Billy Crystal stopped by “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on Tuesday night, where he discussed his tribute to his late friend and collaborator Rob Reiner during this year’s Oscars telecast, which he said would have made the filmmaker “really smile.”
This year’s extended “In Memoriam” segment at the Academy Awards began with Crystal taking the stage to honor both Reiner and his late wife Michele Singer Reiner. The tribute ended with the actor being joined by other stars of Reiner’s movies, including Meg Ryan, Kathy Bates, Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, Jerry O’Connell, Wil Wheaton, Fred Savage, Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Carol Kane, Kiefer Sutherland, Demi Moore, Kevin Pollak, Annette Bening, John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga.
Crystal, who became lifelong friends with Reiner after having been hired for a guest spot on “All in the Family” in 1975, said that the planning for the Oscars tribute began “shortly after the tragedy” of their deaths. He also noted that, as has been widely reported, they spent the night before Reiner’s death at Oscars host Conan O’Brien‘s annual Christmas party.
“We were talking about the movie business and how it’s changed and how people don’t go to theaters like they used to, and we talked about the fact that you can’t control how a movie is going to do. What you can control is the experience of making it,” Crystal recalled. “The experiences that we had together and that he had with his cast of his other movies were so extraordinary that he said, ‘That’s something you always have. Hits are great to have, but it’s the people that you hold on to.’”
“I kept that in my heart, and I called Conan shortly after. I said, ‘I have an idea for a tribute to them,’” Crystal explained. “I said, ‘If I can get the casts of those movies together to walk out with me, that would have made him really smile.’ So I got in touch with all of them.”
Later, Colbert asked Crystal what Reiner was like as a friend and what it has been like to grieve his death over the last few months. In response, Crystal told Colbert that Reiner was “hilarious, devoted, opinionated, in the best way.”
“We could talk about everything. He was an uncle to my kids,” Crystal continued. “There’s so many moments that, when something good happens, [I go], ‘Isn’t that crazy?’ And I want to pick up the phone and call and say, ‘Did you see?’ Because that’s what we would do. In [‘When Harry Met Sally’], there’s a lot of moments that Meg and I are really Rob and I.”
“He was going through a tough divorce from Penny Marshall at the time, and we were on the phone constantly. There were moments when we’d be watching a movie together, like ‘Casablanca,’ and we would do that and go back and forth,” he added. “That’s in the movie. All of that stuff was in there.”
The actor ultimately concluded of Reiner’s death, “It’s a profound loss for, I’m just gonna say humanity, because he was the most human person that I ever met.”
