One month after Rob Reiner was killed in his home at the age of 78, the director will appear in a series of heartfelt interviews to share stories about his late father’s lifelong friendship with comedian and director Mel Brooks.
In Judd Apatow’s new two-part documentary, Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, Reiner appears several times to speak about the comedian’s 70-year friendship with his father, fellow comedian Carl Reiner.
Director David Lynch also appears in posthumous interviews throughout the two-part documentary, debuting on HBO Max on January 22.
“Mel was there when my dad died,” the younger Reiner says. According to Reiner, the Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs director was the first person to see his father after he collapsed in his home at age 98 in June of 2020. “My dad died right after that,” Reiner adds.
Brooks, 99, details the incident, noting he spent over an hour begging paramedics to keep administering life-saving aid to his best friend.
“I just didn’t want him to go. I wouldn’t accept it. I loved him so much,” Carl Reiner’s frequent collaborator recalls.
Reiner states that Brooks came by his family home for “months and months and months” afterwards to watch TV and eat dinner—a ritual Brooks and Carl Reiner shared for decades, captured in a 2012 episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee featured in the documentary.
“He was that close to my dad where he wanted to be close to him even when my dad was gone,” the When Harry Met Sally director explains.
The two men met in 1950 while working on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and were propelled to comedy stardom with their beloved sketch The 2000 Year Old Man, in which Carl Reiner’s straight man interviewer lobbed questions at Brooks’s from-another-era caveman. The act turned into several comedy albums, eventually winning a Grammy in 1998.
“My father was like a second banana; he never felt like he needed to be the star,” Rob Reiner says in the film. “He would push Mel into a corner, and that would make Mel explode with creativity and humor.”
“I always thought that, even though Mel was only like four years younger than my dad, he looked to my dad as a father figure,” Reiner says.
Brooks, who had lost his father when he was just two, agrees.
“I was always searching for some guidance from an older man. And Carl was nice and tall. I literally looked up to Carl,” Brooks jokes. “And Carl, for all his schtick and insanity, was wise and loving. I just said, ‘That’s my father,’ I felt that Carl was there. I was very close to him.”
Reiner, who was killed in his sleep in December alongside his 70-year-old wife, Michele Singer Reiner, recorded the interviews in May 2024, according to co-director Judd Apatow.
The couple’s son, Nick, 36, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and now stands trial for his parents’ deaths.
In another touching scene from the film, Brooks and the two Reiners recite the story of Rob’s first time meeting Brooks in unison. Apatow and co-director Michael Bonfiglio edit between interviews with the three comedians as they tell the story together, finishing each other’s sentences.
“I met Mel when I was four or five,” Rob Reiner says, conjuring up the moment. His father had invited Brooks over for the weekend and told Reiner that “a man” would be coming by.
“At about six in the morning, I heard, ‘Is that the man? That’s the man,’” Brooks says with a laugh.
“To me, that’s who Mel was,” Reiner recalls with glee. “He was the man.”
