His career spanned decades. The blockbusters he directed, especially in the 80s and 90s, had everyone talking: Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, A Few Good Men, Ghosts of Mississippi… But this page isn’t about Rob Reiner’s film legacy, aptly written about and celebrated everywhere. It’s about a tragic irony: A Hollywood legend shot The American President in 1995; a sitting president disparaged him, the day he died.
Rob Reiner’s star on Hollywood Boulevard.
Let’s juxtapose Trump’s crude words on Truth with the fictional president’s speech (Michael Douglas as Andrew Shepherd). Trump: “Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.”
Michael Douglas as Andrew Shepherd in The American President: “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship, you’ve got to want it bad, because it’s going to put up a fight. It’s going to say: You want free speech, let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land is the land of the free, then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”
‘The American President’
On one hand Reiner’s and screenwriter Sorkin’s vision of the presidency –flawed, but always dignified, always uplifting– and with it their vision for the American democracy. On the other hand, the mean, vindictive, psychotic world of President Trump –no different from fictional senator Bob Rumson, the ‘villain’ played by Richard Dreyfuss in the 1995 movie. “We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them,” warns President Shepherd (nomen omen). “And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections: You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time and you talk to them about family and American values…” Prophetic!
