“This is the story of us – not ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ but when [Karl] Hortsmann met Reiner – how a few good men (and women) didn’t go north, but instead headed west, past the ghosts of Mississippi to shoot Rob Reiner,” writes Kim Sloan Tripp on behalf of Triple Horse Entertainment. A well crafted sentence, and a slightly veiled play on movie trivia.

Rob Reiner, a comedic legend, was recently filmed in conjunction with Turner Classic Movies. Reiner introduced TCM’s new series, 27 Essential Movies, offering commentary on why the films were selected and how each spoke to our culture on the whole. The series, which aired in April, featured Alfred Hitchcock’s “Dial M for Murder,” “North by Northwest,” “Casablanca,” “The Maltese Falcon,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madres,” and Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”

Triple Horse Productions filmed Reiner on Stage 1 of the Ten9Fifty Studios in Culver City, California. Clips from the movies were projected onto a curved wall on one side of Reiner and hanging parallel panels on the other. “Projecting semi-transparent images onto both sides of the hanging panels – that was the challenge…,” said Director Karl Hortsmann. “We determined the best approach would be to make the hanging panels from loosely woven fabric and simultaneously use standard projection on the front while inverting the exact same image onto the rear fabric panel. The two images converged onto the center of the screen to produce quite a unique effect… thanks to [Reiner’s] skill and flexibility, we were able to shoot 27 opens, closes, and promos in a day and a half.”

The production team was headed by Producer John Hembree and assisted by Writer/Producer from Program and Production at TCM, Ruth Ann Millman; Set Designer Rick Morganelli; represented by TCM’s VP of Program and Production, Tom Brown and Shannon Davis Forsyth, VP of On Air and Network Creative.