Watch This: Pee-Wee As Himself
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The new documentary Pee Wee as himself isn't the boilerplate Hollywood profile you think it is. Sure, you get the biographical details you expect, how young avant-garde artist Paul Rubens created the persona of Pee Wee Herman and the meteoric rise and fall that followed. But you also get a sense of what it cost Rubens to insist that Pee Wee wasn't simply a persona, but in fact a real person. It

It's the latest in a recent series of documentaries that shine a spotlight on their subject's hunger to control their narrative and what happens when that narrative inevitably gets away from them. I'm Linda Holmes. And I'm Glenn Weldon. And today we're talking about Pee Wee as himself on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

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It's just the two of us today, so let's jump in. Pee Wee S. himself is a remarkable project. Queer documentarian Matt Wolfe spent 40 hours interviewing Paul Rubens, who did not disclose to Wolfe that he had been diagnosed with cancer. He playfully spars with Wolfe over control of the documentary. What do I have to do to prove to you I don't trust you?

You're right. There's a tiny bit. A tiny bit. I don't want this to go to your head, and I don't want you to feel in any way, shape, or form that I trust you. I don't think we would be here if you didn't have a tiny bit of trust. You made one documentary I liked out of, what, six? The film draws on Rubens' remarkable collection of photos, film, and video. Rubens eventually stopped cooperating with the production, but it does include a final message from the performer recorded the day before his death. 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 charts his success on the big and small screens, his run-ins with the law in 1991 and 2002. Rubens is candid about his sexuality and about his very deliberate decision to go back into the closet as the peewee persona began to take off.

Pee-wee as himself is streaming on Max. Linda, you and I know Pee-wee. We talk Pee-wee a lot. What'd you think of this? I really liked this. I really liked the approach that Wolf took in dealing with him. You know, in the intro, we listened to what I think you correctly referred to as a certain amount of playful back and forth. Yeah. There's obviously some genuine tension there that culminated in, as you mentioned, Ruben's pulling back from cooperating with the documentary. So what you get is really his ambivalence about his

doing this project at all. But ultimately, the vast majority of the time is spent talking about his development and how he came from being this very avant-garde kind of arty kid at CalArts through being in the Groundlings, developing Pee Wee, and ultimately wanting commercial success, wanting to be a movie star. And the ups and downs of that

Yeah. And that's the thing, because in the first half of this, I was starting to wonder if all this meta narrative I was hearing about this documentary about, you know, Pee Wee.

about Rubens and Wolfe kind of sparring for control, I kind of thought maybe it was a little bit overblown because in the first half, my reading was exactly that. It is playful. It is teasing. And it's also very familiar. I mean, speaking as a gay man of a certain age, when I'm dealing with elder statesqueers, shall I say, there is that quality of them not trying to keep you in your place. It's not about that. It's very gentle but pointed. It is a reminder that...

You know, you don't want to take liberties that you are not justified to have taken. And whenever I see it, and as I saw it all over that first half here, I just find it incredibly endearing. And in my case, it's justified. Like I've overstepped and I need to take a step back. And that's what he gently reminds me of in a way that I love. But the second half, as you mentioned, where he refuses to cooperate...

You know, whenever a creative roadblock presents itself, there are usually interesting byways to explore because what happens then? Because he stops cooperating as the documentary gets to the 1991 and 2002 days.

So let's use some very careful language here. In 1991, Rubens was arrested at an adult movie theater and police charged him with indecent exposure. He eventually entered a plea of no contest. About 10 years later, he was charged with misdemeanor possession of child pornography for images police said they found in his extensive collection of kitsch memorabilia and vintage pornography. He pleaded guilty to a lesser obscenity charge.

In the documentary, Rubens and his representatives deny that he exposed himself or that the photos police found depicted children. His team called the investigation of his memorabilia a, quote, homophobic witch hunt. That's when he pulls back and isn't there. But what that forces Wolf to do is to interview friends of Rubens who were there with him at the time. Right.

If he had still cooperated and told us what he was going through then, that'd be interesting. But there's something about allowing us access to people who were there with him during that time. I mean, it's a fuller picture, right? It is. It's very human that as they approached having an interview about those events, that that was sort of, for him, a roadblock to participating in all of this. Because...

One of the things that I think is really clear from this is that it's easier for him to talk about, you know, a situation where I was defiant, a situation where I was determined, a situation even where I was selfish. Right. But when he starts to talk about a situation where I was hurt. Right.

that is harder for him. He doesn't talk a lot about the pain of this. And as he says in that final message, like being called something that you're not and the pain that that caused him, especially as somebody who had so treasured

Yeah.

And the effect on him, I noticed that you weren't hearing him talk. And I thought, oh, I wonder if they made a decision that it would be better for it to come from other people or what exactly is going on. It's not until later that you realize that it's because he essentially never did the interview that was supposed to be about that, right? Yeah. Although, as you say, his perspective on that would have been valuable. I agree with you that in the end, the perspectives of all the people who are around who saw how this was affecting him,

Right.

But he sort of says, I don't want people to feel like I'm a victim. And it was interesting to me that he does have a fair amount of perspective on the fact that, listen, I wanted to be famous. I wanted control of everything. When other people got in the way of that, I cut them loose, you know? Which brings us to, I mean, this is a remarkable document only because, you know, it's so enriched by all this original footage, the home movies of Rubens and his then boyfriend Guy. Yeah.

Remarkable because you see that they were in love, but you also see that it was the 70s. I mean, art school kid is a vibe. Southern California art school kid in the 70s is a whole thing. You can smell the patchouli. You can feel the macrame. But that said, whenever this documentary or Ruben's in the documentary asserts, you know, that he was so insistent that Pee Wee be seen as a real person, that's

Linda, you and I were there. That felt a little like gaslighting to me because it was so obviously a bit. Everyone knew it was a bit, but we just accepted it because it was the era of performance art, of Andy Kaufman, of kayfabe wrestling. You know, we just went along with it. But that felt like a thing that was being asserted that felt false to me. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I was interested in that too, because, you know, this plays into things like when he would appear on talk shows, it would be as Pee Wee, not as Paul Rubens. Sure. But then it gets into things like that when Pee Wee's Big Adventure came out, he was credited, you know, as Pee Wee playing himself. But as a writer, he was credited as Paul Rubens. And he has this kind of frustration. Well, I didn't really get credit because people didn't know that was me. Right. And I felt like...

Yeah.

But I think there's an almost like, no, no, no, I made Pee Wee a real person. I had the same reaction as you. I was like, well, I understand in theory you did. But like, I don't think people really thought that. Right. Did they? And I had the same reaction of like, I feel like I was there. But that's the thing. But because it was also a distancing technique, right? Because there are going to be some contemporary queer folk are going to tut-tut over his decision to go not just in the closet, but back in the closet. Back into the closet, yeah. Once everything started to take off. Yeah.

But the thing I tried to make a point of in the obituary that I wrote about him for NPR is that while Paul Reubens may have been in the closet, Pee Wee was queer. Not queer in a sexual sense, but queer in the sense that Bugs Bunny is queer, right? Insensibility. Because, you know, Pee Wee Hermans was what we used to call a sissy. He was a new kind of sissy, right? He was a sissy that kind of owned the stage, who didn't hide.

And the other great thing about him is that, yes, he was a man-child or whatever, but there was no – it wasn't really about wonder and whimsy and the power of the imagination. It was about petulance and id and sociopathy and a complete lack of empathy, which I think it's fun to be reminded of that. Yeah, I think it's fun to be reminded of that too. Yeah. I found it fascinating to see how –

the tension between subject and filmmaker, which has kind of, as you mentioned, become the meta-narrative around this documentary, how it's worked into the film. Because...

The thing that people say over and over again, and I generally believe it, is that you don't want the documentary to become about the documentarian. You want it to continue to be about the subject. And, you know, I think most documentarians feel that way. Maybe if you're Michael Moore, you're one of those guys. Maybe not. Generally, I think the idea is you want it to continue to be about the subject. Yeah.

And it can be very tricky because the making of the documentary, this is a great example. This film is a great example. The making of the documentary is enlightening about who this guy is. Right. And so it makes sense to include it. Yeah.

At the same time, you don't want to shift the focus to this is the story of me making a documentary about Paul Rubens because then you lose, you know, the focus on the archival and the focus on the story and the focus on what kind of a person grows up to create Pee Wee Herman, which is really what the story is. And I think what I took away from it was how Rubens treated making this documentary and

makes it into the film. But Matt Wolfe's feelings about what it was like to be trying to do this...

Don't make it in. Right. Which I think is the right balance. Because if you read the piece that he wrote for Vulture about making this, you get much, much, much more of the stress that he felt trying to finish this project in which he had invested a lot. For which he had other people working and they were reliant on this job and trying to get this done. Yeah.

His feelings and stresses don't really come through in the movie. You know, at one point in the documentary, Rubens is asked, well, what would this look like if you directed it? And what he describes is the most artsy-fartsy, meaningless CalArts art school project that's all purely, you know, vibes. Right.

which, I mean, it would have been interesting, but it would not have been enlightening in the way that this is. No, I don't think so. And it's such a difficult balance. The documentary that this reminded me of the most is a 2011 film called...

Paul Williams, Still Alive, which is about Paul Williams, the songwriter and performer, probably most famous in the 70s into the 80s, wrote a lot of the music from the Muppet movie. Incredibly brilliant guy. And this filmmaker made this sort of, you know, road movie with him.

And they have a really interesting relationship, these two guys, because there's a certain amount of push-pull. There's a certain amount of, why do you want to take footage of me eating? All of those little complexities. But it's beautiful because it culminates in sort of, if you imagine this story of Wolf and Paul Rubens having a much-

Yeah.

And that's where this documentary, which is kind of, you know, it is heartwarming. It is enlightening. In many cases, it's very funny. That's why that message that we heard a clip of at the top is so heartbreaking and infuriating because he was so clear-eyed about how his legacy had been tarnished. He knew...

that his obits would include that paragraph, right? And the word pedophile would be raised in those paragraphs only so they could be slapped away. Yeah, and one other thing I found interesting was the way he talks about Tim Burton, who directed Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. What he seems to come away from that movie with was a resentment of Tim Burton getting too much credit for, I guess, doing a good job. Right.

He did have a little bit to me of a self-defeating difficulty sharing credit. They really soft pedal the fallout that he had with Phil Hartman, who was one of his early, early and very, very important collaborators, co-wrote Pee Wee's Big Adventure, co-created, really helped create the Pee Wee's Playhouse and all that stuff.

They're very soft about the details of that, I think probably partly because Phil Hartman died and is not around to give sort of his side of it. Phil Hartman doesn't come off great in the footage that you see of him talking about Rubens after his arrest. But it's clear that some of that had to do with credit and jealousy and getting on SNL versus not. And it's clear that these tensions created a lot of...

You know, stress and difficulty for Paul Rubens and sometimes for other people. These are among the many reasons why this particular documentary, Pee Wee As Himself, is as enlightening as it ends up being. Well, we want to know what you think about Pee Wee As Himself. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash PCHH and on Letterboxd at Letterboxd.

popculturehappyhourfromnpr.com slash nprpopculture. We'll have a link in our episode description. And that brings us to the end of our show. Linda Holmes, thank you so much for being here, my friend. Thank you. This episode was produced by Hafsah Fathima and Mike Katziff and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy, and Hello Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

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