Rob Reiner, Michele Reiner and Nick Reiner at The Grove in August 2013 in Los Angeles. Nick has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his parents. Michael Buckner/Getty Images for Teen Vogue Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment I almost didn't have dinner with the Reiners. At the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, I was consumed with covering a slew of stories for my then-employer the L.A. Times. This included the stir around eventual best picture Spotlight, the buzzy Lenny Abramson movie Room and even a controversy over a court injunction stopping the screening of an Aretha Franklin concert documentary. The days were few and the news was great. So when a publicist I trusted said she wanted me to meet with Rob and Michele Reiner and two of their adult children for a movie they had made called Being Charlie, I was prepared to tell her no. Obviously Rob was a legend; I grew up on the holy texts of The Princess Bride and This Is Spinal Tap. But a movie dramatizing the addiction troubles of Nick, his little-known twentysomething son, on a busy weekend night with 10 other events? And it didn't even have distribution? This one just might have to pay the festival price. But the publicist pressed. "You won't regret it," she said. I relented. The dinner ended up being revealing, heartwarming and jarring. Related Stories Movies Critic's Appreciation: Rob Reiner Was So Much More Than a Capable Company Man General News Nick Reiner Revealed Violent Outburst, Family Issues and "Cocaine Heart Attack" on 2018 Podcast Taping Ever since news broke that Rob and Michele Reiner had been killed in their home - according to the LAPD, by a knife-wielding Nick - I have replayed every moment of that night of my mind. Every clang of the fork, every Rob-esque digression, every uncomfortable Nick shift in the chair. Everything that happened on the second-floor of that downtown Toronto restaurant as, with loud diners and obsequious servers and barside festival schmoozers creating a din, we sat at a corner table and talked about what it meant to be part of a family with a serious addict - to be a parent, to be a sibling, to be the addict themselves. With the aid of my notes, which I had kept digitally intact from that night, I rewound the DVR in my mind. Again and again. It was a decade ago, but alive in front of me. Directed by Rob and co-written by Nick, Being Charlie focuses on David, an accomplished actor now running for governor - clearly a Rob stand-in - and his drug-addicted son who feels like he is being pushed hard to get clean to avoid becoming an embarrassment to his famous father, the character a clear stand-in for Nick Reiner. The real-life son, who turned 22 on the day of our dinner, had just taken the stage with his father at the premiere a few blocks away. Then they made their way over to the restaurant with me. Nick was sober now, they said, after some 18 trips to rehab since his early teenage years, some of which he spent on the streets. And this movie was going to provide the happy ending to all that sadness. "Can you believe this boy?" Rob said as we sat down, beaming. Nick smiled uncomfortably. From the start, a pushing was evident. Rob wanted this story told - wanted, maybe not surprising for a man steeped in show business, for the movie to succeed where therapy had failed. But he also genuinely felt pride - "nachas," as he said, using the Yiddish word for parental joy. "I'm so proud; it's incredible. He's been through everything; it's so hard, you're in this position of no control. And how he's sober, here on his 22nd birthday, and he wrote this movie." Nick seemed less sure. He and a fellow addict had originally worked on a treatment for a TV series, so clearly he had some publicizing ambitions. Maybe he was getting cold feet now that his life would get shared with the world. Or maybe he just didn't want his story becoming part of his father's film universe. "It was tough at first, to think, 'Am I actually going to do this?'" Nick said after I prodded a little. "I really wasn't sure I wanted to do this. Am I really going to get it out there?" Rob jumped in. "That's part of being a creative person - you express it; you get it out there." The director looked lovingly at his wife. "Everybody's so open, and it's because of Michele." "Everybody is," she said, looking back at her husband. "But we didn't set out to do a public good. We had to do it for each other." We ordered, and Nick explained the ineffectiveness of rehab for him: "I just couldn't get by in these programs. I had resistance every time they tried to reach me." The elder Reiners described their own misgivings. "The program works for some people, but it can't work for everybody," Rob said. "When Nick would tell us that it wasn't working for him, we wouldn't