After Reiner Murders, Arrest, Focus Is On a 2015 Movie

The arrest of Nick Reiner after the murder of his famous parents has drawn attention to a 2015 film he helped make with his father. Rob Reiner directed Being Charlie, and Nick Reiner was a co-writer. The movie is loosely based on the younger Reiner's struggles with drug addiction as a teenager and the effect on the family.

• The film "offers an unusually candid glimpse into the inner workings of the Reiner household in those years when Nick's challenges grew," per the Hollywood Reporter. The fictional Charlie resents his parents' tough approach to his addiction, including mandatory rehab stays, which paralleled what happened in real life.

• "When Nick would tell us that it wasn't working for him, we wouldn't listen," Rob Reiner told the Los Angeles Times when the film came out. "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." Wife Michele agreed: "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."
• Nick Reiner, now 32, had gotten sober by 2015, but he spent stretches prior to that living on the streets and going in and out of shelters. "There was a lot of dark years in there," he told People in 2016. "When I was out there, I could've died. It's all luck. You roll the dice and you hope you make it."
• Both Nick and Rob said the film brought them closer together. "It forced me to have to see more clearly, and understand more deeply, what Nick had gone through," said Rob Reiner in 2016, per the New York Times. "And, I think it forced him to see things that I had experienced during this process." However, the Hollywood Reporter suggests that Nick Reiner at times didn't seem as convinced as his father about that: "A reporter came away feeling that the elder Reiner's expression of closure was an aspiration that had not been fully achieved." The same year, Rob Reiner told NPR that his son is "brilliant and talented and he's going to figure out his path."
• Police have not speculated about what led to the murders. TMZ reports that Rob and Nick got into a "very loud argument" on Saturday night—the night before their bodies were discovered—at Conan O'Brien's Christmas party.