Although he received less personal publicity than his box-office powerhouse contemporaries George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Reitman had a comparable impact on filmmaking trends of the late 1970s and 80s. When the demographics of moviegoers shifted to favor teens, these visionary showmen more than understood their target audience--they molded it with their own distinctive tastes and obsessions. What Lucas and Spielberg did for fantasy adventure, Reitman did for comedy. He took the kind of quasi-disreputable material once geared to teens in second-string low budget fare, made it mainstream and
