A half-century after the actor and director Carl Reiner tried depicting the life of churlish star in ‘The Comic,’ both Hollywood icons reflect on the career footnote: «What we were going for, really, was authenticity.»

Both Carl Reiner and Dick Van Dyke have always loved silent-movie clowns. At one point, they even teamed up to tell the story of one — a fictional composite of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and other superstars who was portrayed as a lying, cheating, egotistical jerk.

The movie — which opens on the protagonist’s funeral, then jumps back through time — was called The Comic, and, shortly after it hit theaters in New York exactly 50 years ago on Nov. 19, it disappeared. But Van Dyke and Reiner can’t quite forget the film, which has become an odd footnote in their legendary careers.

By way of backstory, Van Dyke, now 93, recalls to The Hollywood Reporter how he became friends with his silent-era idols Stan Laurel, who died in 1965, and Keaton, who passed away the following year. «I was looking through the phone book one day and there was his name,» recalls Van Dyke. «I thought, ‘It can’t be!’ [But] I called and it was Stan Laurel! He had seen our show and knew who I was» —  in fact, Van Dyke and Henry Calvin had re-created a Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy sketch in a 1963 episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show called «The Sam Pomerantz Scandals» — «so I went and visited him on several occasions. I have some wonderful pictures of the two of us up in his apartment.» Van Dyke also discovered Keaton in the phone book and visited him at his house in the San Fernando Valley.

Even before the Van Dyke Show ended in 1966, creator-producer-writer Reiner, now 97, and Van Dyke often talked about paying homage to these silent clowns. But both were busy with other projects almost immediately. Van Dyke was in demand for films — starring in such hits as 1967’s Divorce American Style and Fitzwilly — while Reiner directed his first feature, the well-received Enter Laughing, based on his semi-autobiographical novel. He also wrote and starred in the Emmy-winning The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special, which reunited the cast of Your Show of Shows.

But in 1968, the duo set to work rewriting an old script at Columbia with Aaron Reuben. “What we were going for really was authenticity. We wanted to make it look like the era [as best] we could,” says Van Dyke, who even visited a couple of silent-film actors at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital «just to talk and see what life was like.»