Event photos by Ed Ritger, protester photos by Keoki Seu / Flickr
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1. ABC 7 anchor Dan Ashley (left) and Rob Reiner. 2. Rob Reiner had the audience laughing from his first comments. 3. Reiner and Ashley’s discussion ranged from politics to TV to family. 4. Reiner said celebrities need to be more informed about issues they tout. 5. Reiner attracted a sold-out audience.
old so we could watch him. I remember one time going down to “The Show of Shows” and there was the writer’s room – we’re talking about Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry Gelbart, Sid Caesar and my dad. I remember when I was about five or six years old waiting for him to come out of the writer’s room and all I can remember was them screaming – crazy screaming at each other because they were fighting for their jokes. I said, “That’s comedy? They’re making comedy in there? It sounds like they’re killing each other in there.” But some of the funniest stuff in the world came out of there. If you think about the second half of the 20th century, everything you laughed at came out of that room: all of Woody Allen’s work; all of Neil Simon’s work; Joe Stein, who wrote “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Enter Laughing”; Larry Gelbart, who wrote “M*A*S*H” and Tootsie; Aaron Ruben, who created “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Gomer Pyle”; my dad; Mel Brooks; Mike Stewart, who wrote Hello, Dolly! They called it the golden age of television because it was. Television was a brand-new
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
medium and you had to have some money to own a television set, quite frankly, so the fare was more highbrow. It was an extension of theater; it was an extension of revues and satire and a very upscale type of theater that was put on television. And then television became a mass medium, and you saw all kinds of dumbing down of things. I attest that right now we’re in our second golden age of television because of cable TV – “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad” and “Homeland,” brilliant shows that are done with great writing and great acting. ASHLEY: I often tell people who ask me about television that yes, there is a lot of junk on television now, but there’s also more quality on television than there’s probably ever been. REINER: Yes, I think there is. If you look at AMC and HBO and Netflix, Apple TV – all these different ways of accessing these niche shows – they [offer] really smart shows, nothing that would have been put on the networks. We were lucky to get “All in the Family” on, which was a fairly elevated type of show at the time that it was on, this urban
A P R IL/MAY 2013
comedy that dealt with issues; a rare thing at that time. ASHLEY: Let’s talk about “All in the Family” for a minute. Did you find that people then or even now understand that it wasn’t celebrating bigotry, it was ridiculing it? REINER: We shone a light on the ignorance of a bigot. We didn’t just go outside the box or go to the edge of the envelope; we destroyed the envelope. We broke the box. CBS had a disclaimer on before we came on that essentially said, We don’t have anything to do with this show. You want to watch it, it’s up to you, because we don’t know what the heck this is. We were able to succeed in large part because, aside from the fact that it was funny and we dealt with issues, these were real people that people could identify with. People saw themselves either in Archie or Mike. We presented two points of view. Norman Lear talked about how his favorite play growing up was “Major Barbara” by George Bernard Shaw. George Bernard Shaw was a liberal, but if you didn’t know he was a liberal and you went to see that play, both the hawk