even so, Reiner adds, “For me, it was tough because there’s just so much.”
The film illuminates a singular career that always was ahead of its time, as the men, now both 77, converse over a meal — in the style of “My Dinner With Andre” — at Matteo’s, an old-school Hollywood hangout once favored by the Rat Pack. They relish anecdotes from their 60-year friendship, while digging into the roots of Brooks’ radical approach to comedy, which made him a legendary guest on Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” and influenced generations of comics, and his prescient work as a filmmaker, which, among other things, forecast the rise of reality TV in 1979’s “Real Life.”
And then there’s an entire acting career beyond his own films, with memorable turns in everything from “Taxi Driver” to “Drive,” and an Academy Award nomination for supporting actor in “Broadcast News.”
For Brooks, it was a welcome occasion to remind those otherwise unaware that his resume includes more than voice acting for Disney animations.
“You know,” Brooks said, “for a while people would come up to me and be very nice and assume that I was born doing the fish and ‘Finding Nemo,’ and that was it. So it was nice to be able to say, like your parents do, ‘I was here a long time before you.’”
Reiner pulled together an extraordinarily rich array of archival material, including much that brings to life the worlds of Brooks’ parents: Harry Einstein, a master of Greek dialect comedy whose character Parkyakarkus was popular on the radio shows of Eddie Cantor and Al Jolson, and Thelma Leeds, a singer and actor who had a brief movie career before her marriage. “Some of the stuff of my mother I had never seen,” said Brooks (who was born, yes, Albert Einstein), noting a moment from the 1937 film, “The Toast of New York,” “where she comes down a long staircase and then sits on Cary Grant’s lap. That’s his first movie. He was like an extra. And I’m going, ‘Where did that come from?’”
Brooks’ revelation of how he figured out his father had died, immediately after slaying the crowd with a monologue at a 1958 Friars Club roast of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, was a big surprise to Reiner. The 11-year-old Brooks always went to sleep with the radio on, which his mother would turn off in the middle of the night. “The night his dad died, he woke up and the radio was still on, and he knew at that moment,” Reiner said. “I had never heard that, and that was pretty moving to hear.”
Significantly, Reiner gives flashbacks to Brooks’ stand-up routines some room to breathe. “You see a lot of documentaries about comedians … you just see a little blip,” Reiner said. “I wanted people to see enough of what he does to really understand how brilliant he is.”
Brooks, who has a role in the forthcoming James L. Brooks comedy “Ella McCay,” is happy to have his life — so far — so thoughtfully arrayed.
“If either of my kids have children, all they have to do is sit them down for 88 minutes and that’s it,” he said, “because I couldn’t explain to my kids who my dad was. They’d have to listen to old-time radio shows, and they were willing to try. Rob put it all in one place. I was so overwhelmed with that feeling of a very cool thing has been made that my kids can show their kids one day. It’s like the best home movie you could ever have. Yeah, and by the way, I don’t want it to be the end. Maybe we can do Part 2.”
