Martin Scorsese’s Rob Reiner Essay: ‘It Breaks My Heart’

Martin Scorsese honored the late Reiners in an essay published in The New York Times, writing, “Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michele. From now on, I’ll have to use the past tense, and that fills me with such profound sadness. But there’s no other choice.”

The Reiners, aged 78 and 70, were found dead in their Brentwood home on Dec. 14 with knife wounds. Their 32-year-old son, Nick Reiner, has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder.

Scorsese first got to know Rob Reiner shortly after moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when he started going to get-togethers hosted by George Memmoli and filled with comedians and actors.

“Rob and I were both Eastern transplants, in a way,” Scorsese wrote. Reiner came from show business royalty, his parents being the performers Carl and Estelle Reiner. “This was 100 percent New York humor, and it was in the air I breathed.”

“Right away, I loved hanging out with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other. He was hilarious and sometimes bitingly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over the room,” Scorsese wrote. “He had a beautiful sense of uninhibited freedom, fully enjoying the life of the moment, and he had a great barreling laugh. When they honored him at Lincoln Center, Michael McKean did a bit, which was a brilliant parody of solemn official tribute speeches. Before he got to the punchline, Rob laughed so hard you could hear it throughout the auditorium.”

Scorsese’s favorite film directed by Reiner is “Misery,” which he described as “a very special film, beautifully acted by Kathy Bates and James Caan.” And he wrote that “This Is Spinal Tap” is “in a class of its own … an immaculate creation.” When Scorsese was casting his 2013 film “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he “immediately thought of Rob” to play the father of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort.

“He could improvise with the best,…