On the day before his death in 2023, Paul Reubens, the children’s entertainer better known as Pee-wee Herman, recorded a rueful statement about being labeled a “pedophile” after his bombshell arrests on indecent exposure and obscenity charges in the 1990s and 2000s.
“More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something that I wasn’t,” he says in HBO Documentary Films’ “Pee-wee as Himself,” which premiered Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival. “The moment I heard someone label me as — I’m just going to say it — a pedophile, I knew it was going to change everything moving forward and backwards.”
Directed by Matt Wolf, the two-part docuseries delves with uncommon depth into the actor and comedian’s upbringing, rise to international fame and subsequent fall from grace, aided by its subject’s vast photo/video archive and more than 40 hours of (sometimes cagey) interviews with Reubens, who did not reveal to the filmmakers that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
In particular, “Pee-wee as Himself” reconsiders Reubens’ 1991 arrest for indecent exposure at an adult theater in Sarasota, Fla., to which he pleaded no contest, and his 2002 arrest for possession of child pornography — charges that were later dropped.
The documentary suggests that both arrests, and the tabloid coverage they inspired, stemmed from prejudice against Reubens’ homosexuality.
As seen in contemporaneous footage, the earlier incident led actors Soupy Sales and Phil Hartman to call the performer a pervert and a deviant, respectively, while CBS dropped syndication of his popular children’s program, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
The film expressly describes the latter as a “political case” brought by then City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo and built on misconstruing Reubens’ collection of vintage gay erotica as child pornography: As publicist Kelly Bush Novak says in an interview in the docuseries, “This was a homophobic witch hunt.” (Reubens pleaded guilty in 2004 to a misdemeanor obscenity charge, for which he was still required to register as a sex offender for three years.)
Reubens ultimately became estranged from the project, indefinitely delaying a final interview that was intended to focus on his arrests. “The day before he died,” we learn from a title card, “he decided to record audio on his own.”
“I wanted to talk about 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,” Reubens says in the recording. “I wanted people to understand that occasionally, where there is smoke, there isn’t always fire.”
Reubens made his final film appearance in a cameo in Hulu’s “Quiz Lady” in 2023.
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