Hard on the heels of the excellent documentary John Candy: I Like Me comes another moving film about comedy performers. The first was co-executive produced by Candy’s two adult children. This one is directed by a famous son, Ben Stiller. His film, Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost, premieres Friday October 24 on AppleTV.
Now, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara weren’t just ordinary parents; they were a genuine comedy team. Back when The Ed Sullivan Show was the biggest career launching pad on broadcast television, they were one of the impresario’s most popular house acts. They stood out for their frank, groundbreaking reality approach to comedy at a time when Sullivan still featured vaudevillians and old fashioned joke tellers. These two were always more Second City than Borscht Belt.
Starting in 1963, their 39 Sullivan appearances were basically distilled from their real lives and circumstances. If they had just had a fight, it became a sketch. While both were New Yorkers, they came from different worlds in terms of religeous upbringing. He was Jewish; she was Catholic. He was a driven perfectionist; she was a natural who longed for the legitimate stage. Could they overcome their social and artistic differences and find true happiness? Sullivan thought so. After all, he and his wife, Sylvia, navigated the same religious split.
The documentary takes on the central question for Stiller and Meara: where does the act end and the marriage begin? With the death of both his parents (Meara died in 2015 and Stiller in 2020), it falls to Ben and his sister Amy to pack up and sell their parents New York apartment. That it is crammed with everything Stiller senior never threw away — old scripts, audio and video recordings, press clippings, screenplays and boxes of photographs — provides plenty of ammunition to get to the truth. Stiller and Stiller plunge into it and in the process reveal plenty about their own struggles in life, relationships and surviving strong parental shadows.
There is plenty of table talk in “Stiller & Meara” with Ben & Amy sharing memories of hearing their parents behind closed doors. Were they working on their act or actually arguing? Lines were blurred in their family, we are told. The kids got drawn into the act and became adept at instant improv, with young Ben pointing his own Super 8 camera at it all.
We learn of some harsh obstacles. Meara faced loss at a young age when her mother took her own life. The pressures of committing to the act — and stifling her own desires to take on more dramatic roles — eventually got to Meara, who started drinking.
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Stiller the filmmaker tells much of the story with lines of dialogue from life and sketches super imposed over clips of his parents on television. This deep dive into their 62-year marriage came at a time when the “Zoolander” and “Night at the Museum” actor was losing the handle on his own union at home.
Stiller, now 60, had moved out of the house he shared with wife Christine Taylor and their two young children. At one point he confesses his greatest fear: “I didn’t want to become my parents.” Things weren’t easy for his older sister, either. It wasn’t great, she tells Ben, to be waitressing “while you were out being famous.”
Ben’s own children are interviewed by their dad and let him have it for his own parental screwups. His actress daughter Ella reminds her movie star dad that he cut her from “Night at the Museum 3.”
The documentary shows that Stiller & Meara also took stock. They purposefully shut down their comedy act in the ’70s and took separate career paths. Much of this is told through clips of the couple being honest about each other on The Mike Douglas Show and even on husband and wife game shows such as Tattle Tales. They each had success in supporting roles in films such as “The Taking of Pellham One Two Three” and “Fame.” By 1975, both moved to Los Angeles to headline CBS TV shows that quickly — and mercifully as it turned out — flopped. For a while it looked like guest shots on Love Boat and Rhoda was they best they could do.
Then came Seinfeld, and an “inner rage” role that Jerry Stiller clearly had bursting inside of him for decades. At the same time, Meara quit smoking and drinking. Both figured out, as Jerry put it, that a long marriage is less of a hard set of rules and more something you negotiate as you go along.
About halfway through the film it seemed as if Ben Stiller had tilted this story too much towards his own inner demons, but by the end, it does all come together. The apartment has been decluttered and emptied of old ghosts and the director finds his own way back home. Viewers who never heard of Ed Sullivan or Stiller & Meara or maybe even Seinfeld will meet a family held together by laughter, and if they are lucky, it might make them think of their own parents and siblings.
Kudos to Stiller for taking such a deep dive inside his own head and heart in what could otherwise have been just another pop culture biography dwelling on the ’70s. Here he honours his parents by pushing harder, combining the work ethic of his dad with his mother’s firm grasp on the truth.
Nothing is lost, as the title implies, and what is found is suprisingly relatable, even if your parents never worked it all out on Ed Sullivan.
ADDENDUM: In January of 2004, at a CBS party in Los Angeles that was part of a Television Critics Association press tour, I got to party with Stiller & Meara. There were plenty of big names at this event, including Tom Selleck and Angela Landsbury, but me and fellow Canadian critic Brad Oswald from The Winnipeg Free Press made a bee line for Jerry and Anne as soon as we spotted them in the crowd. Stiller had finished his run on Seinfeld at the time but was cashing in with a similar role on the sitcom The King of Queens.
What a memorable night. The two of them basically adopted us. Both were exactly how they emerge in the candid moments of the documentary. They made no secret of the fact that their marriage had true ups and downs and while it fueled their act it also, at times, singed their relationship. Yet there they were, together, happy, generous and winning.
Shortly after I returned home to Toronto a package arrived for me addressed to the mailroom at The Toronto Sun. It was Jerry’s book, “Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara” (Simon & Shuster). Both he and Anne signed it, and inside were individual notes typed on their own stationary.
It was such a valued, old school gesture. What a classy couple.
