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 asked 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 20-something son, on a busy weekend night with ten 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.

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 from that night in my mind. Every clang of the fork, every digression from Rob, every uncomfortable Nick shift in the chair. Everything that happened on the second-floor of that downtown Toronto restaurant, 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. Trying to connect what allegedly was done by one of the group now with what was happening then. The meal 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 so as not to be an embarrassment to his famous father; the character is 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, the Reiners said, after some 18 trips to rehab since his early teenage years, some of which he spent on the streets. 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, saying nothing.

From the start, a kind of fatherly pushing was evident. Rob wanted this story told — wanted, not surprisingly 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 game, a little almost like he didn’t fully want to be there. 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 story would be shared with the world. Or maybe he just didn’t want his life 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 listen. We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”

Michele said: “We were so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”

I looked at Romy, the Reiners’ daughter. How did she feel? “This is my best friend, and I was there for all of it,” she said, gesturing to her brother, two years older. ”It’s weird but good to see it on the screen,” she added. She struck me as someone deeply admiring of her brother, but also, perhaps, a little tired of explaining his behavior, to her parents, to everyone.

Rob, who had been eating, put down his fork. “What got us through is two books, Tweaked and Beautiful Boy,” he said, citing addiction memoirs. Something poignant, even sad, abided. Unable to access the mind of his own son, he turned to the words of strangers to let him in.

“And then we started talking about the movie,” he said. “That helped.” Michele nodded. “To be honest, by the time we got to the point of making the movie, it didn’t matter [if we actually made it],” Rob said. “Because our relationship had gotten so much closer.”

This was a happy ending. But something about that phrase didn’t feel right. Was it not happy? No, it was. It just didn’t feel like an ending.

For all the talk about catharsis and success, something felt unsuccessful. I checked later with the publicist, who wasn’t at dinner but had been spending time with the family. Did she pick up on anything? She thought everything was fine. But it didn’t feel fine. It felt like things were better but far from resolved; it felt like the festival had arrived and a lot of what hadn’t been resolved had been hurriedly shoved in the closet, like the last pile of living-room mess before company arrives.

Appearing on a podcast a few weeks later Nick was more candid about his ambivalence about the movie and the promotional efforts around it. Sobriety, he said, was a relative term. While he’d managed to get off meth and heroin he was still drinking and smoking pot. “I said to [the film’s publicists], listen, I’m not in a position to do this. I’m not a quote unquote sober guy. I’m going to have to go on these talk shows. They said you have to do this. They want the whole father son angle. It just goes to show you how disgusting it is.” But he finally relented. “It was uncomfortable but I felt like it was part of the job.”

At dinner the family turned its attention to a line Rob insisted make it into the film — “I’d rather have you alive and hating me than dead on the streets.” Rob really, really wanted the line in. It explained his actions, justified them, even though he was now apologizing for thinking that way, for being so hard on his son. I looked over at Nick. He didn’t seem so happy to have the line in the film. It was, perhaps, too excusing of the kind of parental pushing he didn’t want to excuse.

There was another line in the movie, right after that. “So what do you want me to do? Tell me what to do,” David begs his son.

I asked Nick what he thought of that — what could his father had done? But Nick had no answer. Not at dinner, maybe not ever. Maybe there was nothing Rob could do. Maybe the whole movie, I thought, was Rob coming to terms with that inescapable fact, and all the cheer and the pride, well-earned as it was, could simply not illuminate that darker, more severe reality. He had done everything he could to help his son. He had even set in motion the Hollywood machine to help his son. And yet there was nothing he could do to fully help his son. Some things are beyond our greatest effort.

At dinner I saw a man who wanted so badly for resolution to be true, for reconciliation to find its way to them, that maybe he was pushing harder than matters should be pushed — that maybe he was trying to will his son into someone he couldn’t be.

And I also saw a man — not a boy — who had to take responsibility for himself, who was no longer a teenager, who couldn’t simply point his finger at a father, much as his body language suggested he wanted to. I saw, in short, an American family, where everyone was sympathetic but no one was blameless.

A festival-goer approached our table, saying he had just come from the premiere. A niece who had battled addiction had survived several suicide attempts, he said, and he hoped that his wife could find solace in the film. “Thank you, that’s the point,” Rob said to him. He almost glowed. His own pain was making others feel less alone. All Rob Reiner wanted to do, with all his movies and now with this one, was to make people feel less alone.

He turned back to the table. “It was very hard. The number one job of any parent is to keep their child safe. And I hadn’t done that.” He was almost tearing up. “And now here I have done that. I kept him safe. He came out alive.”

Here in 2025, the words kept ricocheting through my brain. Yes, Nick had come out alive. It was Rob that hadn’t.

I looked at my notes, rifled through my memory — sought some great unlocking of a box whose contents, once unpacked, would explain what allegedly happened in the family’s Brentwood home on Sunday. Were there clues? Did someone say something that night that suggested this would all end horribly badly? Was there some dark foreshadow-y Easter egg embedded within, if only I’d known where to look? I came up with tension, with awkwardness. But nothing made me tilt my head back and put my hands in the air to say “of course.” The key didn’t come. Perhaps it never would, not even to the participants.

What makes us turn against the ones we love, the ones who give us life? These are the people who care about us most, the people we live because of, and for. And then we rebel. In some extreme cases, violently.

Confronted with the murder of parents by a child we face the grimmest puzzle. It is unfathomable, and in the face of the unfathomable, the mind speeds through explanations: addiction, mental illness, a fugue state. We cannot — we must not — believe this was a mindful act. Or a slow-growing one. Something “snapped.” If it didn’t, how else could it have happened?

But what if it didn’t? What if it had been building? What if the seeds of this were evident a decade ago at that restaurant? Nothing about that night suggested a specifically bad outcome; I’d be lying if I said it did. And yet I’d be equally dishonest if I said something about that night also didn’t make me deeply uneasy. Anyone with even a modest EQ could see it.

I could see the helplessness. The missteps of a parent. The futility. The irony was painful to me, and, I could only imagine, to Rob Reiner. Here was the nation’s storyteller-in-chief, unable to finish the tale how he wanted. Characters reject our keystrokes. We are all agents in our own story but not authors of it. Even the man who shaped some of the best couldn’t be an author of it.

In the end, I thought, what made this different from any awkward dinner between a 22-year-old and his parents? Strip away the iconic persona of the father and the son’s addiction struggles (and maybe not even that) and it becomes any other tense family dinner where baggage and demons hover. And yet it wasn’t any family dinner: it was Rob Reiner. It was Meathead and The Bucket List, it was Stand By Me and the I’ll-have-what-she’s-having scene. (Another Reiner parent, incidentally, in another restaurant.) The kind of figure whose stature was supposed to transcend all of this, was supposed to mind-crush the challenge that would befall a more ordinary family. I mean, that’s the implicit bargain when we turn ourselves over to such famous storytelling hands, isn’t it? That the savvy and talent that made them our family chroniclers would surely be enough to vanquish whatever pedestrian problem beset their own clan. And yet of course it isn’t. In the end, it didn’t.

Rob Reiner was great precisely because he highlighted these family foibles and made sense of them. We could relate to an inability to get through to a thickheaded father-in-law, and to a boy who grudgingly wants to be read a story by his grandfather, and to being forced to find makeshift brothers on a body-seeking adventure when our own parents are absent. Maybe that’s what makes this extra tragic. Reiner was all about sorting through the complexity of parents and offspring and coming out OK on the other side. He’s the one who taught us how hard it was but that we could get through it, just as he did with his own famous father, with whom he bonded over baseball. He just couldn’t enact the lesson with his own son.

As the dinner ended, we pushed back our chairs and stood up. Rob looked at me. He took my hand and clasped it. “Thank you, Steve.”

Perhaps I imagined it, but in his eyes I saw a pleading, an ask. Not to conceal anything. More the opposite — he wanted this story written in a way that willed the best outcome into being. I clasped his hand back as he held my gaze an extra twinkly, plaintive second. It was the last interaction we had.

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