Though he is well-known for only one, the performer and writer Paul Reubens lived many lives.
As the new documentary “Pee-wee as Himself” details, before he created his alter ego Pee-wee Herman, Reubens was a successful child actor in regional theater. Growing up in the circus town of Sarasota, Fla. (the longtime home of Ringling Bros.), he was surrounded early on by self-proclaimed freaks. He became an Andy Warhol-loving cinéaste; a serious collector of kitsch; and, by his 20s, an aspiring performance artist.
Among the many revelations in the three-hour documentary — which premieres Friday on HBO, in two parts — is his acknowledgment that he is gay, and that he was out of the closet before deciding early to barricade back in.
Reubens’s death, at age 70 in 2023, was another surprise; the cancer he lived with for years had been a secret to almost everyone. (The filmmakers, who captured 40 hours of footage with him, were unaware of his illness; he was still due to sit for his final interview.)
Even more startling, and illuminating, is the audacity of Reubens’s lifelong ambitions — and his vast and continuing influence. During his heyday in the ’80s, with the hit movie “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and the Saturday morning children’s show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” he offered fans a world of outlandish creative possibility, where anyone could be anything they dreamed up. Also, chairs gave hugs, the floor talked, and a mechanical Abraham Lincoln cooked you pancakes.
Pee-wee was bizarre at the time, too, but in retrospect, the global superstardom Reubens achieved is downright bonkers. With a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, he viewed his creation as conceptual art. He also meant to be famous. He was an avant-gardist, but “he wanted to be a superstar,” said Matt Wolf, the director of the documentary.
The people Reubens scooped into his vision, like the artist and cartoonist Gary Panter, were also high-art punkers, as conversant in Wet Magazine as they were in Artforum. His feel for talent was impeccable: He wrote “Big Adventure” with Phil Hartman, his Groundlings pal-turned-“Saturday Night Live” star, and he picked Tim Burton to direct — Burton’s feature debut. Long before Mark Mothersbaugh, of Devo, scored soundtracks for Wes Anderson or Marvel, he composed the “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” theme.
To the artists and creators who followed in Reubens’s wake, his achievements are both inspirational and mystifying. The filmmaker and actor Benny Safdie signed on as a producer of the documentary, with his brother, Josh. “I just wanted to know how it all was done, to really try and understand Paul Reubens and how he did it,” Benny wrote, sounding astounded even in email.
In his later years, Reubens, aware that he was a towering figure to a community of renegades, turned his energies to support and mentorship. He showered his favorites with praise — specific, meaningful — and freely dispensed advice. Through a secretive cabaret series, he cultivated a network of comic performance artists, sad clowns, championship hula hoopers and other eccentrics, encouraging them to pursue the impossible: wild success on their own terms. He was singular, but he was trying mightily not to be.
Reubens developed Pee-wee at the Groundlings, the storied comedy theater in Los Angeles, which he joined in the late 1970s. He was mischievous, said Laraine Newman, the “S.N.L.” star and fellow Groundling, who met him doing improv at CalArts. “He always had what I like to describe as a kind of stealth humor.”
Pee-wee appeared in 1978, fully formed with his singsong voice, as a character in a scene class. The idea, Reubens says in the documentary, is that he was a club comedian who was never going to make it. (That his invented outcast became a mega-celebrity was another level of subversion.)
Reubens had done drag, made esoteric art-school films and tried vaudeville shtick. With Pee-wee, he went broad almost immediately, appearing in character as a contestant on “The Dating Game.” The audience loved him: a nerdy fizzle of a man in a retro gray suit and cherry-red bow tie, injecting childhood delight into adult spaces.
The canny stage act that followed, Wolf said, was “an exercise in world building.” Reubens’s marketing savvy — he printed headshots as Pee-wee before anyone knew him — fused with his conceptual framework. “The goal was to make people believe that Pee-wee Herman was a real person,” Wolf said.
Panter designed the show’s first flyer and sketched basically everything else. The Groundlings theater was then on a grotty stretch of Melrose Avenue, next door to a punk record shop, Vinyl Fetish, where Reubens spotted Panter’s album covers for the likes of Frank Zappa. The local confluence of underground comedy, punk and D.I.Y. art came to unlikely fruition in a pastel set of plush puppets and wacky anthropomorphic props.
“My vision, you know, it was kind of spawned by bad acid trips,” Panter, 74, said.
“The Pee-wee Herman Show” premiered one midnight in February 1981, when Reubens was 28. The elaborate set and high production value had no antecedent at the bare-bones Groundlings, but those designs became the blueprint for every iteration of Pee-wee thereafter, from a successful national tour in the early ’80s to a 2010 Broadway run.
And when it had its biggest platform, as “Playhouse” on CBS, Reubens chose actors of color for major roles, including Laurence Fishburne as a cowboy, and threaded the series with camp and queer references — bonbons for adult viewers.
The busy, madcap “Playhouse” world required cattle calls for puppeteers and animators. “It was like if John Waters made a movie called ‘Designer Frenzy,’” Panter said of the set, built with the artists Wayne White and Ric Heitzman.
As a memorabilia lover, Reubens also wanted zingy accessories for the Pee-wee-verse. With Panter overseeing, the merchandise designers were underground cartoonists — artists like Kaz, who became a force on “SpongeBob SquarePants,” and Richard McGuire, of the celebrated graphic novel “Here.”
Growing up in Iowa, “I was the Pee-wee kid,” said the comic writer and actor Paul Rust, 44. In the ’80s, “I think every school probably had a Pee-wee kid, who did the voice,” he added. Pee-wee’s ubiquity gave people “license to be weird,” said Rust, who went on to co-write and act in “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday” (2016), Reubens’s final film. (An overblown scandal after his arrest at an adult movie theater in 1991 had derailed Pee-wee mania, but his fans remained loyal, and he eventually returned.)
Pee-wee’s existence wasn’t just an opening for the weird; it was a welcome mat.
“Nobody in the Pee-wee world ever goes, like: ‘Hey, why are you wearing that suit? What’s up with you? What age are you?’” Rust said. “Everybody is accepting of Pee-wee. In some ways, I think it’s Paul’s hope for a utopia.”
Panter said he got emotional when asked about Reubens’s legacy. “We were making a pluralistic, inclusive show” for kids who felt like outsiders — “and for the regular kids, if there is such a thing,” he said. “And also bridging the gap between the child’s imagination and the artistic imagination of adults.”
Reubens could be reserved, and prickly — by his own admission, he was not easy to work with — but he never grew out of being deeply silly. When Rust visited him at home, he recalled, and the heat would kick on, inevitably, “one of us would queue up that song from ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ ‘The Heat Is On.’”
Comedy that was sly, corny and conceptual was in some ways Reubens’s sweet spot. He may have found its apotheosis at Brookledge Follies, the cabaret organized by Erika Larsen, whose family founded the Magic Castle, the member’s club in Hollywood for magicians and their acolytes. There were no tickets or publicity; she curated the performers — magicians, ventriloquists, puppeteers, drag kings, less classifiable folk — and invited guests to a theater tucked behind her home.
Dick Van Dyke and Moby were regulars. Afterward, everybody mingled over cheese puffs and plastic cups of booze. Reubens started turning up — his CalArts classmate, Kristian Hoffman, was the music director — and quickly became “the mayor” of the scene, Larsen said. “It was his world.”
Any show he attended instantly became notable. “He had his special seat that he always sat in, very visible from the stage,” Larsen said. He laughed generously; he hung out after; he knew what it meant to a fringe artist. “People said it was the highlight of their careers, to perform with Paul in the audience,” Larsen said.
Reubens gravitated particularly toward people with alter-ego characters, like Mike Geier, a 6-foot-8 musician who performs as Puddles Pity Party, a melancholic clown with a mesmerizing baritone. They met at Brookledge in 2014, striking up a friendship. When Geier, 61, wondered whether Puddles should appear on “America’s Got Talent,” in 2017, Reubens was the first person he called.
Absolutely, was the advice. And Reubens phoned after the first episode, Geier recalled. “He said: ‘I saw you on the show. I have some notes.’”
After Reubens died, Puddles, who is now opening for Weird Al Yankovic in arenas, took the stage for Reubens’s memorial. So did Jibz Cameron, a queer performance art vaudevillian (with a Guggenheim fellowship), who’s better known as Dynasty Handbag.
Cameron, 50, who hosts her own cabaret of offbeat artists, was so overwhelmed when she met Reubens at Brookledge that she sat in her car afterward and screamed. He was formative to her, just as he was to untold others.
“He really showed people anything was possible,” she said. “He found this fabulousness in everyone — not just weirdo artists, but everybody who was outside the system. Dirtbags. Criminals.” (Think of the biker gang in “Big Adventure.”) “It was explicitly, ‘Everybody counts.’”
And his compliments were pivotal. “I mean, he told me I was a genius,” Cameron said. “It was everything to me. And I call it in all the time whenever I’m feeling insecure. I’m like, Well [expletive] that! Paul Reubens thinks I’m a genius. Whatever; I’m good.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter at The Times, covering the personalities, projects and ideas that drive the creative world.
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