The night before Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were found dead in their Los Angeles home Sunday afternoon, the legendary film director and producer got into a “very loud argument” with their 32-year-old son Nick Reiner at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party, TMZ is reporting.
Reiner family sources told TMZ that the argument was loud enough for others to hear and prompted Rob, 78, and Michele, 68, to leave early. It’s not known if Nick also left, but it was the latest instance of the couple becoming increasingly “anguished” over their son’s reported mental illness and substance abuse issues. “We’ve tried everything,” Michele Reiner reportedly said, according to the sources.
People magazine also confirmed that there was a heated argument between the father and son at the party, with a source saying that “Nick was freaking everyone out, acting crazy, kept asking people if they were famous.”
This report about the fight follows news Monday that Nick Reiner was arrested in connection with his parents’ murder and booked into the Los Angeles jail on $4 million bail, though the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office has yet to file criminal charges, CNN reported.
The LAPD’s elite Robbery Homicide Division is handling the investigation. People magazine reported that Nick Reiner was questioned by police after his younger sister reportedly found their parents dead in their home in the posh Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. LAPD said they responded to a death investigation at the Reiner home around 3:40 p.m. Sunday, where they found the couple, both dead of reported stab wounds.
Both Rob and Nick Reiner had been open about Nick’s struggles with drug addiction, going back to when he was a teenager, after they made the 2015 movie “Being Charlie” and promoted it in interviews and at the Toronto International Film Festival. The feature film was directed by Rob Reiner and based on a screenplay that his son co-authored about his reluctance to go into rehab as a teenager and how that contributed to a downward spiral into heroin use and homeless.
The Hollywood Reporter said that the film, sanctioned by the Reiner family, gave “an unusually candid glimpse into the inner workings of the Reiner household” in the darkest times of Nick’s addiction.
When “Being Charlie” premiered at the TIFF, the Los Angeles Times wrote that the “When Harry Met Sally” director and his son, then 22, were making the movie to “exorcise drug demons.” When the film was released, Nick Reiner presented himself as being in recovery.
Key portions of the movie were lifted from the Reiners’ lives, including when Rob and Michele Reiner said they “wondered if there was an end in sight, and whether it would be the tragic one that a voice in the back of their heads kept telling them was coming,” the Times reported.
During a Q&A following the film’s premiere, Rob Reiner said that “Being Charlie” was “the most personal film that I’ve ever been involved in.” He explained that it drew “from our own experiences of what we went through.”
“We didn’t set out for it to be cathartic or for it to be therapeutic, but it turned out to be that,” Reiner continued. Meanwhile, Nick Reiner said that the experience of working on the film could sometimes “get overwhelming for me.”
In a 2016 interview with People, Nick Reiner opened up about how he first went to rehab around his 15th birthday. He also briefly faced homelessness because he resisted his parents’ efforts for him to go back to rehab after all the times he relapsed.
“If I wanted to do it my way and not go to the programs they were suggesting, then I had to be homeless,” he told People. “I was homeless in Maine. I was homeless in New Jersey. I was homeless in Texas. I spent weeks on the street. It was not fun.”
But Nick Reiner reflected on how that experience proved valuable, both for writing the film and in his personal life, though his IMDB page shows that “Being Charlie” marked his one and only credit as a screenwriter.
“That made me who I am now, having to deal with that stuff,” Nick Reiner said. “I met crazy great people there, so out of my element.”