Mr. Nice Guy Makes a Nice Little Film

What a nice man. When the tape recorder’s batteries die, Carl Reiner, shrugging off objections, insists on leaving his lunch and walking the length of the hotel lobby to buy new ones.

Funny too. As the hotel’s fire alarm blares, he calls out: “It’s only in my head!”

Reiner has gone solo for the first time in 20 years to write a screenplay, “Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool,” which he also directs. The film, which opens Friday, is the story of an English coal miner with some talent for song and dance who tries to break into show biz.

And guess what? It’s, well, nice. Corny, maybe, but pure Reiner.

At age 65, Reiner has seen it all, too much of it all, if truth be told. He’s lost patience with the graphic violence he sees in movies today. Reiner is not kidding around when he proclaims himself a man on a serious mission: To restore “nice” to the big screen.

“After I wrote ‘Bert Rigby,’ ” Reiner says, “I thought, ‘Wait a minute, am I going to go up against people crashing through windows?’ Why would anyone go see this when they can go see hardware? Then I realized that people can still be moved by nice.

“I hope it makes enough money so (the studios) let people make these kinds of movies,” he adds. Reiner was inspired by the success of his son Rob Reiner’s “Stand By Me,” a story of boyhood friendship that received critical acclaim and a healthy showing at the box office.

Reiner’s recent projects, including “Summer School” and Steve Martin vehicles like “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” and “The Man With Two Brains,” were collaborations. But he wrote “Bert Rigby” alone during a monthlong stretch at his vacation home in the South of France.

The result was a screenplay written specifically as a vehicle for Robert Lindsay, an actor Reiner had spotted on a Broadway stage as the star of “Me and My Girl.”

No car crashes here. Just good clean fun. Reiner even includes a scene in which Rigby does a commercial for non-alcoholic beer. The director hopes that youthful moviegoers will notice this detail, and be encouraged to switch to nonalcoholic beer at their parties.

“I drank beer in the Army, but it wasn’t a necessary thing to be macho,” says Reiner. “Now every kid thinks they have to have a beer can and smash it on their head. So I was thinking, if we can make the kids feel macho with beer that’s not alcoholic, I would be thrilled.”

Reiner originally got the idea for “Rigby” when he read an interview with Aussie actor Paul Hogan of “ ‘Crocodile’ Dundee” fame. “He said he had been a blue-collar worker, working on a bridge, and someone put him on an amateur show,” Reiner recalls. “He failed, but he was so charming and funny that they had him back every week.”

Hogan’s interview provided the starting point. All Reiner had to do was create a story that would fit the background and personality of Lindsay, an Englishman. So Reiner created the story of a British coal miner in a dying English industrial town who sets out on the amateur show circuit.

But the character of Bert Rigby is less Hogan--or Lindsay--than vintage Reiner: a nostalgic who longs for a return to the days when Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire danced on screen, and looks genuinely puzzled when his friends mention modern-day artists like Michael Jackson or Bruce Springsteen.

Reiner dedicated the film to Kelly, and says his most important moment in his “recent theatrical history” was when the great actor/dancer--a neighbor of Reiner’s--agreed to watch a screening of the film in Reiner’s home. Afterward, according to Reiner, Kelly congratulated him on a “very nice” effort.

“Bert Rigby” also incorporates Reiner’s nostalgia for the early days of comedy--a passion that was more fully expressed in his film “The Comic” in which Dick Van Dyke portrayed a silent film comedian trying to cope in the new age of talkies.

Rigby resembles Reiner in other ways too. Rigby is a man who relishes being the center of attention but whose dreams are modest. Rigby wants only enough success as an actor to be able to reopen the town’s theater, just as Reiner’s early ambition was to earn $75 a week in television, forever.

“To dream the possible dream,” explains Reiner. “Don’t dream the impossible dream; there are too many chances of failure. By the way, those are the happiest people, the ones who have (modest plans for) what they want to do and it’s within their purview to do it. I had little dreams when I was young. I never dreamed of being in the movies; that was a fantasy.”

In fact, though, success--big success--came to Reiner early in his life. He was a regular with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca on “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s. He followed that in the 1960s by creating the popular TV series “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” which broke with the tradition of shows like “I Love Lucy” by depicting a married couple who didn’t routinely deceive each other. Reiner also played variety show host Alan Brady on the series.

Much more than “Bert Rigby,” the Van Dyke TV series was based on Reiner’s life and marriage. “It had a reality to it that I think people understood,” Reiner says. “The best comedy is when you don’t know you’re looking at reality but you just feel something about it.”

He’s looks for that reality in the sitcoms he watches today, but sometimes, he says, it goes too far. Reiner says that “Roseanne,” starring Roseanne Barr as a blunt-talking working-class mother, “is a hard show for me to admire. They throw out everything that’s charming and good because (Barr’s character) feels so put upon by the world that she lives in. So they’re showing slovenliness and making it a virtue.”

Reiner has no urge to reinject his own brand of “nice” into TV again. Since leaving that medium for film, he has never looked back. Other films he has directed over the years include “The Jerk,” “All of Me,” “Oh, God!” and “Where’s Poppa?”

“(Critic) Pauline Kael once wrote that she’s not sure if I’m a serious film maker or not,” says Reiner. “So I assured her: I’m not.”