As an actor and director Ben Stiller is well known, merging those talents in movies like Zoolander, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Tropic Thunder, The Cable Guy and countless others, and most recently as director and producer of the Emmy darling Severance, a show that continues to demonstrate his versatility. Now though, in a project that has taken a pandemic to start and five years to complete, he has directed a very personal documentary that puts the spotlight on his own family, himself, and most notably his showbiz parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who for certain generations were best known as that married couple whose comedy act landed them on The Ed Sullivan Show a whole bunch of times (36 to be exact starting in 1963).
With routines on topics like the new craze of computer dating, hate, and many others often pulled from their own lives living on the Upper West Side of NYC, they were a TV staple in the 1960s and ’70s, though never getting to the heights of, say, Sonny and Cher, and existing in the shadow of the brilliant routines of Nichols and May before those two went on to individual directing careers. They were, however, immensely talented together, and later on their own showed real acting talent in individual roles. Jerry gained fame as George Costanza’s father in Seinfeld, and later as Arthur in The King of Queens. Anne did wonderful turns in movies like Lovers and Other Strangers and on Broadway in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves (Guare is interviewed in the film) and as a playwright herself. Jerry was Jewish, Anne was Irish, and yes the twain did meet (even with short-lived CBS series that got canceled in the same season) in a marriage that lasted 62 years until her death in 2015, followed by his in 2020. That the same time son Ben and daughter Amy decided to chronicle the impact of their famous parents, not just in showbiz but in their family life growing up in that milieu.
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, directed by Ben, is a loving portrait but also an honest one that focuses on their successes and sometime failures in the business and in the family as Ben and Amy visit the apartment they grew up in and are now putting up for sale. With all the remnants of that life still in place, the task of rummaging through a place that is literally filled with the life’s work and collections of their parents, Jerry’s in particular, serves as the anchor for this entertaining and poignant look at Stiller & Meara on and very much off stage. And though Ben admits they all had family therapy sessions, the making of this docu turns out to be a different form of therapy for someone who followed in their footsteps, tried desperately to establish his own identity, and found to his surprise he may have been repeating the same kinds of mistakes with his own family that his parents did with his.
What is certainly like hitting the motherlode for a filmmaker is the fact that Jerry was a bit of a pack rat. He kept everything, and better than that he recorded everything, some via home movies but mostly on audio cassettes — hundreds of them, with endless conversations (hence the title Nothing Is Lost). This material, used liberally, paints a portrait of what it was like growing up with a successful comedy act that also happened to be your mom and dad. The film commenced after both parents had passed and becomes a bit of a detective story as Ben and Amy surf through all that was left behind before emptying the home they thought they knew so well, but were about to discover so much more. As do we.
It is a true love story, but Jerry was quite insecure and the driving force behind the idea of Stiller & Meara. Anne, however, was a serious actress and really wanted no part of being in a comedy act with her husband, but he knew it was she who could make it work. They wrote their own routines and so became fixtures on television and in nightclubs as we see in appearances on game shows like Tattletales, talk shows like Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas, sometimes dragging Ben and Amy along (most amusingly on Douglas, where they played a charmingly off-key “Chopsticks” on fiddles, much to the delight and pride of their parents ceding them a nationally televised spotlight). Certainly there was friction — Anne admittedly drank too much — but the problems that broke up so many showbiz unions this close in life and career (think Lucy and Desi) did not do the same to this remarkable 62-year union. In this way the story Ben Stiller is telling may well be a universal one, something recognizable even to to families well out of the celebrity limelight.
In addition to sister Amy playing a key role, Ben also brings in his own family here, each of whom are interviewed including wife Christine Taylor (The Brady Bunch Movie,) from whom he was separated when embarking on this film (they eventually reconciled during the pandemic); and his kids, Ella, now 23, and Quinlin, now 20. Ben admits his own flaws as a father, his unhappiness at a certain point in his life, and maybe finally realizing the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree in terms of his own success balancing life and career. In some ways, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost is also about him as he puts the focus on his parents and tries to come to terms with it all.
In that way this docu is similar to another new film, My Mom Jayne, in which Mariska Hargitay dives into the life and times of her famous mother Jayne Mansfield, who died in a horrendous car crash in which her three kids were riding in the back seat, including a 3-year-old Mariska. In directing a documentary portrait and interviewing her siblings and others on camera, she finally gets to know the mother she never really knew in life after losing her at such a young age. Like Ben Stiller’s film, it becomes a bit of a detective story, helped by the fact this was also a parent who also had a treasure trove of memorabilia to discover.
Hargitay’s film differs with a shocking revelation in its second half. The Stiller movie has no such drama, but it resonates on a level where we get to see a loving family that might not be that far from yours or mine, even under the bright lights of show business.
Producers are Stiller, Geoffrey Richman, John Lesher and Lizz Morhaim.
Title: Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
Distributor: Apple Original Films
Release date: October 24 , 2025 (streaming)
Director: Ben Stiller
Cast: Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor Stiller, Ella Stiller, Quinlin Stiller, Christopher Walken, John Guare
Running time: 1 hr 37 mins
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