THE STORY – For the first time, Paul Reubens discusses his life and career, the creation of his famous character Pee-Wee Herman, and the personal tribulations he faced, including his public scandals and his eventual decision to reveal his authentic self. All the while, he attempts to wrest control of the documentary from its director, Matt Wolf.
THE CAST – Paul Reubens, Matt Wolf, Tim Burton, Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson, Natasha Lyonne, Laraine Newman, Cassandra Peterson & Lynne Stewart
THE TEAM – Matt Wolf (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 205 Minutes
Imagine you’re a documentary filmmaker, and you’re facing a project that requires screening over 1,000 hours of archival footage, mounds of photographs & personal memorabilia, and a subject who wants to hijack the direction of your film. For most filmmakers, that would seem like an insurmountable catastrophe. For director Matt Wolf, however, it became a golden opportunity.
At first glance, the result — “Pee-Wee as Himself,” a profile of comic actor Paul Reubens — might seem like your average celebrity doc, and indeed, the film follows the typical rise-and-fall-and-rise template so typical of the genre. But on closer inspection, several elements of the project were far from ordinary. Although his comic alter ego, Pee-Wee Herman, was among the most public figures in the comedy world of the late 1980s, Reubens himself had a reputation as one of the most private performers in Hollywood, rarely giving the public a glimpse into his personal life. Yet to Wolf, he offered access to his most personal photographs, home movies, and artifacts of his life. Best of all, Reubens agreed to tell his life story himself, directly to the camera, in a way that only he could shape. And that’s where the trouble began.
Reubens was first introduced to Wolf by Josh and Benny Safdie, who thought the shared sensibility between the two gay Jewish artists would mesh well together. (The Safdies also agreed to executive produce the film.) While most of his on-screen interactions with Wolf are friendly and supportive, Reubens, early on, begins to show his discomfort with not having any say in how the documentary is being shaped. Sometimes the exchanges are slyly passive-aggressive, while at other times less so; however, the grappling for control between director and star adds a dynamic extra layer to the film that proves to be both unexpected and compelling.
The copious personal archival footage offers a detailed portrait of Reubens’ early years, with a largely happy childhood, punctuated by efforts to impress his macho father, one of the founding pilots of the Israeli Air Force. The Rubenfeld family later moved to Sarasota, FL, where the city’s circus-based economy sparked his interest in entertainment and likely had a significant influence on his second film, 1988’s “Big Top Pee-Wee.” From there, he attended CalArts, where he developed his skills for performance art, often appearing on campus in (very attractive) drag. It was inevitable that Reubens would migrate to Los Angeles, where he found success as a member of the comedy troupe, The Groundlings.
It was for a Groundlings character assignment that Reubens first developed the character of Pee-Wee, who was originally created to be a failed stand-up comic but who later morphed into becoming the host of a children’s TV show. As a midnight attraction, “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” became so popular that it moved to a Sunset Strip rock club, where it played for five months. In Los Angeles, Pee-Wee was a cultural phenomenon to those in the know, and soon “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” became an HBO comedy special, bringing the character to a national audience for the first time.
It’s in these scenes of remembering his early career that you recall just how engaging Reubens was as a storyteller. There’s a nostalgic tone he brings to those memories, even those of his early sexual relationships with men. He claims that he was always fully out to his friends, particularly after he entered into a deeply felt relationship, which Reubens ended because he thought that he couldn’t control it anymore. He decided to dive back into the closet for the sake of his career, which he believed would be over if his sexuality ever became known. It was then that he realized that he was no longer managing Paul Reubens’ career. He was now in the Pee-Wee Herman business, and, to the public at least, Paul Reubens would disappear into the background.
With the success of the HBO special, Hollywood naturally came calling, and the result — 1986’s “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” in which Reubens was paired with debut director Tim Burton, a self-described misfit himself — proved to be an unexpected critical and box-office success. Reubens notes that the acclaim made his family proud, particularly his father, whose approval he so desperately wanted. Eventually, however, he admits that the fact that most of the film’s glory went to Burton instead of him, despite starring and co-writing the film’s script. Determined not to let that happen again, Reubens demanded and got complete control of “Big Top Pee-Wee,” but the result was a critical and box-office flop, the first of his career.
Fortunately, in the wake of the “Big Adventure” success, CBS approached Reubens with the idea of producing a Saturday morning children’s show. Intrigued by the idea of teaching kids that it’s OK to be different, he jumped at the chance, setting the show in a colorful cottage filled with wacky characters and gadgets, but always with a lesson. Critical response for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” was rapturous, and the series won a whopping 15 Daytime Emmy Awards from 22 nominations. In many respects, it was the highlight of Reubens’ Pee-Wee career, so at the end of the series’ five-season run, an exhausted Reubens decided to visit his parents in Florida.
The details of Reubens’ 1991 arrest for indecent exposure at a Florida adult movie theater have been well-documented in the press, and he takes full responsibility for that action, but he vehemently denies his guilt in a 2002 case on charges that his vast memorabilia collection contained child pornography in a case that many believed was political in nature by an ambitious L.A. city attorney. The Pee-Wee brand was irrevocably tarnished, if not destroyed, and Reubens cites the difficulty in reconciling the fact that his career may be over.
It is in these scenes where the conflict between the doc’s star and director comes to a dramatic head. Having lost control of the news narrative at the time of his arrest, Reubens is determined to get it back in the film. He argues that it’s his story and wants some say in how it’s told, and he expects access to Wolf’s editing room. Wolf came to what he believed was a compromise on the impasse, with the director retaining final cut but giving Reubens “meaningful consultation.” But after showing him the first 45 minutes of the rough cut in order to close the deal, Reubens stormed out of the screening, never to return, cutting off all communication with Wolf without ever signing the final agreement. To HBO and the producers, the “Pee-Wee as Himself” project was shelved, possibly for good.
After one year of radio silence, Wolf was unexpectedly contacted by Reubens’ reps to say that he had signed the compromise agreement and wanted to restart production. As both parties began to work out details, Reubens recorded what turned out to be his final message for the documentary, a heartfelt explanations of his motives doing the film, seeing it as a chance to explain his life, his hurt that some people still consider him a pariah and a pedophile, and that all he wanted to do in life was to entertain and being some joy into the lives of his audiences of all ages. It served as a moment of closure for Reubens, for Wolf, and even for the audience itself.
The next day, Paul Reubens was dead at the age of 70. Unbeknownst to anyone on the production, Reubens had been battling cancer for six years, including the entirety of the production, and kept it a secret from all but his closest friends. His penchant for privacy, which he maintained throughout his life, even followed him until his death.
The sheer volume of material that Wolf has compressed into the film is impressive, and much of it is fascinating, since it reveals the formative years of Reubens’ early life in a way that mere text could not provide. However, there may be such a thing as too much material, which contributes to the documentary’s epic 205-minute length, particularly in the film’s first hour, where it reaches information overload and slows down the film’s rhythm (Cutting back on Reubens’ voluminous family home movies might be a good place to start).
Still, “Pee-Wee as Himself” is one of those rare celebrity docs that manage to succeed on multiple levels. In a genre often dismissed as “show business puffery,” the film is a textbook example of this genre done right, utilizing the form to reveal dimensions of its subject while allowing that subject to tell the story of his life in his own words. But Wolf takes it to the next level — he could just as easily have excluded his on-camera clashes with his star, leaving it for the gossip-mongers to speculate. However, by allowing us to see them firsthand, we gain a better understanding of Reubens’ need for control throughout his life, both personally and professionally. Just who gets to tell your story is a question to which many people can relate, and thanks to Wolf’s film, Paul Reubens is still able to ask it from beyond the grave.
