This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and legend doesn't quite cover it.

He was a chameleon. He just, he looked at the thing and said, I'm going to make this and I'm gonna do it as spectacularly as I can.

What Rob Reiner meant to Hollywood and why President Donald Trump disagrees. Stick around. If you think about the most iconic lines in movie history, the ones you find yourself quoting over and over again, fair to say some of these might be on the list.

I'll have what she's having. These go to 11. Inconceivable! My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die. You can't handle the truth! I'm your number one fan. If I see you first.

If you can believe it, all of those movies were directed by the same person, Rob Reiner. The son of a comedy giant, Reiner first made a name for himself on the classic sitcom All in the Family, but eventually became a legend in his own right as a prolific director. His impact on Hollywood honestly can't be overstated. From the quintessential romcom in When Harry Met Sally to basically creating a whole genre in the mockumentary, this is spinal tap, Reiner was movies. By all accounts, he was also one of the nicest guys in the biz, the unofficial mayor of Hollywood. His constant, steady presence is one of reasons it continues to be so shocking that he's gone.

'Today I'm here to announce that our office will be filing charges against Nick Reiner, who is accused of killing his parents, actor-director Rob Reiner and photographer-producer Michelle Singer-Reiner.

In a weekend filled with unthinkable, horrific news from Providence, Rhode Island to Sydney, Australia, the death of Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner hit hard for a lot of people, because, yes, of how it allegedly happened, but maybe more so because of how much Reiner's work is woven into American culture.

'His wife, Michelle Singer-Riner, was an equally iconic photographer and producer. Their loss is beyond tragic, and we will commit ourselves to bringing their murderer to justice.

'And Reiner wasn't just an artist. He also used his celebrity to make a change in politics in a way few Hollywood stars have. And that seems to have touched a nerve with President Donald Trump. So today I wanna take a look back at what made Reiner so special with Alan Sepinwall. He's a former TV critic at Rolling Stone who now runs his own site called What's Alan Watching? Alan says he first saw Reiner in All in the Family when he was growing up. And for those who haven't seen it, it aired in the 1970s after all. Reiner played a character called Mike Meathead Stivic. He was a progressive liberal, the polar opposite of his very conservative father-in-law, R.G. Bunker.

I just remember this was a really funny show, I was too young to fully understand all the political aspects of it, so I think I probably laughed more at Archie's toilet flushing and certainly at Archy and Mike arguing and insulting each other.

Hold it! What are you doing here? What about the other foot?

The scene that always jumps out to me is, it's not anything about what was going on in the world. It's, they're going on a fishing trip or something and Archie wakes up Mike and Mike puts on one sock and one shoe and Archy is offended by this because he says, you know, everyone else in the word goes a sock and a sock, not a sock in a shoe and they just go back and forth on the merits of each.

I like to take care of one foot at a time! That's the dumbest thing I ever heard.

The chemistry between Reiner and Carol O'Connor was so funny. It didn't matter, you know, how young you were, it popped off the screen.

As someone who watches TV and movies for a living, can you point to one thing in his work that has made it so timeless and so appealing to so many people? Because in going back and revisiting his filmography, just he worked across so many different genres, romance, drama, horror, and he seemed comfortable in all of them.

I mean, that's the thing. We talk about how his first seven movies are as perfect an opening run as anybody's ever had, but they're all different. If you were to watch Spielberg's first seven movies, or Scorsese's first movies, or Wes Anderson's first 7 movies, you would be able to tell that those guys directed them, whereas Rob Reiner was not only working in different genres, but he was directing each movie differently. He was doing it specifically for what that movie needed. And so... He was very smart about choosing collaborators. So Spinal Tap is obviously with Christopher Gast in that group. He did when Harry Metzeli with Nora Ephron, he did Princess Bride and Misery with William Goldman, who was one of the great screenwriters to ever live. Aaron Sorkin, few good men. Yes, yes, it was just. He found the best possible collaborators, worked with them. He was really good with actors. Billy Crystal's never been better than he is in When Harry Met Sally. He made Meg Ryan a star. He put John Cusack into one of his earliest lead roles. He helped discover River Phoenix and Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell and Will Wheaton. Obviously, life got in the way with River, but he was going to be an enormous, enormous star.

Does his upbringing have a lot to do with that, you think? Cause people might forget that he was a nepo baby of sorts, you know?

'He was totally an epo baby his father was carl reiner his father Was a co-star and writer on your show of shows in caesar's hour Which were basically the saturday night live of the 50s and then he went off and carl created the dick van dyke show Which is one of the great sitcoms of all time and among the most influential like you can still see its dna In things, you know like the office and and pretty much any workplace comedy made This is one of the great comic minds of the 20th century, a total mensch. Everybody liked him. He was everywhere. And so obviously growing up in that home definitely had to influence both Rob's sense of humor but also influence Rob's since of goodness. And one of things about the Dick Van Dyke show was Carl created that as a vehicle for himself. He was supposed to star in it. And CBS looked at the pilot and said, this doesn't really work. We need another guy to play you. And that wound up being Dick Van Dyke and it was an enormous hit and it the right decision there. And I think Carl learned a lesson from that, that it's not necessarily about me, it's about who I'm working with and you can a million percent see that with everything that Rob did in his career.

I'm thinking about some of maybe our younger listeners or people who aren't too familiar with some of the older movies that Reiner made. Like his roles in New Girl and The Bear, you know, more millennial coded TV. And it's just interesting how he kept kind of popping up here and there and stuff that like people really watch and love.

I mean, it's sort of in following the footsteps of his dad, who stopped directing and then was in the Ocean's 11 movies and was doing a lot of voice work. Rob obviously loved to direct. His career in that area, foundered after that initial run and I guess the American president and most of the other movies he made were not necessarily well received. And so he enjoyed going back and flexing those acting muscles. And I was watching YouTube clips of him on New Girl, just refreshing my memory on that the other day. And he's so funny. And he was so good on The Bear this season. I was just happy to see him. Whenever one of those actors turned directors goes back to acting, it's a real relief. And you're just reminded of what a warm presence he was. Even when he was playing a combative guy like Mike, you couldn't help but like him.

'Now, there was at least one person who did not like Rob Reiner, the current president of the United States. We'll talk about that after the break. So Alan, obviously progressive politics played a big role in Rob Reiner's life. It wasn't just the character he played on all in the family. Later on, he would be very outspoken against President Donald Trump. But it also wasn't, just words or cutting a check. He was intimately involved in the causes he believed in. He worked to overturn a proposition in California that banned same-sex marriage. He pushed another proposition that would create some early childhood development programs. So what do you make of the way he used his star power in politics?

I mean, it's not surprising that he would do that. I mean his big breakout roles on Alma Family, which is a hugely political show and Norman Lear its creator is maybe the most politically active showrunner we've ever had. He eventually founded People for the American Way and basically like dropped his TV career to do that, to do this advocacy. And so I'm sure Reiner saw that. And the organization you mentioned or the proposition for early childhood care in California, I believe Reiner was actually the chairman for it. When it was approved for several years. So he was putting his money where his mouth was. He was investing his time. When he died, when the terrible news broke, you would see on social media people telling stories of, oh, in 2008, I was campaigning for Hillary or I was in this campaign office in 2015. And Rob Reiner came in and he phone banked next to me for five hours and we talked and he wanted to know about my life and I wanted to about his movies. So like he was out there. He was not, you know, living in his ivory tower. He was trying to pay things forward and make the world a better place.

Yeah, and some of that activism put him in direct opposition to President Trump. And we have seen Trump's reaction become a part of the storyline here in the aftermath of his death. Many people have contrasted how Reiner himself reacted to the murder of Charlie Kirk in an interview with Piers Morgan.

That should never happen to anybody. I don't care what your political beliefs are. That's not acceptable. That's a not a solution to solving problems.

To how Trump reacted to Reiner's death on social media and later in the Oval Office.

So he became like a deranged person, Trump derangement syndrome. So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape or form. I thought he was very bad for our country, yeah.

You know, many folks on the right, even people on Fox News, have not really aligned themselves in Trump's camp. Does that speak to the kind of reputation Reiner had or just the callousness of Trump's message?

I think a little of both, I mean, you don't need me to tell you that Trump has a spectacular ability to both make everything about him and to go for the most tasteless, least compassionate approach to any subject whatsoever. So anyone who is a representative of liberal Hollywood in any way, even if they're not someone who is directly complaining about him, Trump would find a way to insert himself into that. But obviously when you have members of your own party who have been cowed by everything you've done and said for 10 years saying, buddy, you've gone a little too far here. There's this deep well of affection here and but also he's just a person and he and his wife died in a horrific, you know, every parent's worst nightmare fashion. This is a moment for compassion and empathy, not for what he did.

Well, on the politics front, you know, going back to all in the family, I'm interested because Reiner once said he kind of compared Trump to an Archie Bunker type, that there's an Archy Bunkers in the White House, I think back during his first term. But it was also Steve Bannon who kind of made a connection to that character as well when it came to Trump. So it seems like the impact of that show politically, culturally has really lived on and kind of like. People can mold it to what they see fit in this day and age.

Well, I forget exactly where it was, but someone did polling on the show when it became the most popular thing on television in the early 70s. And I think what they found is if you are a liberal to begin with, you recognize that the show is on Mike's side and is against Archie and is making fun of Archie and his bigotry in his retrograde ways. And if you are a conservative, or if you have prejudice views or whatever, you assume that the show is on Archie's side and is making fun of Mike. It just became a Rorschach test.

It's just in the guy's home, and it's usually just that guy who's a hardhead.

That's right, he's a Hardhead.

He always just looks like a slob,.

Looks like Jackie Gleason.

'And then he has this hippie son-in-law

And, you know, President Nixon was heard talking about it in the Oval Office. It's on one of the White House tapes.

The general trend of it is to downgrade him.

'And upgrade the son-in-law.

Make the hard hat out to be bad

And I believe Nixon was lamenting the fact that the show seemed to be attacking Archie because he saw Archie as an ideal Nixon voter. So this has been going on for a very long time, unfortunately, but I believe Reiner also said that there would have been a certain point at which Archie would have jumped off the Trump train. And as we saw on the show, eventually, while Archie never entirely reformed, He was able to learn empathy and a certain level of compassion and ease off some of his more hateful beliefs over the run of the show, to the point that when Mike and Gloria move out at the end of, I think, the eighth season, Archie, you can tell Archie really wants to say how much their relationship has meant to him. And he can't quite, he's too embarrassed to say it, but you see it there. So that show showed that. A divide can be crossed. I don't know if it can be cross with Donald Trump, but you know, it hopefully can be crossed with other people.

He said that the coming of age film Stand By Me was the movie he'd most like to be remembered for. Why do you think that film held such a special place in his career?

'I mean, it's really poignant. All of his movies from that initial seven movie run, other than maybe The Sure Thing, which is still very good, could have an argument as this is the best version of this type of movie. And I don't think there's any question that Stand By Me is like the best coming-of-age movie ever made, the best movie about sort of being a boy right on the verge of adolescence and friendships at that age. And again, he was able to find these kids. And he saw something in them such that they were all able to go on to have careers. Jerry O'Connell is still working, Will Wheaton is still working, Feldman and Phoenix, unfortunately, have had other travails and River passed away. But I can see the experience of making that movie and working with those kids really resonating with him, especially as a father with children himself. I mean, just going back to what you were saying before about how it's amazing he did all these kinds of things. I remember when the news broke, I posted something on Blue Sky about, here are his first seven movies. Who has ever had a run like this? And I got a lot of responses of, oh my God, I didn't realize he had also made this. I didn't realize, like he directed Misery. I didn't know that he made the sure thing. Because again, he sort of, he was a chameleon. He just, he looked at the thing and said, I'm gonna make this and I'm going to do it as spectacularly as I can. And so I don't want to say these movies could have been made by anyone because obviously they weren't. They were made beautifully by him, but you don't look at most of them other than if you see his name in the credits and say, oh, obviously that's a Rob Reiner. And to some degree, like, that's the mark of a truly great director is. You know, he didn't feel the need to put his stamp or to put himself forward. When he's in spinal tap, he's the straight man. So he just recognized here's what I need to do to make this great. And, you know, I just kind of want to get off this call and go and binge all of his movies.

Yeah, it's not a bad idea. And as we've seen from the reaction, President Trump, notwithstanding, the mark he's made on folks has been genuine and extreme. Well, Alan, thanks so much. Appreciate it. All right, that's all for us today. We'll be back on Sunday. In the meantime, you can get the latest on this story and so many others over at cnn.com or on the CNN app. I'll talk to you later.