Thank you, Dana and Justin, for those lovely tributes to Rob Reiner, a man who always seemed like a mensch in addition to being someone whose big- and small-screen contributions were inconceivably enormous. I love the way you put it, Justin, that Reiner had "an anti-auteurist touch" throughout that incredible eight-year run of films he directed. It's true that each of those classics works miraculously well without bearing the insistent marks of an individual's creative ownership.
Isaw Woody Allen onscreen for the first time as a 17-year-old, a senior at an all-girls Catholic school in a small New England town called Riverside. In the middle-class Rhode Island suburb where I was brought up, the type of person Woody Allen plays in Manhattan -a glib, disaffected, neurotic, middle-aged TV writer-did not exist. Or if they did, I had no knowledge of them-and that's probably the way it should be,