A screenshot from Pee-wee as Himself, a two-episode documentary “series” directed and produced by Matt Wolf and streaming on HBO Max. (Courtesy of HBO)
A year ago I wrote a review of a documentary about comic/actor Steve Martin, which I said portrayed his “lonely art and happy life.” “What emerges is a portrait of an anxious introvert acting like an extreme extrovert for fun and profit,” I said. “Martin seems to have been separated emotionally from other people for much of his life, wanting but lacking intimacy.”
Similarly, Jim Henson: Idea Man, a documentary on the Muppets’ creator that I reviewed last year, showed the toll of success on an artist we think of as essentially comic. “This kind of success has less peace in it,” Henson’s wife says in the film. “It’s troublesome in many ways. There’s a lot of work, a lot of separation.”
This kind of film seems to be a genre now. Pee-wee as Himself, streaming on HBO Max, is a two-episode documentary “series,” directed and produced by Matt Wolf, that does much of the same work. Paul Reubens, whom most of us knew as his character Pee-wee Herman, created brilliantly original writing and performances. Like Steve Martin, his career really began with stand-up routines (based on his work with the conceptual-comedy troupe The Groundlings) that became national sensations and led to media stardom, especially with his first movie, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, the subsequent kids’ show Pee-wee’s Playhouse on CBS, and later supporting roles in films such as Mystery Men and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As with Henson, Reubens’ perfectionism, overwork, need for control, and sometimes-alienation apparently often made him miserable.
“He was such a perfectionist and so driven to make something that matters. It takes a lot of negative energy to get there too,” a friend says in the film. “Paul could hold a grudge. He didn’t forgive very easily.”
The documentary uses some of the 40 hours of late-life interviews agreed to by Reubens, who was, unbeknownst to most people including Wolf, being treated for cancer that would prove fatal. He is smart, funny, and looks good, but he often seems wounded, argumentative, and angry. Reubens says many times in the course of the interviews that he does not trust Wolf to make the documentary, and that he should have been allowed to make it, but that the studio (presumably) thought he lacked “perspective” in the matter.
He also only partially-comically suggests he holds a grudge at Pee-wee Herman’s tremendous success, because the persona blocked him, Reubens, the creator, from being credited with the magic. As he points out, the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame says “Pee-wee Herman.”
Reubens even points out that when he was later arrested for indecent exposure in an adult theater in 1991, the public did not know what he actually looked at and were shocked at his “Charlie Manson mug shot,” as he puts it. Despite his people assuring him the notoriety of the arrest would blow over, it remained a “footnote” to his life.
“The public has a memory like a steel trap,” Reubens says.
The two legal incidents that changed and haunted his life were no more than plea misdemeanors, and only those because his team thought it better not to have trials that would create a publicity storm, even if he probably would have won. His lawyer still calls the charges “homophobic witch hunts.” (The second was an arrest on suspicion of possession of child pornography, which turned out to be baseless.) Though the film does not go too far down the road of saying Reubens was targeted in a conspiracy against a gay entertainer under the guise of homophobia and “protecting the children,” it does not take much imagination to entertain the theory.
Reubens insists on camera that the documentary must not be of the “tears of a clown” variety. It is an admirable attitude, but Wolf’s film, perhaps inevitably, emphasizes Reubens’s problems.
Still, there are many triumphs and joys shown, including his friendship with many other performers. Before he hit it big, Reubens became a regular on David Letterman’s early talk show, and he got an episode in a series HBO shot on location. But, Reubens says, “I got as far as I think you can go on your own by yourself without, like, somebody stepping in and helping you.” Steve Martin’s manager then called him unexpectedly and said, “I think it’s time.” This led directly, in planned fashion, to his standup tour (to include Carnegie Hall) and his first movie.
“There wasn’t, like, a moment in the ’80s that wasn’t really super cool to be me,” Reubens says. Many of his later years were around people who served as his “other” family, and he was in a “loving relationship” at the end.
Movingly, despite Reubens ending his cooperation with the film long before it was made, he recorded a final statement on his legacy, the day before he died, at age 70, in 2023. He says it hurt to be made a pariah for incorrect assumptions.
“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.”
The documentary is subtly framed around the idea that Pee-wee Herman, starting with the Groundlings’ original stage show, was “about a boy who wants to fly.” Pee-wee gives away his wish to fly (granted by Jambi the Genie), so Captain Carl (Phil Hartman) can love Miss Yvonne (Lynne Marie Stewart). “And then, of course, because he was a good boy, he gets his [original] wish,” a speaker in the film says. “Because he did the right thing.”
The last seconds of the documentary are footage of 20-something Reubens, make-upped as proto-Pee-wee, with a ridiculous, tiny cartoon body, wishing us goodbye and soaring into the sky.
