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A few months ago, I wrote about Pee-wee as Himself, a two-part HBO documentary about the life and career of Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) that had then just premiered at Sundance. Now we’ve got a trailer and a premiere date: May 23.
It’s weird to be in this situation, having a documentary made, because I’m used to having control of my alter ego.
Before he died in 2023, Paul Reubens conducted 40 hours of interviews about his life and career with filmmaker Matt Wolf. These interview form the backbone of Wolf’s two-part documentary series Pee-wee as Himself. The series recently premiered at Sundance and there’s no trailer yet, but Variety has an overview and review.
Reubens is a compelling enough figure to carry a straightforward bio-doc, and over its substantial length, Wolf’s two-part film does justice to its subject’s thoroughly sui generis artistry — a rare blend of experimental performance, broad comedy and high, queer camp that caught imaginations of all ages — while giving due scrutiny to the off-screen legal troubles that unfairly threw his career off-course. Reubens is a generous, engaging raconteur on all such matters, while also allowing himself to be drawn on a personal life that he kept close to his chest up until his death. But it’s the brittle, unsettled dynamic of the interview footage itself that makes “Pee-wee as Himself” unusual and engrossing, as Wolf and Reubens — never, we learn, an artist comfortable with surrendering creative authority — grapple for control of a story that each wants to tell very differently. The result is perhaps a draw, though far from a dull one.
In the interviews for the film, Reubens reveals publicly for the first time that he is gay. He’d been openly gay earlier in his life but had his reasons for not talking about it as his career blossomed:
In adolescence, those inclinations shifted toward the bohemia of the late-1960s art scene, and upon leaving home and going west, CalArts proved a sympathetic environment for his singular talents and personality. At this stage of his life, Reubens was openly gay, while his family was fully supportive in this regard. A long-term, live-in relationship with a fellow artist brought him both happiness and creative stasis: “I lost a lot of myself and my ambition in being with someone else,” he says, reflecting on his subsequent decision to suppress his sexuality to prioritize his career.
Pee-wee as Himself will air later this year on HBO.
The entire episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special (1988) is on YouTube, fully remastered in 1080p HD. Special guests include Annette Funicello, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Whoopi Goldberg, Magic Johnson, Grace Jones, Little Richard, and Joan Rivers. From a Vulture piece on the special:
Christmas at Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the 1988 primetime CBS special from comedian and actor Paul Reubens, is one of the strangest, most glorious, most improbable, most confident pieces of entertainment to appear on television. Thirty-five years after it aired, and in a period of reconsideration after Paul Reubens’s death, the Pee-wee Herman Christmas special still looks like one of the major pinnacles of Reubens as an artist, full of silly delight and winking subversion, all framed inside the relative safety of a big sparkly Christmas extravaganza.
And after declaring “This special is one of the gayest things I’ve ever seen”:
What’s so brilliant about it as a piece of queer art is that it is presented so earnestly, and the iconography they’re playing with is Americana. It plays as camp to our modern view of over-the-top earnestness. But it’s a mix of camp aesthetic and an alternative comedy aesthetic of laughing at bad jokes, like the series of fruitcake jokes, which were at the time a cliché, that fruitcake was bad. Why are we going to make this joke about fruitcake over and over again? Because it’s stupid!
(via austin kleon)
This is gold — a perfect 30 seconds of entertainment. I have watched this at least 10 times and Pee-Wee rolling around on the ground at the end cracks me up every time.
See also The “Welcome to Jurassic Park” Scene But With The Dinosaurs Digitally Removed and Jurassic Park but with the Dinosaurs from the 90s TV Show Dinosaurs.
This is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever posted and I love it.
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