Latest news with #PeeweeHerman
CNET
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CNET
Thanks to Pee-wee Herman, Gen X Got to Grow Up Weird and His New Documentary Is a Reminder of That
There are a million memes about how Gen X is a tough, often forgotten generation, and a million more about how we're also an apathetic generation (say whatever you want about us, I don't care). The whole "we drank from the hose and biked alone till dark" thing absolutely shaped many kids who grew up fiercely independent and resilient in the 1980s. But we were also one of the first generations to truly be babysat by TV and that also played a huge role in the lives of millions of lawless latchkey kids. It wasn't until I watched Pee-wee as Himself, the new two-part documentary on Max about the life and career of Paul Reubens, (aka Pee-wee Herman), that it hit me just how lucky we were to grow up at a time where a character like Pee-wee existed in the mainstream and the idea that something could be weird -- and embraced for that. Pee-wee's weirdness was obvious and evident in his films and on TV in Pee-wee's Playhouse. Here was this ageless man-child in a gray suit who lived alone, whose prized possession was his bike, who screamed every time a secret word was spoken. My household routinely ran out of Scotch tape as a result of my using it to stretch my face into some grotesque skin mask with an upturned nose, thanks to Pee-wee. The character seemed like someone who got to live out every kid's fantasy life, and that was the initial draw. He was aspirational in his silliness. But what the documentary makes clear is how deliberate Pee-wee's choices were, especially in the creation of his CBS Saturday morning TV show Pee-wee's Playhouse. This was a show that went out of its way to cast actors of color in prominent roles (including Law & Order star S. Epatha Merkerson and Laurence Fishburne, who both appear in the doc), and created an inclusive environment that embraced the unusual and eccentric. Nothing about any of that was by accident. Natasha Lyonne, who appeared on the show as a child, said being on the show "felt like permission to be myself." I'd like to think this permission to embrace what others might not consider "normal" is one reason why our generation identified so much with genres whose names speak volumes: alternative music, indie film, underground comedy. These things already existed but ours was the generation that labeled them. How many other children's television shows cast androgynous disco star Grace Jones in their Christmas special? (The special also featured appearances from Charo, Joan Rivers, k.d. lang, Cher, Oprah Winfrey and Little Richard, an attempt to create multiple levels of entertainment for several generations. The Muppets did this too in a more vaudevillian-inspired way; Pee-wee took it to a much campier level.) Reubens says in the film, "I wanted kids to learn about being a non-conformist and what non-conformity was ... you can do the opposite of things, you can do whatever you want." Warner Bros. Discovery "I just put a lot of stuff in Pee-wee's Playhouse that I thought, 'Why not?'" he adds. This includes things like Pee-wee dancing in high heels and holding a marriage ceremony between himself and a bowl of fruit salad. (What's more fascinating is that while this stuff was considered offbeat at the time, it wasn't censored and didn't spark backlash the way that it potentially might today.) Pee-wee Herman was a performance art creation by an actor who chose not to ever appear as himself in public until much later in his career. It's because Paul Reubens never allowed anyone to get to know him and his creative process (a fact he expresses regret about in the film), and we didn't know at the time just how intentional and subversive he was being with his work. Reubens died in 2023 while still in the process of finishing interviews for the film and he struggled to relinquish creative control of the doc -- it's bittersweet to see him express his triumphs and regrets in these interviews and not get to see the completed product. I was a Pee-wee loving kid but after watching the documentary, I'm grateful that it was finished even in the wake of Reubens' death. It's a necessary bookend to Reubens' career; without it, I don't even know if I would have realized the impact he had on so many of us little weirdos.
Fox News
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
‘Pee-wee Herman' actor Paul Reubens hid terminal cancer from documentary director until his death
Paul Reubens did not tell his director, Matt Wolf, that he was dying from cancer. The actor and comedian, who famously starred as Pee-wee Herman in the 1980s, passed away in 2023 at age 70. Before his death, he gave over 40 hours of interviews on camera about his life and career for a two-part documentary, "Pee-wee as Himself," now streaming on HBO Max. "I was scheduled to do a final interview with him the week after Paul Reubens passed away, and we had a conversation a week before he died," Wolf told Forbes on Monday. "I could tell something was up with his health, but I didn't understand the gravity of it," the filmmaker shared. "I had no reason to believe he was terminally ill, but we had a meaningful private conversation that gave me the assurances I needed to move forward with this film." "I left that conversation feeling like it was intense but not thinking too much about it," Wolf continued. "I found out on Instagram that he [had] died, along with the rest of the world; only a very small group of close friends were aware that he was dying." According to Wolf, they spoke about everything — Reubens' childhood, his complicated relationship with fame, his ambitions, his commitment to his alter-ego, his sexuality, his arrest — except the fact that he had been battling cancer for the past six years. Wolf told the outlet that from the beginning, Reubens was eager to tell his story. "When Paul and I met, he started the conversation the same way the film starts, saying, 'I want to direct a film myself, but everybody's advising me against it, and I don't understand why,'" Wolf recalled. "I said, 'Well, I'm here to talk to you about directing a film, so why don't we get to know each other and see if we can conceive of an approach that would appeal to you.' That began a very long and involved process of communication, but in that initial meeting, I didn't relate to Paul as a fan." WATCH: PAUL REUBENS WORKED WITH KIDS WITH CANCER BEFORE HIS DEATH: MARK HOLTON While Wolf admitted that he did not know at what point he felt Reubens trusted him, the star later remarked, "At some point, you just have to take a leap of faith.'" "He took a leap of faith with me, and I'm grateful for it," Wolf added. Wolf told the outlet that he had a question that was never fully answered by Reubens during their lengthy sit-downs. "It wasn't that I wanted an answer, but I was working chronologically through Paul's life in this epic interview, and we stopped before the arrest in Florida," he explained, referring to the entertainer's 1991 detention for indecent exposure at an adult movie theater. At the time, Reubens was handed a small fine, but the damage was incalculable. In 2001, he was arrested and charged with misdemeanor possession of child pornography, which was reduced to an obscenity charge with probation. These are covered in the documentary's second part. "Paul anecdotally discussed that because we had a digressive conversation for over 40 hours, but I wanted to go in more detail through his arrest step by step," Wolf told the outlet. "At the end of the film, I wanted to reflect with him, not only about his late career work, but also about how he felt having gone through the full interview about this process, if he did have all the perspective he thought he had, or if he had learned something about himself through the course of telling his full story. He had also been on the record and in the media discussing his second arrest." Wolf noted that it was important for the film to have Reubens' last words in his own voice, as well as for the film to end in his voice. "The day after Paul Reubens died, I started reading the 1,500-page transcript of my interview with him, and I found significance and meaning and all sorts of things that I wouldn't have understood before," said Wolf. "I did encounter what are the last words of 'Pee-wee as Himself,' which were profound and moving to me, and they actually were the last things Paul said in the interview." "… All these different emotions, all these different influences and factors, stuff that I saw when I was little, I felt like I could somehow give that back," Reubens reflected in the documentary. "I felt like a good collector of it all. I was like a good vessel for it all." "Nothing would stop me," he shared. "Nothing would deter me that it would be pure in every way. And I think that's what it was. It's part of why I feel so proud of it. Because I delivered that. I've lived up to that. Not just for you, but for myself." Wolf told The Associated Press that in looking back at their final conversations, it was clear that Reubens was "privately contemplating mortality." "I was aware that this was an extraordinary situation that was part of the story of the film and that the stakes were the highest I had ever experienced," said Wolf. "Pee-wee as Himself" premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.
South China Morning Post
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
How HBO Max film Pee-wee as Himself about Paul Reubens came together after comic's death
Paul Reubens did not tell his director that he was dying. Advertisement On July 31, 2023, the news of Reubens' death came as a shock to documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf, who had spent a year trying to convince the actor and comedian to make the ambitious two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself, now streaming on HBO Max, and over 40 hours interviewing him on camera. But in 2023, the project was in danger of falling apart. The two had been at an impasse for a while over the issue of creative control, and they had finally found a way forward. He had one last interview scheduled, set for the first week of August. Then the texts started coming in. Wolf sat there shaking. They had spoken about everything – Reubens' childhood, his relationship with fame, his ambitions, his commitment to his alter ego Pee-wee Herman, his sexuality, his arrest – except the fact that he had been battling cancer for the past six years. But after the initial shock, a renewed purpose set in. 'I went to work the day after Paul died. I started to read the 1,500-page transcript of our interview through the night and was struck by the significance and meaning that came by understanding that he was privately contemplating mortality,' Wolf said.
Forbes
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
‘Pee-Wee As Himself' Director Had No Idea Paul Reubens Was Dying
"I was scheduled to do a final interview with him the week after Paul Reubens passed away, and we had a conversation a week before he died. I could tell something was up with his health, but I didn't understand the gravity of it," recalls Pee-wee as Himself director Matt Wolf. "I had no reason to believe he was terminally ill, but we had a meaningful private conversation that gave me the assurances I needed to move forward with the film." "I left that conversation feeling like it was intense but not thinking too much about it. I found out on Instagram that he died, along with the rest of the world; only a very small group of close friends were aware that he was dying." Reubens passed away from cancer on Sunday, July, 30, 2023. He was 70 years old. The two-part documentary Pee-wee as Himself spotlights the life and career of iconic actor and comedian Paul Reubens, best known for his child-like character Pee-wee Herman. Both parts are now streaming on Max. Wolf and his team transferred, logged, and digitized over 1,000 hours of archival footage, much of it from Reubens' own private collection. Despite agreeing to the project, it's clear that the iconic entertainer is never entirely comfortable with the process. "As a documentary filmmaker, they always ask you, 'Who is your dream subject?' And I would say, 'Paul Reubens,' but I didn't know that much about Paul," Wolf muses. "I knew he went to CalArts in the heyday of conceptual art and was part of The Groundlings, but that was about it. I knew about his arrest, but that wasn't really my point of interest in making a film. We were connected by the Safdie Brothers and my producer, Emma Koskoff, through an unexpected convergence." "When Paul and I met, he started the conversation the same way the film starts, saying, 'I want to direct a film myself, but everybody's advising me against it, and I don't understand why.' I said, 'Well, I'm here to talk to you about directing a film, so why don't we get to know each other and see if we can conceive of an approach that would appeal to you.' That began a very long and involved process of communication, but in that initial meeting, I didn't relate to Paul as a fan." Pee-wee's Playhouse served as Wolf's gateway to Reubens' creative world, being "transfixed" as a kid. "Pee-wee's Playhouse was probably my first encounter with art that I had a visceral, emotional relationship to, and that stuck with me," Wolf muses. "In retrospect, Playhouse was depicted as this place of radical acceptance where creativity thrived, and it got wrapped up in my DNA. Pee-wee remained a touchstone for me, not as an uber fan, but as something influential that was part of the slate of references that informed who I am and what I do." The filmmaker realized Reubens was "very different" from Pee-wee Herman and more "intense and skeptical." "Every word I said counted and mattered," he explains. "It began a long process of building a relationship. Something I always say to people when I start a film is that I don't think trust should be expected. It has to be earned, and I wanted to earn Paul's trust. That proved to be a very difficult endeavor." At what point did he feel that his subject trusted him? "It's a good question, and I don't fully know, but I know he said, 'At some point, you just have to take a leap of faith.' He took a leap of faith with me, and I'm grateful for it," Wolf, who also produced the documentary, reveals. "That said, it wasn't because he fully trusted me; it was because he wanted a documentary to be made, and I think he felt I was the right person. He felt I understood how to do something artistic that wasn't a run-of-the-mill celebrity biopic and that, while I may not have been a pushover who would do as I was told, I was willing to collaborate with him and engage in the hours of conversation that he needed to feel involved and secure that his point of view would be included in the film." "I maintained the final cut, and Paul had meaningful consultation, which is an arrangement that's typical of docs these days, but that's fairly ambiguous as to what that means. We kept punting the issue of what that meant and doing the kind of precarious dance people do when making a documentary." Among the many anecdotes Reubens shares is how much weed he and his co-writers smoked when creating Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the movie that made the pop culture phenomenon a movie star. However, the revelation didn't shock Wolf. "Stoners love Pee-wee, myself included," he shares with a laugh. "I think that was also part of what was so odd about Pee-wee's Playhouse. You would have the stoner college kids, get up in the morning, then wake and bake and watch Pee-wee's Playhouse, and you'd have little kids. The two could exist side by side." "There was nothing tawdry about that; it was just a sensibility that crossed boundaries. There was something psychedelic and out there about the world that Pee-Wee lived in, and the world that Paul and his collaborators built, that I think was transfixing to kids like myself and trippy to adults who found the sweetness in Pee-wee, but also this aversiveness in his wild imagination." Now considered a classic, Pee-wee's Big Adventure was a box office hit, grossing $40.9 million despite Warner Bros., the studio behind it, having little faith in it. The screwball caper marked the feature directorial debut of Tim Burton, Reubens' pick for the job. Securing time with him for the documentary was a coup for Wolf. "Tim said no initially, and then he said yes, and I was incredibly grateful," he confirms. "It was a quick and fast interview, but Tim said everything I needed to hear, and it would have been such an oversight not to have him and to hear his point of view because I think it was a magical collaboration. It was a case of right place, right time. The first big work people make, that first foray into the public eye, has something so naive about it. There's a freedom that I think is on full display in that film, so it was a very kismet collaboration, and I'm glad that Tim took the time to share those memories." "There were a fair amount of interviews that were shot after Paul's death, for instance, his sister, Tim, and artist Gary Panter, and some interviews that were unresolved became possible after Paul died. People wanted to reflect on their relationships with him. We also created a sort of museum of Paul's collections and props, so we were able to do that after Paul passed away and to film that as well. It was a great representation of his creativity and his mind that we still had access to." Aside from Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Reuben's other notable movie work includes Batman Returns, Flight of the Navigator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mystery Men, and Blow. Paul Reubens in 'Pee-wee as Himself.' HBO Wolf and Reubens were due to have one last mammoth interview session before his death. Although he had much of what he needed to complete the film, was there a burning question Wolf wanted to answer to but never received? "It wasn't that I wanted an answer, but I was working chronologically through Paul's life in this epic interview, and we stopped before the arrest in Florida," he laments, referencing the entertainer's 1991 detention for indecent exposure at an adult movie theatre in Sarasota. "Paul anecdotally discussed that because we had a digressive conversation over 40 hours, but I wanted to go in more detail through his arrest step by step. At the end of the film, I wanted to reflect with him, not only about his late career work, but also about how he felt having gone through the full interview about this process, if he did have all the perspective he thought he had, or if he had learned something about himself through the course of telling his full story. He had also been on the record and in the media discussing his second arrest." "There was material that allowed me to give his last words in his own voice, but it was important to me for the film to end in his voice. The day after Paul Reubens died, I started reading the 1,500-page transcript of my interview with him, and I found significance and meaning and all sorts of things that I wouldn't have understood before. I did encounter what are the last words of Pee-wee as Himself, which were profound and moving to me, and they actually were the last things Paul said in the interview."
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Pee-wee as Himself' director reveals what happened after Paul Reubens backed out of documentar
The two-part HBO documentary Pee-wee as Himself (on Crave in Canada), directed by Matt Wolf, is an incredibly fascinating exploration of the life of Paul Reubens, who created the infamous character Pee-wee Herman, and died in 2023. But part of the alluring aspect of the documentary is questioning how much Reubens will actually open up to Wolf. As Reubens states in Pee-wee as Himself, he wanted to make his own film about himself. "Turns out that you're not really supposed to direct your own documentary," he says. While identifying that the belief is that you don't have "perspective" on your own self. In the interviews with Wolf, you get the sense that Reubens is never actually sure that he wants anyone telling his story for him, creating a complex dynamic between Wolf and his documentary subject. "My first meeting with Paul, it was clear that there could be a power struggle with this subject, because Paul said when I met him, 'I want to direct a documentary about myself, but everybody's advising me against it, and I don't understand, why,'" Wolf shared with reporters ahead of the documentary's premiere. "It was a lot of talking and processing to get Paul to sit into that interview chair." "When Paul sat down he was very rebellious and slippery. He wouldn't follow my lead with any questions. He wanted snacks, pretzels, lollipops. He would make funny facial expressions and it was a competitive dynamic. I remember before the shoot I said, ... 'Typically when we do these interviews, people sort of get tired around five hours.' And he said, 'I'm not going to get tired, you're going to get tired.' ... So it was kind of like game on from the beginning. But he was sort of rebelling, procrastinating, giving me a hard time." At one point Wolf actually said to producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff, "I don't know if this is going to work." "It occurred to me then that this is who Paul is, this is portraiture. We're seeing in real time him, in theory, rebelling against me, but he's really kind of grappling within himself about how much he's willing to share," Wolf said. Pee-wee As Himself is quite a comprehensive journey through Reubens life, from his upbringing and connection to the circus, to avant-garde performance theatre, joining the Groundlings and the development of Pee-wee Herman. "Paul had just an extraordinary recall for details from his childhood. Like the colour of the wallpaper in his childhood bedroom, he could talk about that for like an hour," Wolf said. Reubens also had an impressive archive that he kept throughout his life, from things he filmed himself to significant artifacts from moments in his life. "He saved most of these tapes ... in a temperature controlled bedroom, and he had recordings of almost every public appearance and media appearance he ever did," Wolf said. "I think some of the most revelatory material is the Super 8 that Paul shot from the 1970s. The Groundlings was hardly documented. He has some of the only stuff we were able to find, and boy did we search. And his early relationship with his boyfriend Guy, beautifully rendered on Super 8, and that's all shot by Paul. So to my knowledge, there was no material that was off limits." Wolf identified that the most powerful connection he had with Reubens was when they spoke about him coming out and the discussion about his early relationship, and the decision that followed to go back in the closet. "My career absolutely would have suffered if I was openly gay," Reubens says in the documentary. "That was, I would say, the most powerful connection I ever felt to a subject," Wolf said. "Paul went into this process wanting to come out. That was a decision he had made. He was aware that I was a gay filmmaker. ... I wanted, as a younger person, to support him in that process, but he also was intensely sensitive that the film would overly emphasize that, or focus entirely from the lens of sexuality when looking at his story." "I do think that the level to which Paul discusses his, I wouldn't say sexuality, but his relationships and intimacy and vulnerability, and the poignant decision he made to go back into the closet, I do have to believe to some extent he shared that because of our connection." Nearing the end of the second part of the documentary, Reubens and those who were close to him talk about his arrest on charges of child pornography, connected to his collection of vintage gay erotica. The charges were later dropped. But then we find out that after a year Reubens stopped cooperating and never completed the final interview about his arrest. "I had been promised final cut and Paul was given meaningful consultation," Wolf explained. "It's a dance that we do to figure out how to include somebody, both for fact-checking and to take the temperature of how they feel about the representation of their story, and Paul and I were at odds about that." "I wanted to do for Paul what I said I would do, which is to create a nuanced and complicated portrait of an artist, and to reappraise the significance of his work so that people would stop looking at his arrests as the first point of entry into Paul Reubens. But I didn't feel that I could accomplish that with the level of control that Paul wanted. And we were going back and forth trying to make an agreement on very specific terms as to how involved he would be in post-production. I held the line on that and that went on for over a year, and I was prepared to move on, go on to different projects, and then suddenly we heard that Paul was ready to finish his interview, to sign his release, and that it needed to happen within two weeks." When Wolf spoke to Reubens to discuss how the final interview would go, the filmmaker could tell that something was "off." "A week later, I'm en route to Los Angeles to proceed with filming this final interview and I got a text from my executive at HBO with a post from Instagram saying, 'Is this real?' And it was a post that announced that Paul Reubens had passed away. And I was just in total shock," Wolf said. "And then I got a call from Kelly Bush Novak who was Paul's publicist, but also a very close friend, and she was like, 'I tried to get to you before the news broke, I couldn't, but Paul recorded something for you, for the documentary. And he had things to say, but he ran out of time.'" "I went into Kelly's office and she played the audio for me and it was devastating. But he wanted it to be said, what he had to say in the documentary, and I had to figure out a way to use that not in a sensational manner." As we hear Reubens say in a voiceover in the documentary, he wanted to show people who is really is, and how "painful" it was to be labelled a pedophile. "I wanted to talk about what it's like and have some understanding of what it's like to be labeled a pariah, to have people scared of you, or unsure of you, or untrusting, or to look at what your intentions are through some kind of filter that's not true," we hear Reubens say. "I wanted people to understand that occasionally, where there is smoke there isn't always fire." "I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love and my desire to entertain, and bring glee and creativity to young people, and to everyone." With 40 hours of interview footage, Wolf identified how unique the process of creating Pee-wee as Himself was as a filmmaker. "It was thrilling to go this deep. I've never been able, or I don't know if I ever will go this deep with another human being," Wolf said. "I revered Paul as an artist and had come to know him in complex ways as himself. And it was ... thrilling to be able to excavate this much material from him and really to collaborate." "I think people often overlook the sense that documentary filmmakers, unlike journalists, have a much more collaborative relationship with our subjects. We need lots of things from them, we have to invade their home with our cameras, and to gather all of their archive and scan it." The filmmaker said that the "intensity" of the project changed him, specifically has made him feel more confident. "It made me confident that I can rise to the occasion under really extraordinary circumstances," he said. "I came to understand how scary I am as a documentary filmmaker approaching a subject." "Obviously, the power dynamics I had with Paul were unique. He's a celebrity. He [was] a different generation. We also had a lot of stuff in common. But through his eyes and how extreme he felt in this process, I understood better how it feels, not just for him, but for anybody I approach to be the subject of a documentary."
