By Ray Bennett
Fame and popularity can so easily go to the head of entertainers and so it seemed the first time I met Rob Reiner when he was still in his 20s and starring in the smash hit TV sitcom ‘All in the Family’. Just shy of ten years later, I was pleased to discover that he had changed completely.
Reiner was with a bunch of other celebrities at the Hiram-Walker distilling facility in Windsor, Canada, in 1976 in connection with a charity tennis tournament across the river in Detroit sponsored by the liquor firm’s Lauder’s Scotch brand. Funds raised on the tour went to the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
Charlton Heston, Lloyd Bridges, Chad Everett (‘Medical Centre’), Chris Connelly (‘Peyton Place’) and Desi Arnaz Jr. were among the group and, covering the event for The Windsor Star, I chatted to several of them over lunch in the plant’s reception centre.
Afterwards, we all toured the bottling plant where I was in for a surprise. A mugshot ran on my column in the newspaper and I had made quite a few radio and television appearances. For a time, I participated in a current affairs programme with our editorial writers on Detroit’s PBS-TV station. All of which meant that, locally, I was reasonably well-known.
Still, I didn’t expect it when a couple of girls in the bottling plant asked me for my autograph. ‘No, no, I’m just with the paper,’ I said as Reiner and Arnaz Jr. looked on. ‘We know,’ the girls said, ‘and we’d still like your autograph.’ I signed and Reiner, with a disgusted expression on his face, said to Arnaz Jr. ‘Makes you wonder what the fuck we’re doing here.’
In 1985, I was in Los Angeles where I landed an assignment to profile a young actor named John Cusack who was starring in Reiner’s second picture following the cult classic ‘This is Spinal Tap’, a likeable film titled ‘The Sure Thing’ that I reviewed for Canadian TV Guide’s Video+Movies section. I arranged to speak to the actor and the director for stories in the magazine and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
One of five children of Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Richard Cusack, John Cusack was 18 at the time but with a lot of screen work in industrial films, commercials and three features behind him he was confident and engaging.
In ‘The Sure Thing’, he plays a high school graduate whose attitude to girls is changed when he meets two opposites, one studious and standoffish (played by Daphne Zuniga) and the other gorgeous and available (Nicolette Sheridan). Cusack said he could identify with the role: ‘High school girls get a little annoying after a while. There’s a lot of girls out there who are beautiful but don’t have a lot upstairs. Guys still look for those girls who just kind of put out without giving you a headache. I got the chance to go out with some beautiful stupid girls in high school and I got bored with them too.’
He said he hated high school because of the social aspects and concentrated on acting. Switching back and forth from Hollywood soundstages to suburban Chicago classrooms didn’t help: ‘I would go and do a film and meet just beautiful older women. I would start something off but then the film’s over and it’s back to Chicago. That was frustrating.’ He already had a wise head on young shoulders. ‘The Sure Thing’ might be a hit or not – it was – but he said, ‘That’s all right because it’s a good film. If I’m good in it then I was good in a good film. If you’re good in a bad film, that’s something else.’
Cusack appeared so unaffected by his success that my memory of Reiner’s youthful boorishness made me apprehensive about interviewing the director. Maybe it was the learning curve he had gone through collaborating with three other talented comedic creators – Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer – but he had become the man all his friends and coworkers have described. In fact, he reminded me very much of his father, Carl Reiner, who had been gracious and candid when I interviewed him about his film ‘All of Me’ a few months earlier during the Toronto International Film Festival. Years later, when I chatted with Rob Reiner in London at the U.K. launch of his film ‘Bucket List’, he was just as relaxed and open.
Back in 1985, the filmmaker welcomed me to his office and gave me as much time as I needed. He spoke enthusiastically about Cusack and admitted that he cast him in ‘The Sure Thing’ because ‘he reminded me of me’. Zuniga, he said, was the girl he would have been in love with at college.
The title role had to be the epitome of a Southern California fantasy girl, a blonde on the beach with a great tanned body in a string bikini and Reiner was hilarious speaking of casting Nicolette Sheridan. ‘When she walked into my office,’ he said, ‘I acted like Jerry Lewis for about ten minutes’.
Sheridan read well but Reiner said he knew she was the right girl for the part when he explained that he would have to ask to see her in a bikini. Sheridan smiled at him and said, ‘I don’t think you can handle it.’ I thought of that years later when I saw Reiner’s film ‘A Few Good Men’ and heard Jack Nicholson’s iconic unscripted line ‘You can’t handle the truth!’
At the London launch, I asked Rob Reiner about a line in ‘The Bucket List’ when Jack Nicholson says to Morgan Freeman, playing a character named Carter, ‘Mind if I call you Ray? My main man, Ray.’ Rob said, ‘Oh, Jack came up with that. It wasn’t in the script. I don’t know why but it fit Jack’s character and everyone likes a Ray, don’t they?’ Then he clapped me on the back.
How quiet scenes help make ‘The Great Escape’ so thrilling
By Ray Bennett
John Sturges’s terrific prisoner-of-war adventure ‘The Great Escape’ is an annual treat around this time of year and remained great entertainment when I watched it on BBC-TV for the enth time. Elmer Bernstein’s splendid score was the first film soundtrack recording I ever bought and it is still thrilling. For me, too, some of the best scenes, which actually enhance the drama and chase sequences, are quiet ones between James Garner, as Hendley, the scrounger, and British actor Donald Pleasance playing forger Blythe, who loses his sight.
There appears to be genuine chemistry between the two actors and when I interviewed Garner in the Seventies, he agreed. ‘I felt so,’ he said. ‘I loved it! I just think Donald is so marvellous and it was a good relationship. We got to do some things on our own in there.’
Garner lauded director Sturges for being very accommodating. ‘He was very good about that,’ he said. ‘As long as we stuck to the point of it, we could change a little dialogue. I wrote about three scenes in the picture. They were small character things, you know, like the stealing of the equipment they needed for the forgeries.’
A poignant sequence in the film is when Hendley suspects and then sees that Blythe is going blind. ‘I really loved working with Donald,’ Garner told me. ‘As a matter of fact, John apologised profusely to me because there were two scenes that you never saw that were really absolutely wonderful. Donald was fantastic and they were beautifully shot and everything but they were left on the cutting-room floor so we could get Steve McQueen on his motorcycle.’
Garner was pragmatic about what made the film so exciting. ‘That turned out to be, I guess, the right thing to do,’ he said, ‘but it would have been better for Donald and me to keep those scenes. You have to look at the picture as a whole and it was the right thing to do: get McQueen on that bike.’
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