Ben Stiller Sells Parents’ UWS Apartment, Preserves Legacy in New Documentary

By Eric Schwartzman

Anne Meara’s voice comes early in the film, a blend of affection and exasperation. “You’re making tapes no one’s ever going to hear,” she tells her husband. Jerry Stiller keeps recording. Decades later, those very tapes would resurface in “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” the 97-minute documentary made by their son Ben Stiller.

This film is a devotional profile of his parents’ life and legacy.

The documentary, which premiered at 3 p.m. on Sunday, October 5, 2025 at the 63rd New York Film Festival, opens inside the couple’s longtime apartment at 118 Riverside Drive, between West 83rd and 84th streets, which they purchased for just $11,000.

Every square inch of tabletop is cluttered with framed photographs; reading glasses are strewn about, tangled in clusters, as if left mid joke, before a suitable punchline could be grasped. Beyond the open-floorplan living room, dining room, and kitchen, bedroom closets are filled with with boxes of reels, cassettes, and videotapes Jerry Stiller saved.

“I went to the apartment just to film it before we sold it,” Ben Stiller told the audience during the post-screening Q&A. “It was such a big thing to let go of.” What began as documentation became an act of care, a way to preserve the material his parents left behind so their legacy could be immortalized.

Edited by Adam Kurnitz (“The Velvet Underground”), the movie intercuts interviews with Ben Stiller, his sister Amy, wife Christine Taylor, and children Ella and Quinlin with raw material, recordings, photographs, letters, and home videos. The film paints a portrait of a life defined less by the actions of his parents, than the reactions of audiences. Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara met in the New York theater scene in the 1950s and became fixtures of 1960s and 70s television with their Stiller & Meara act. Their chemistry—he the fast-talking Jewish husband, she the dry Irish-Catholic wife—made them regulars on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and household names long before Jerry’s role on “Seinfeld.” Perhaps Ed Sullivan favored them because their marriage mirrored his own interfaith pairing.

The film revisits that success without sentimentality. Its focus is the underlying drive: the need for approval that fueled Jerry Stiller’s tireless documenting and performing. For a professional comic, applause was both validation and livelihood; but as the recovered recordings make clear, dependence on that response can never fully quiet the need for it.

Ben Stiller doesn’t try to fulfill his father’s ambition. The film isn’t closure — it’s continuation. Over the five years it took to complete the project, Stiller’s own family changed: his daughter Ella, first interviewed as a teenager, reappears in her twenties; his wife, actor Christine Taylor, and sister, comedian Amy Stiller, join him along with family friends Christopher Walken and playwright John Guare. The film observes those evolutions without editorializing, letting time do the work.

The Upper West Side runs quietly beneath it all — the Riverside Drive apartment, the park outside its windows, the neighborhood’s mix of ambition and anonymity. The movie anchors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara there as they were: working performers who lived among their audience, their legacy preserved not by myth but by tape.

Ben Stiller said he hadn’t planned to appear on camera. “People kept saying it needed something personal,” he told the audience. In the end, his own fame and likeness became the film’s commercial engine. Apple could present the story through his name, reaching younger viewers who might never have known his parents’ work. The result gives Upper West Siders a historical record — an affectionate account of two neighborhood artists whose partnership, and son, kept them visible.

When the lights came up at Lincoln Center, Stiller thanked the crowd. “It’s a dream come true to be here with this movie,” he said. “I just hope my parents are okay with it.” The line landed like the film itself — half joke, half prayer, entirely sincere.

“Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” doesn’t grant Jerry Stiller the satisfaction of endless recognition, nor does it claim to. It offers something steadier: a son’s act of devotion, a family’s record in New York, and a lasting place in our Upper West Side community.

“Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost” is in select theaters October 17 and streaming October 24 on Apple TV.

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