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Rob Reiner beam as he greets me. “You’ve seen Stand By Me 100 times?” he asks. I nod sheepishly. “Then you probably know it better than I do.” It’s August 2006, 20 years after Reiner’s coming-of-age weepie was first released, and I’m sitting in his office at Castle Rock Entertainment, the LA-based production company he co-launched in 1987. On the walls hang posters of Reiner’s beloved movies – This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, Misery, A Few Good Men – but our attention is fixed on a modest TV as Stand By Me begins.
I’m here in Beverly Hills to write an anniversary article for a film magazine, but it’s also a pinch-me moment. As a teen, I’d watched Stand By Me on loop, identifying with the four protagonists – fragile, wannabe-writer Gordie (Wil Wheaton), tough-but-sensitive Chris (River Phoenix), wildcard joker Teddy (Corey Feldman) and put-upon Vern (Jerry O’Connell) – as they share their grief, insecurities and mistrust of adults.
OK, I never hiked up miles of railway track to eyeball a dead body, but my friends were everything to me, plugging the ragged hole left by my parents’ divorce. Like Gordie, I felt lost at home, and like Chris, I was looked down upon because, in my village in the 80s, families did not break up. But my closest circle of pals made everything all right. Together we watched Stand By Me, and like the kids in the film, we never stopped with the banter but could also, when needed, put an arm around each other’s shoulders.
We start to watch the film. “Gordie feels so disconnected,” says Reiner as the slight, doe-eyed boy endures a conversation with his father. “It’s a theme that runs through the whole film. It’s all about him feeling that his father doesn’t love him.” Reiner turned the thought personal as he spoke of his own father, Carl Reiner. “He was a big force. I felt that he didn’t see me.”
For the younger Reiner, who had previously played Meathead in sitcom All in the Family and directed comedy features This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing, Stand By Me was a conscious move to escape his father’s shadow. Though peppered with one-liners and ripe with adventure, it was the bassline of melancholy that runs through Stephen King’s source novella, The Body, that vibrated through Reiner’s core. Like Gordie, Reiner was 12 years old in 1959, when the action takes place, and he too was “the invisible boy” at home. “Stand by Me means more to me than any of my other films,” he murmured.
As we watch, a curious thing happens. Our running commentary begins to dry up, and we have to repeatedly force ourselves to begin speaking again. Partly it’s because we’re pulled into the movie we’ve both seen so many times before, but also it’s down to the personal memories stirred.
“It makes me look back at my own childhood with nostalgia,” says Reiner, and he seems relieved to snap back to speaking about production on the film: shooting for 60 sun-soaked days in Oregon during the summer of 1985; running workshops for his young leads; taking the boys river rafting to encourage genuine bonds of friendship.
At the end of the film, Gordie and co have escaped junkyard dog Chopper, outrun the train on a vertiginous trestle, and plucked off some pesky, alarmingly bloated leeches after an ill-advised dip in a forest swamp. Together we watch in respectful silence as the dead kid is found and Gordie at last cries over the loss of his big brother, Denny (John Cusack). Now the boys are back in their small town of Castle Rock (yes, Reiner named his production company after it) and going their separate ways, innocence lost, friendships soon to be torn asunder.
Reiner is visibly moved when Chris waves goodbye and fades out of the frame. He listens to middle-aged Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss) explain how his best friend grew up to be a lawyer and was last week stabbed for trying to calm an argument between two strangers. “We had no idea that River was going to die [of an overdose, in 1993],” he says. “When you look at the scene now, it’s really chilling.”
That afternoon, we watched Stand By Me until the credits finished rolling to the tune of Ben E King’s title track, and then Reiner, who was every bit as genial as legend has it, said his own goodbyes. I think of that magical day often.
The next day I put on Stand By Me again, in honour of the director who helped define my generation, and whose film nursed and shaped me. I barely made it through the opening scene.
