Dick Van Dyke revealed he only saw Carl Reiner get angry once on the set of ''The Dick Van Dyke Show''
It took a few years on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but Carl Reiner finally got properly steamed up.
The key to any group's success is to have a good leader at the helm of your ship. Any group needs someone who commands respect, who is able to unite everyone under one common cause, a natural boss.
In Dick Van Dyke's memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business, the actor had nothing but glowing things to say about his former boss, Carl Reiner. Reiner had cast Van Dyke as Rob Petrie in the hit television series, The Dick Van Dyke Show. While Van Dyke had been a fairly successful stage actor, one could argue that it was The Dick Van Dyke Show that truly made him a star.
Van Dyke said of Reiner, "The man was a model of hard work and comedy genius who was determined to do things right from day one, and he did. He set the tone, wrote the scripts and the rest of us enjoyed the ride of our lives."
Moreover, while Reiner himself drove the series, the cast and crew felt comfortable enough to pass their own ideas along every now and then. Van Dyke explained, "Carl was firmly in charge, but it was such a sharing environment, one where everyone knew the goal was to make the best and funniest episode possible, that we all felt comfortable voicing thoughts to that end."
Van Dyke recalled only a singular moment where emotions ran high and he saw Reiner actually get angry. He stated, "I only saw him lose his temper once and by then we were already a few years into the show. It was during rehearsal, early in the week, and we were playing around too much with a bad script, trying to fix it. Carl came to the set to watch a run-through and raised hell because we not only failed to fix the script, but we had, he said, made it worse as well."
Despite this, Van Dyke had nothing but kind things to say about Reiner. He said, "Over the years, I have accepted numerous awards and made sure to thank Carl. In fact, on more than one occasion, I can recall thanking Carl for my life. It always gets a laugh. But it's never been a joke. It's true."