I watched Stand By Me with Rob Reiner. The movie and the man changed my life Rob Reiner

RUbbe Reiner smiles as he greets me. “You’ve seen Stand By Me 100 times?” he asks. I nod shyly. “Then maybe you know that better than I do.” It’s August 2006, 20 years after Reiner’s tearful coming-of-age film was first released, and I’m sitting in his office at Castle Rock Entertainment, the Los Angeles-based production company he co-launched in 1987. On the walls hang posters of beloved Reiner films — This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, The Princess Bride, Misery, A Few Good Men — but our attention is on modest television like Stand By. I’m starting.

I’m here in Beverly Hills to write an anniversary article for a film magazine, but it’s also a poignant moment. As a teenager, I watched Stand By Me live, and got to know the four leads—fragile wanna-be writer Geordie (Wil Wheaton), tough but sensitive Chris (River Phoenix), suit clown Teddy (Corey Feldman) and hotheaded Fern (Jerry O’Connell)—as they shared their grief, insecurity and distrust of adults.

Well, I’d never climbed miles of railroad track to see a dead body, but my friends were everything to me, filling the jagged gap left by my parents’ divorce. Like Geordie, I felt lost in my home, and like Chris, people looked down on me because in my village in the 1980s, families didn’t break up. But my close circle of friends made everything okay. We watched Stand By Me together, and like the kids in the movie, we never stopped joking but could also, when needed, put our arm around each other’s shoulders.

We start watching the movie. “Jordi feels very disconnected,” Reiner says as the skinny, doe-eyed boy endures a conversation with his father. “It’s a theme that runs through the whole movie. It’s all about him feeling like his father doesn’t love him.” Reiner turned the idea into a character when he talked about his father, Karl Reiner. “He was such a force. I felt like he didn’t see me.”

For the younger Reiner, who previously played Meathead on the 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. Although it is full of one-liners and full of adventure, it is the bass line of melancholy that runs through Stephen King’s original novel, The Flesh, that shook Reiner’s heart. Like Jordi, Rainer was 12 years old in 1959, when the events took place, and was also the “invisible boy” in the house. “‘Stand By Me’ means more to me than any of my other films,” he murmured.

As we watch, something strange happens. Our running comments begin to dry up, and we have to repeatedly force ourselves to start speaking again. This is partly because we are drawn to a film we have seen many times before, but also because of the personal memories it evokes.

“It makes me look back on my childhood with nostalgia,” says Reiner, who seems at ease talking about the film’s production: shooting 60 sunny days in Oregon during the summer of 1985; Running workshops for its youth; River rafting for boys to encourage true friendship bonds.

At the end of the film, Geordie and his teammates escape from Chopper’s dog in the junkyard, outrun a train on a rotating platform, and pull out some annoying, alarmingly bloated leeches after an ill-advised dive into a jungle swamp. Together we watch in respectful silence as the child is found dead, and Geordie finally cries over the loss of his older brother, Denny (John Cusack). Now the boys return to their small town of Castle Rock (yes, Reiner named his production company after it) and go their separate ways, innocence lost, and friendships quickly torn apart.

Reiner is visibly moved when Chris waves goodbye and fades out of the frame. He listens to middle-aged Geordie (Richard Dreyfuss) explain how his best friend grew up to be a lawyer and was stabbed last week for trying to calm down a fight between two strangers. “We had no idea River was going to die [of an overdose, in 1993]”When you look at the scene now, it’s really chilling,” he says.

That afternoon, we watched Stand By Me until the credits finished rolling to the tune of Ben E King’s theme song, and then Reiner, who was as sweet as legend has it, said goodbye. I think about that magical day often.

The next day, I screened Stand By Me again, a tribute to the director who helped define my generation, and whose film nurtured and shaped me. It was my 119th time watching it, but the first time I couldn’t get through the opening scene without crying.