A Tribute to Rob Reiner (1947-2025).

We first met through Stephen King.  I can't say I know how strange that must sound.  All I can do is tell you that this is the honest truth.  I knew about the writer before I ever became aware of the director.  Even then, it all came about through sheer luck.  What's even more remarkable to me is that it all happened when I was still at such a young and impressionable age.  This is how it all came about.  None of us ever met in person, to begin with.  Instead, all that happened is my parents thought it would be a good idea to allow me to watch a movie.  The exact details are a bit sketchy at this point, because it was so long ago.  Either they sat down to watch this film with me, or else they just slipped their old VHS copy of Stand By Me into the cassette player and then just let me take the whole thing on my own.  If I had to take a guess, then the second scenario is the most likeliest possibility.  Even as a child I was prone to being solitary, and my parents, to their forever credit soon figured out that was just how I liked things.  So, they left me in front of the Idiot Box with what had to have been one of the first home video copies of a book adaptation that has since gone on to become a priceless classic.  It should go without saying that it's earned all the praise it gets.  Rob Reiner's 1985 adaptation of a Stephen King novella with the unpromising title of "The Body" has to stand as one of the textbook examples of what happens when a page to screen translation somehow manages to please every single face in the aisles.

It doesn't hurt that the whole thing is anchored by a solid narrative throughline, one that is able to elevate the otherwise green performances of its young cast into something that has since rightly been regarded as iconic.  It also happens to be very quotable at the same time.  This seems to have been something of a running bonus with most of the director's efforts.  Rob's work always tended to have this way with words.  In almost every film he ever made, there would be these moments where the quality of the dialogue was able to carve out a permanent shelf space in the mind of the viewer.  There are so many out there, and I'm sure whoever is reading this might have their favorites: "These go to eleven"; "I'll have what she's having"; "Inconceivable"!, "You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means"; "You can't handle the truth"; "I'm your number one fan"; "As you wish".  And who can forget the perennial observation that "It's such a fine line between clever and stupid".  I think it's possible to pinpoint an explanation for why the director was able to turn his films into the kind of meme factories that have more or less guaranteed their place for all time in the memories of generations.  

There's also a bit of an irony involved with how Rob was able to do this, considering that it all relies on the kind of strategy that some might not expect.  It's because Reiner seems to have operated on a clear-eyed understanding that even the best composed image is mute without a good word to lend it its voice.  In other words, he seems to have had this intuitive understanding that all film relies just as much on the quality of the script (of the text, in other words) a whole lot more sometimes than even the pictures on the screen.  It's one of those artistic realizations which should be self-evident, yet it seems to confuse a lot of viewers for some reason that I still can't fathom.  We tend to create this artificial separation between words on the page, and images on the screen in a way that makes it difficult for a lot of us to to sift and weigh the value of either.  Perhaps it also doesn't help that sometimes this disconnect can be warranted under the right perspective.  My own take on this issue is that words take primacy over the image, and here's the reason why.  A line of prose is a description of something, while any attempt to dramatize the letters in the story will always have to amount to an approximation, no matter how much quality and craft is placed into the set decoration, camera angle, or the lighting.  To give a perfect idea of what I mean, ask yourselves how you would describe the secondary world of Florin, which is the main location for all of the narrative action in The Princess Bride?  I think we'd surprise ourselves on that score.

It might come as a shock to others when we each realize that we all have our own pictorial ideas of what the home of Westley and Buttercup looks like, and that all other attempts to picture it pail in comparison.  This is a rule that both readers and viewers seem to hold fast to as this unspoken form of ancient, and therefore binding writ.  It's something that just seems to happen of its own accord, even if some of us know how the Fire Swamp was decked out with complete eidetic recall.  Even with perfect memory onboard, there may come a moment when our own Imaginings take over.  Then the simple plastic trees and artificial vines of Reiner's set give way to a tangled mass or almost sentient web of vegetation out of a storybook.  The kind of enchanted glade that looks like it could either invite you in with open arms, or else swallow you whole.  To my thinking, the best image of the Fire Swamp would have to be one that combines both of these sentiments.  It just makes sense that the entire place is a combination of this lotus island spliced together with a Venus Flytrap and a Death Maze.  That's because each of those words provide as elegant a summary as any of us will be able to give about the setting.  It combines the best of both worlds, in a sense.  The magic of Reiner's production melding into the enchantment of the original words penned by author William Goldman.  All of which then get refracted back into the minds of the faces in the aisles to produce this ultimate, definitive storybook setting.

That to me is an example of fiction crafting at its very best, and both Reiner and Goldman's efforts on The Princess Bride are perhaps a textbook demonstration of how actual good storytelling functions.  That's a crucial, yet often overlooked, reason for the success of a book or picture like this.  It all comes down just as much to the audience participation as it does to the words on the page.  In the end, all entertainment is a group effort, and I'd argue that even the efforts of someone as talented as Shakespeare, let alone Marty DiBergi, still would remain mute for the most part, if it wasn't for the willingness of their audience to join in on all the fun.  That, to me, sums up Rob's main gift as an artist.  He was one of those filmmakers whose instincts as a born storyteller allowed him to arrive at this unspoken realization that the image remains static and silent.  Much like his friend and collaborator, Stephen King, Rob seemed to have figured out something that the author of Misery realized even when he was a kid.  He was talking about another movie entirely, of course (it was Creature From the Black Lagoon, for the record), not that it matters.  Because what unites the insights of The Stand author with that of the chronicler of Spinal Tap is the shared recognition that true Art is able to set the Imagination alight in a way that can transcend even the meagerest poverty row level production values.

In King's case, it was the old Universal Creature Feature that taught him this valuable lesson.  "I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a seven-year-old, it was not a terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit.. .just as I knew that, later on that night, he would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and swamp rot, all ready for a post-midnight snack of small boy. Seven isn’t old, but it is old enough to know that you get what you pay for. You own it, you bought it, it’s yours. It is old enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy, and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water (103-4)".  If this bit of observation seems somehow disconnected to anything made by Reiner, then go back and consider the look and movements of the Rodents of Unusual Size, from the adventures of Westly and Buttercup.

For one thing, they have the same problem as Universal's Gillman.  They're not just a bunch of guys in suits, you can also sort of tell right away, with just one look, that these count as very cheap costumes.  It's clear to even a 10 year old that by the time this scene was scheduled for the day's shoot that most of the film's budget had dried up by then.  And that's being generous, assuming Rob ever had the funds needed just to pull the whole Fire Swamp chapter off.  Even the titular setting isn't that much to look at when you stop and think it over.  It's an obvious set, for one thing.  You can tell that there aren't that many wetlands out there that look quite so cheap.  The whole thing looks like the backdrop of a Muppet Show skit, and the only major difference is that now the audience gets a chance to see what that would look like through the eyes of a professional 45 millimeter studio camera lens.  The net result doesn't change all that much.  It might have looked impressive as hell to someone like Shakespeare, however even by 80s standards, the sets for Ridley Scott's Legend come off as a lot more impressive in terms of the visual department.  And yet the fact is that people still remember The Princess Bride more fondly than one of Tom Cruise's old missteps (and lets face it, you probably even forgot that Maverick was in the Tim Curry Fantasy film).  It's a fascinating result that cries for explanation, even from die-hard fans.

How on Earth does a film with cheap looking sets that probably would give a tenured Medieval archaeologist a headache still somehow go on to become a treasured classic?  I think King once more helps us to arrive at an answer to that problem, and the punchline seems to be that professionalism of imagery might be the least important aspect of what makes Rob's efforts still work so well.  The first thing to note about the "Inconceivable" Fantasy is that it fulfills a very specific artistic stricture, which King describes as "perhaps the perfect reaction, the one every writer of...fiction or director...hopes for when he or she uncaps a pen or a lens: total emotional involvement (104)".  That, I think, is the real gift that Rob was able to achieve, not just for himself as an artist.  He was then able to pass that gift along to others because, like King, he realized that the true strength of a story resides in the words of the script, and on the Imaginative sympathies of a receptive audience to be able to realize where the true magic a story like The Princess Bride comes from.  In that sense, it is possible to speak of Rob Reiner as a storyteller not just of the first rank, but also in the truest sense of the term.  He knew that all good films amounted to stories told regardless of how much or how little you could show, in the last resort.

While all this might seem fascinating, there may be some who are now eager to remind us all of the baleful elephant looming over the whole proceedings.  Rest assured, as much as I'd like to, as much as I wish I was writing words on a different topic in another timeline where Rob was still with us, I know that's not the case.  If it's a reason why this should be the case, then I'm not the one you should be asking.  I'm just here to try and see if I can provide some sort of compensation for a collective sense of shared grief.  All of the bit of fun reminiscences held above had two purposes in mind.  In the first place, the last time I checked, it was always considered proper custom to speak fondly of those who have gone on ahead of us.  This might be something of a double obligation in the case of a talent like Rob's.  Someone who was able to churn out such an incredible of amount of winning narratives for so long deserves to have others make sure that such gifts and efforts are never forgotten.  In the second place, all of those snippets of two cents were meant to do one other thing.  It felt necessary to try and give the reader a sense of what was normal and fun when it came to discussing Reiner and his life.  

In my opinion, it is always going to be the films which will determine the legacy of the man, more than anything else.  In a moment of shock such as this, when most of us are still just beginning to climb down from our initial reactions of horror, it seemed the proper thing to remind audiences of what made being a fan of the artist such a treat, while at the same time couching it in terms appropriate to a decent memorial, however meager.  That's why I'd like to leave off this short tribute with a story.  If this seems like a strange thing to do, then perhaps it might help to point out that the overarching theme of the tale seems to be the nature of grief; how it can shape and sometimes consume our lives; and also, strange as this may sound, how to fight back against it.  What I'd like to leave off with here is a simple YouTube video.  I think if taken in the right spirit, it can serve as some sort of balm, or tonic for the recent tragedy and scandal surrounding Rob's passing.  In order for the proper frame of mind to be in place, however, a few final words of explanation are needed here to make everything clear.  This includes the reasons why I chose this particular video, and why I think the content of a simple make-believe short story can work as good outlet for any needed catharsis on real life events.  It all goes a bit like this.

The main conflict at the center of this story is the experience of grief, and how to move on from it.  At the center of the story enclosed with this article is a widower struggling to move on from the loss of his wife.  There may be some who will make an interesting argument on this particular plot point.  They might say an outcome like this is normal compared to what happened to Rob and Michele.  Even if it's true that the wife of the main character in this short story had a sudden death, it was still, in the last resort, a natural enough occurrence.  What does the normal course of a grieving widower have to do with a tragedy like the one that befell the Reiner's.  Besides, this is a work of pure fiction we're talking about.  A make-believe situation featuring people who don't even exist, and never can.  How on Earth can fiction such as this address the problems of real life?  At least that will be the implicit assumption for some in the audience.  To be fair, I'm not sure what I can say in response.  Another implicit takeaway from such a viewpoint is that it maintains that if there's any compensation to be had when a tragedy like this strikes a family, then it can never come from the pages of a book.  This is a viewpoint which holds that Art has no real power to address such issues when they happen in the real world.  In that sense, my response won't be all that convincing to any who hold to this view.  Still, I maintain that it is the truth.

Experience has taught me that people can have a very interesting, even symbiotic relationship to the stories we like to tell ourselves.  To be clear, there have been plenty out there who maintain that stories serve no purpose other than entertainment.  So long as I'm being fair, I'd even argue that this is what any halfway decent story should stick to.  At the same time, it's like there's this weird dichotomy at work in how we relate to any decent work of fiction.  We'll decry fiction as mere moonshine in one breath, and then spend hours online sharing and reminiscing with others about what we liked so much in our favorite books and films.  In fact, the very existence of this blog and others like it is proof enough of how often this happens.  It may not be enough to make some believe there is any importance to it.  Yet it continues to happen, just the same.  It's as if some natural phenomenon of sorts is taking place, and we still have difficulties figuring it out.  Come to think of it, that might be the best explanation for why literary and film criticism even exists in the first place.  All of which is to say that even if the majority opinion turns out to be that most of us don't believe in the value of storytelling, there still remains a number of interesting facts which are left begging for some sort of logical explanation.  To start with, there was the revolution in modern sentiments and social mores sparked by the Romantic Movement.

Thanks to Lake Poets like Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Blake, we've come to view childhood and children not as mere resources to be exploited, by rather as genuine lives that deserve our protection, as best we can give it to them.  Then there is the work, not just of authors like Mark Twain, but also forgotten names such as Phyllis Wheatley, who used the Imaginative medium of Poetry to pioneer the first voice of African-American Civil Rights in this Country.  Then there is the further transformation of social life thanks to the efforts of a group of San Francisco poets and authors known as the Beats, and how they essentially gave voice to an attempt at living a more authentic life.  Going back further down the timeline, we have Henry David Thoreau penning some of the key texts of environmentalism, the chief text of which is still considered to be Walden.  No offense yet that comes off as a lot of positive impact for a bunch of people who were just sitting around spinning yarns to themselves.  Each of these artists has made enough of a difference to the point where it sort of has no choice except to belie the statement that fiction has no value in human society.  If that were the case, we wouldn't be busy rediscovering authors like Wheatley, and allowing her to once more have her voice both as an African-American, and as a woman.  You don't do that without believing in some value for the written word.

It all gibes well with something Stephen King once observed in Misery.  We're talking about the original book, now.  The passage that follows sadly didn't make an appearance in Rob's film adaptation yet it's worth repeating here for the sake of proving the kind of value that others seem to believe fiction truly does hold.  Somewhere in the middle of the misadventures of a hapless artist at the hands of a psychotic fangirl, King pauses to describe a curious phenomena that occurs when the writing is hot and the world within the words starts to leap off the page.  He describes it as what happens when "the gotta set(s) in.  Paul knew all the symptoms. When she said she was dying to find out what happened next, she wasn’t kidding. Because you went on living to find out what happened next, isn’t that what you’re really saying? Crazy as it was—shameful, even, in its absurdity—he thought it was. The gotta.

"It was something he had been irritated to find he could generate in the Misery books almost at will but in his mainstream fiction erratically or not at all. You didn’t know exactly where to find the gotta, but you always knew when you did. It made the needle of some internal Geiger counter swing all the way over to the end of the dial. Even sitting in front of the typewriter slightly hung-over, drinking cups of black coffee and crunching a Rolaid or two every couple of hours (knowing he should give up the fucking cigarettes, at least in the morning, but unable to bring himself to the sticking point), months from f finishing and light-years from publication, you knew the gotta when you got it. Having it always made him feel slightly ashamed—manipulative. But it also made him feel vindicated in his labor. Christ, days went by and the hole in the paper was small, the light was dim, the overheard conversations witless. You pushed on because that was all you could do...And then one day the hole widened to VistaVision width, and the light shone through like a sunray in a Cecil B. De Mille epic and you knew you had the gotta, alive and kicking.

"The gotta, as in: “I think I’ll stay up another fifteen-twenty minutes, honey, I gotta see how this chapter comes out.” Even though the guy who says it spent the day at work thinking about getting laid and knows the odds are good his wife is going to be asleep when he finally gets up to the bedroom. The gotta, as in: “I know I should be starting supper now—he’ll be mad if it’s TV dinners again—but I gotta see how this ends.” I gotta know will she live. I gotta know will he catch the shitheel who killed his father. I gotta know if she finds out her best friend’s screwing her husband. The gotta. Nasty as a hand-job in a sleazy bar, fine as a fuck from the world’s most talented call-girl. Oh boy it was bad and oh boy it was good and oh boy in the end it didn’t matter how rude it was or how crude it was because in the end it was just like the Jacksons said on that record—don’t stop til you get enough (249-50)".  King then backs up this basic premise with a few choice anecdotes about the effects that storytelling can sometimes have on its audience.  

"It was crazy. It was funny. It was also real. Millions might scoff, but only because they failed to realize how pervasive the influence of art—even of such a degenerate sort as popular fiction—could become. Housewives arranged their schedules around the afternoon soaps. If they went back into the workplace, they made buying a VCR a top priority so they could watch those same soap operas at night. When Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes at Reichenbach Falls, all of Victorian England rose as one and demanded him back. The tone of their protests had been Annie’s exactly—not bereavement but outrage. Doyle was berated by his own mother when he wrote and told her of his intention to do away with Holmes. Her indignant reply had come by return mail: “Kill that nice Mr. Holmes? Foolishness! Don’t you dare!”

"Or there was the case of his friend Gary Ruddman, who worked for the Boulder Public Library. When Paul had dropped over to see him one day, he had found Gary’s shades drawn and a black crepe fluff on the door. Concerned, Paul had knocked hard until Gary answered. Go away, Gary had told him. I’m feeling depressed today. Someone died. Someone important to me. When Paul asked who, Gary had responded tiredly: Van der Valk. Paul had heard him walk away from the door, and although he knocked again, Gary had not come back. Van der Valk, it turned out, was a fictional detective created—and then uncreated —by a writer named Nicolas Freeling.

"Paul had been convinced Gary’s reaction had been more than false; he thought it had been pretentiously arty. In short, a pose. He continued to feel this way until 1983, when he read iThe World According to Garp. He made the mistake of reading the scene where Garp’s younger son dies, impaled on a gearshift lever, shortly before bed. It was hours before he slept. The scene would not leave his mind. The thought that grieving for a fictional character was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course. The realization had not helped, however, and this had caused him to wonder if perhaps Gary Ruddman hadn’t been a lot more serious about Van der Valk than Paul had given him credit for at the time. And this had caused another memory to resurface: finishing William Golding’s Lord of the Flies at the age of twelve on a hot summer day, going to the refrigerator for a cold glass of lemonade . . . and then suddenly changing direction and speeding up from an amble to an all-out bolt which had ended in the bathroom. There he had leaned over the toilet and vomited. 

"Paul suddenly remembered other examples of this odd mania: the way people had mobbed the Baltimore docks each month when the packet bearing the new installment of Mr. Dickens’s Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist was due (some had drowned, but this did not discourage the others); the old woman of a hundred and five who had declared she would live until Mr. Galsworthy finished The Forsyte Saga—and who had died less than an hour after having the final page of the final volume read to her; the young mountain climber hospitalized with a supposedly fatal case of hypothermia whose friends had read The Lord of the Rings to him nonstop, around the clock, until he came out of his coma; hundreds of other such incidents (257-58)".  There are other such examples out there than can be multiplied.  A the constant running theme threading its way through all of it comes down to what happens when some kind of positive symbiotic relationship is forged between story and audience.  However strange it may sound, it does appear to be explicable in clinical, analytic terms.  It does seem as if the Imagination works as a kind of natural safe-guarding function.  Part of the mind's ability to protect itself.  It's what allowed a burned out poet like Coleridge to hold onto a sliver of sanity in the midst of a mental breakdown, and what allowed a girl like Phyllis Wheatley to try and write her way to freedom.  All of it points to the occasional necessity of tapping into the Imagination for the purposes of mere survival.  

The net result of such ongoing strangeness seems to be that we're surrounded by oddities, all the while being haunted by this indefinable sense of normalcy, that somewhere out there everything is "just so".  In all honesty, I wish I knew if that were true or not.  What I think I can say with any degree of clarity is that I think King is onto something.  Nothing seems more possible to me than that well written books and films can be, not just a balm, but sometimes also even the cure for grief.  It's the medium's capacity for consolation that I'd like to turn to now as a way of paying tribute to the life and work of Rob Reiner.  If I had to give any other reasons for why I'm doing this, then they would go as follows.  A major part of the initial idea for this memorial came from just listening to the words and realizing something interesting.  Here's the thing, this is an article I never intended to write, and the video enclosed within isn't something I was expecting to have much in terms of worth commenting on.  Then a terrible tragedy struck both Bob and his wife, Michele.  So there I am in the wake of the whole thing, reeling from it all, just like the rest of us, and still trying to get my bearings.  I went back to look at this video with not much of anything in mind, it's just that you'd be surprised how you're perspective of the Art you read or watch can do a 180 degree shift based just on what's happening in the real world.

The first time I caught a glimpse of an unremarked upon short story with the equally unpromising title of  "Laurie", I didn't think it was any great shakes at first.  Now, with the passing of a legend forever lodged in the memory banks, I went back to it, only to be confronted with a peculiar thought.  It went a bit like, "You know something, if you were to cast someone like Tom Hanks in the lead role for a screen adaptation of this work, then you'd have a pitch perfect idea for the kind of film Rob Reiner used to make in his glory days".  I don't know how morbid that sounds, yet I'd also be lying through my teeth if I tried to claim that this isn't the idea that crossed my mind there and then.  It's a realization that I owe to the vlog proprietor of The Stephen King Book Club YouTube channel.  His creativity with computer illustrations, combined with the regular artistry of King's words, all came together to remind me of just how good Reiner and the original author of Stand By Me used to work so well together.  In fact, Rob's adaptations of the Maine scribe's writings seem to be one of those rare cases where the translation from page to screen has been met with near universal acclaim.  It was my share of this bit of collective pop culture film knowledge that seems to have caused Rob to creep into my thought the more I watched.

I began to see how all the elements of this story went together to create this kind of accidental, yet genuine tapestry of all the best Humanistic tropes that Reiner was great at incorporating into his films.  At the center of the story is a man who is still reeling from the loss of his wife.  He starts out the story spinning his own wheels in a constant, never-ending loop of regrets, bitterness, and self-recrimination.  All the time, he goes through a series of gestures and motions which tend to fall under the category of being a potentially self-destructive routine that can happen to those who take grief a step or two beyond the bounds of the normal.  Sometimes, harsh as it may sound, the experience of loss can be enough to serve as the mental trigger necessary for further, larger psychological issues.  The story's protagonist, Lloyd Sunderland, has never managed to get that far, to his enduring credit.  Yet it's clear he's stuck in the same familiar rut.  It takes an interesting sort of double surprise to first snap him out of his old routine, and then to get him to learn how to start caring again, not just for himself, but also for others.  Now here's the part where I have to make one statement very clear.  What I'm about to say next is meant to comfort, as best I can, anyway.  Disrespect is the furthest thing from my mind.  With that all said.

The thing is, as I was listening to the audio narrated version linked below, a funny thing happened.  It's like I just began arrive at a slow, surprising, yet genuine enough understanding of how this could have made for a good film adaptation.  Not just any page to screen job, either.  It would also have been the type of Humanistic yarn that Rob was just plain great at churning out way back during the good old days.  Indeed, there is even a sense in which "Laurie" can be spoken of as an interesting companion piece to a film like Stand By Me.  At their core, both narratives revolve around the idea of the confrontation with mortality.  Each features a protagonist who ends up venturing out into the wilderness to confront the shadow of the grim reaper.  Whereas Stand By Me tackles the concept from the viewpoint of youth, "Laurie" explores the same terrain from that of an older, more adult perspective.  It's one of those literary tropes or conceits that goes as far back in this Country to the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.  The idea of the Fateful Journey into the Woods has its origins in fairy tale and myth.  Yet here in America, at least, the archetype seems to have found it's longest lasting legacy within the field of the Modern Gothic.  This is what turns out to be the mainspring of King's short story.  It's a key note that he has played to either exact or near perfection more than once in his career.  The best novel-length example of the author playing this note to the hilt can be found in the pages of Pet Semetary.  How well Lloyd fares on his own version of this same journey I'll let you discover.

The curious notion I can't seem to shake is the sense that the story's content somehow just manages to fit in well with the ideas and themes that undergird a lot Reiner's more serious works.  There's this quiet, contemplative tone to the short work that allows us inside the head of the main character in such a way that makes him likeable to the point that you want to root for him and hope he turns out alright.  There are even moments of genuine excitement and suspense, even if these are all handled in the typical Gothic fashion.  What makes even these moments fit in with Rob's regular oeuvre, however, is the strange yet endearing note of authentic warmth that King is able to find in the midst of what is essentially an example of what's known as the Southern Gothic.  It seems to have been this note of warmth, even of consolation that might have helped to place me in mind of Rob and his collaborations with King in the past.  This seems to be because what we're dealing with here is a case of the author pulling off a remarkable, yet unremarked upon achievement, of sorts.  King seems to have been able to tap into that same note of warm Humanism that animated Stand By Me, and then somehow transplant it intact into another with a totally different cast of characters, and plot situations.  A lot of the reason for the author's success seems to be because both works share themes of death, and how to deal with loss.

It might have been the realization that "Laurie" shared these same plot elements with the Reiner film which made me think this could be the type of story that Rob might have been able to appreciate, even if we all got a lucky break, and nothing had ever happened.  It's easy for me, at least, to imagine Rob leafing through the pages of "Laurie" in the collection You Like It Darker, and also being struck by the parallels between this relatively new work, and what he and Steve cooked up together in Oregon, way back when.  Yes, it's true there's an obvious disconnect going on here between a work of fiction and a very sad facto of life.  The thing is I came away from this story thinking that I'd found at least as close to a way for audiences to deal with it.  "Laurie" seemed to offer something like an "Inigo Montoya Moment", for lack of a better word.  Yeah it looks stupid, even on paper, yet it's the best I got here.  It was as if King had tapped into that bit of Inspired oddity that allowed first William Goldman and then Mandy Patinkin to place one of the best examples of grief ever committed to page or celluloid.  The fact that people still come up to Patinkin just to thank him for giving an outlet for dealing with the loss of their own loved ones has to be some kind of testament to the power that words have to allowing some form of healing to take place.  If you're looking for an explanation for how that is, then the best I can offer is that it must be one of the functions of the Imagination to help sow up a lot psychic wounds.

It's one of those ideas that probably has no choice except to sound strange as hell, until you stop and recall that the main function of the Mind is the preservation of the human subject.  When it comes to survival chances, nature doesn't seem to like leaving a matter of that importance up to a roll of the dice.  So we have this Art making function in our heads that conjures up images and scenarios that possess the ability to tap into the best of our emotions in an effort to keep ourselves stable and healthy on more than just the physical level.  Last I checked, scientists are still scratching their head over how a mental service like this could have come about.  All we know is that it's there, and this is what it sometimes does.  It's weird as hell, I admit.  It can sometimes also save lives, so maybe there's something to be said for being born with these left-field curveballs inside our skulls.  If it keeps me living longer and healthier I got no cause to complain.  This goes double for all those times whenever the right yarn is lucky enough to snap a real, living soul out of a coma or a personal funk in the wake of tragedy.  That's why I've chosen to celebrate Rob's life with a story.  In addition to containing just enough of the right elements to act as a fitting tribute or memorial to a great artist, the work also tackles death head on.

There seems to be this implicit theme in the story which argues that it is possible to tackle not just grief, and the sense of loss that comes with it.  There may also be a way of squaring off against our fears of death, and somehow managing to not let any of it conquer us in the last resort.  This is the one part of the story where King seems to be tackling a more complex subject than I'm used to here.  It looks very much like the writer had got hold of a genuine notion in the ultimate fate of Lloyd Sunderland, yet it's also the part where I appear to have difficulty finding the right words.  Perhaps even that's fitting, in a way.  It means that if even a story with such a simple narrative as this can achieve that kind of sublimity, then that's got a be some kind of a good sign.  It can mean that the writer has managed to strike some of the right key chords that allow even a mere prose description to achieve some kind of poetic effect.  The best way I can describe the key idea for this story goes back once again to the text of The Princess Bride, and the moment on the set of the movie where Patinkin admitted he used his own personal pain to carry a crucial scene through.  It's a sentiment that this short story seems to share in spades:  "I want my father back, you son of a bitch".  It's crude and inelegant as hell.  It's also perhaps the best any of us can do or say in a case like this  If this is so, then is that such a bad thing?  All I can do, therefore is repeat what I've said already.  The final result left me with something of a surprise gift on my hands. 

It's a story that functions as a tonic for bad times, one that the author himself perhaps never even intended.  In a way though, that counts as yet another point in the story's favor.  The best stories, in my opinion, are the ones where all the artistry remains unintentional on the part of the artist.  I don't set much stock in the idea that you can make Art with a capital A just by choosing to do this.  For whatever reason, the whole process just never seems to work out for the best that way.  J.R.R. Tolkien never set out to create Middle Earth.  Instead, all the happened was he ran across the title of his most famous secondary world as a line of prosody in an old Anglo-Saxon poem, then somehow this word generated another, "Hobbit", in the writer's mind, and from there all that happened is he got curious about what it all meant.  In the same vein, King has often spoken of how a lot of his ideas just come to him out of the blue.  It's a claim that's met with a lot of skepticism by even his most constant of readers, yet I've been a bookworm long enough to be able to state that this is what other authors as disparate as Edmund Spenser, Lewis Carroll and W.P. Kinsella, to Tobias Wolfe and Peter S. Beagle have confirmed as being their Standard Operating Procedure.  I'm convinced that's how all the best works of fiction are made.

Any real story amounts to a Creative Idea waiting for the right artistic mind to discover it.  Part of the reason some of them stick so well is that they can serve a function in helping us to cope with some of the worst aspects of real life.  I'd argue that this is what Stephen King's "Laurie" is able to do when it comes to discussing the tragic event that took the life of one of the greatest directors in all of Hollywood history.  It's the kind of story that has become an accidental yet fitting tribute to the Humanistic themes of living that both Rob and Steve were capable of exploring, whether separately in their own respective mediums and genres, or else together as collaborators with on another.  It's for all these reasons that I not only recommend that you give "Laurie" a read.  I also felt it right to include the story below.  With that in mind, there's not much else to say, except the obvious.  Here's to you Meathead, we miss you something fierce, man.  Thanks for the memories.  If you want us to smile again, then, "As you wish".