← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
A Look Into the Private Life of Pee-wee Herman
00:19:21
The new two part documentary "Pee-wee As Himself" features some of the final interviews with comedian Paul Ruebens before his death.
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- [00:00]
Alison Stewart
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name youe Price Tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law not available in all states. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. If I say I know you are, but what am I? Or everyone I know has a big butt. Better yet, here's the man himself. Hello, Dottie, it's me, Pee Wee.
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Matt Wolf
Where are you calling from? Texas. Where?
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Alison Stewart
Honest?
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Matt Wolf
Listen, I'll prove it. The stars at night are big and bright. Deep in the heart of Texas.
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Alison Stewart
Pee Wee Herman, AKA Paul Reubens was a performance artist, a clown, a serious soul. You get to see sides of him in a new documentary called Pee Wee as Himself. The film debuts on HBO this Friday and it almost didn't get made. For the previous six years, Rubens had been privately battling two forms of cancer and he died in 2023. During that times, Rubens was being interviewed for a documentary about his life and career. But not even the filmmakers were aware of his diagnosis. In the two part documentary, Pee Wee as Himself, Rubens doesn't discuss it, but he does talk about many other aspects of his life in unprecedented his childhood, his time with the Groundlings, his relationship with a man. The documentary was directed by my next guest, Matt Wolf. Hi Matt, thanks for coming to all of it.
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Matt Wolf
Thanks for having me.
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Alison Stewart
So the documentary begins with a card that mentions unbeknownst to the filmmakers, he had been fighting cancer for years. What was your immediate reaction to that news and learning the cause of his death?
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Matt Wolf
Oh, it was a total shock. Yeah, I had no idea. And Paul and I were scheduled to do a final interview a week after he pass. So we had a conversation that I could tell something was off, but I certainly didn't have a sense of the gravity of what was going on. But Paul gave me the assurances that we could kind of move forward with the project. And I found out on Instagram along with the rest of the world.
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Alison Stewart
So after his death and after thinking about it as a whole, it's a three hour documentary, two parts. How did the purpose of the documentary change, if at all?
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Matt Wolf
In some ways it didn't change. The day that Paul died, I started to read the 1,500 page transcript of our 40 hour interview and certain things that he said had, I guess you could say, enhanced significance in the context of his death. But my mission from the beginning was to do a complex and nuanced portrait of an artist. And Paul's mission was to set the record straight and to overcome the media controversies that had become unfortunate footnotes to his career. So those goals hadn't changed, but the level of profound responsibility I was grappling with was quite different.
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Alison Stewart
It's kind of interesting because your goals, they seem like they would be the same, but at times during the filming it was interesting. The two of you kind of not went at each other, but sort of went around it.
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Matt Wolf
Yes, there was a power struggle throughout the making of the film. Paul was somebody who lost control of his personal narrative in the media. And so of course he had reservations and skepticism about a filmmaker like myself coming in and, you know, saying, I'm going to have final cut. I'm going to take your life story and make it the raw material for my work. That concern he had didn't go away. In fact, the first time I met Paul, he said something very similar to the opening of the film. I want to direct this film myself, but everybody's advising me against it and I don't understand why. So, you know, when we began this epic interview, Paul was rebellious against the process of being led. The way you're leading me right now, he didn't like that. And the ways in which he rebelled initially were frustrating to me. And then I thought, hey, this is portraiture. While this film covers things that happened in the past to Paul, this is him relating to telling his story in real time in the present. He may be in conflict with me, but really he's wrestling with himself to decide how much to share.
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Alison Stewart
It also showed us what he was feeling, what he was thinking during the course of the interview. It wasn't just question, answer, question, answer. It was like you saw him thinking about it.
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Matt Wolf
Yeah. And I think many public personalities have been interviewed many times as themselves and they're familiar and have a certain way of framing the narrative of their life. Paul to some extent had done that, but very little, the kind of things that he was sharing were vulnerable and intimate in a way that he had never been before. So of course there was a kind of internal struggle in that process. And the way we work that out is by talking on camera for just an incredible amount of time that I don't know many filmmakers who have had that experience with subjects.
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Alison Stewart
I'm talking to director Matt Wolfe about the two part documentary, Pee Wee as himself. It drops on HBO and Max this, this Friday. We go all the way back to his childhood, he really liked Little Rascals. He loved I Love Lucy. What did you learn about Paul Rubens from his media consumption that he took in as a kid?
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Matt Wolf
Well, I think I got a sense of who he was generationally in terms of what his kind of touchstones were, like Pollyanna and the young Disney stars. And to some extent, it's not surprising that classic TV shows like Captain Kangaroo were an inspiration to the maker of Pee Wee's Playhouse. But I think what became more interesting was the activity he was involved in in the late 1970s, particularly at CalArts, an art school known for conceptual art, where Paul really trained as a performance art. And he would continue that when he kind of fell into the Groundlings, which was an improvisation troupe, but at a point in the entertainment industry where comedy wasn't necessarily king, that wasn't the stepping stone to a huge career in movies. And he also was adjacent to the punk scene that was taking place on Melrose in Los Angeles. In fact, the Groundlings was next door to the most famous punk record store called Vinyl Fetish. So all of these things, from the classic TV shows like I Love Lucy to performance art to punk, it all collided into Pee Wee Herman. And I just found that fascinating.
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Alison Stewart
His dad was a pilot in the Israeli Air Force. He seemed like a real bit of a character. He described his parents as being a vaudeville team when they were together. What was interesting to you about the way that Paul Rubens talked about his parents and his family?
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Matt Wolf
I think Paul loved his parents and intensely idealized his father as this larger than life figure who he called macho more than a few times. But he, you know, called him swaggering, you know, like Indiana Jones. And I think that Paul, like many gay people, you know, felt a need to prove himself to his father and live up to his father's expectations and kind of ideas about success. Paul was just enormously driven, unabashed. I don't think that was driven by his parents. But I do think that Paul was preoccupied with his father's approval. That was clear to me.
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Alison Stewart
You interview his sister in the film, she's a civil rights attorney. She took a more serious path as a civil rights attorney. What was similar about the two of them? And then what were their differences?
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Matt Wolf
They both are gay and both stubborn and hot headed. But I don't, you know, it's hard to make that comparison. I think Abby had a great appreciation for Paul and they also had distance in their differences. And that Abby, I think, was perplexed by Paul's decision to Live as a closeted person. She. I think she wished that he would be in a traditional kind of gay relationship and would be out, but also recognized that in some ways that was a survival strategy for Paul to truly embrace the ambition that he possessed.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah. And the film. Towards the end, one of his friends says, you know, he didn't really talk about his sexuality very much, but he did talk about it with you. Were you surprised?
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Matt Wolf
Well, when Paul started the documentary with me, we had literally hundreds of hours of conversations leading into that interview. And right away he said he wanted to come out. I'm a gay filmmaker. I think that was a point of affinity between us. And it also was a point of tension. Paul, while he did want to come out, did not want to be characterized as a gay icon or he didn't want the film to be made entirely. Entirely from a queer lens. And I think I had concerns that I might do that. But when I heard the story of his early relationship with a painter named Guy, I was struck by how emotionally intense that relationship was and also what Paul did. When they broke up, Paul decided to go back into the closet to pursue his career because that was something he could control. It was very poignant, but to me, it also was hugely significant. In some ways, Paul became two different people in that moment, which would foreshadow the creative and professional choices he made while he separated himself from Pee Wee Herman.
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Alison Stewart
And please correct me if I'm wrong, did you reach out to Guy or Guy?
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Matt Wolf
Guy passed away from AIDS related illness. Paul saw him several hours before he passed away. So it's a very poignant story and moment in Paul's life that I think had a huge impact on him over the decades.
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Alison Stewart
It was so interesting. He often said that parts of Pee Wee were parts of Paul. The way that Paul used to be like, mm, chocolaty.
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Matt Wolf
Oh, you mean Guy. Guy the boyfriend? Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of artists crib things from real life. And Guy, I think, inspired aspects of that character. Well, I know so because Paul said so.
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Alison Stewart
He wanted to be a dramatic actor, at least in part. When did he find comedy? When did he decide, you know what? This is right for me?
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Matt Wolf
Well, Paul wasn't having success as a dramatic actor as a teen. He was sort of the resident juvenile at this prominent regional theater company in Sarasota, Florida. And he kind of found himself at CalArts by accident and trained in performance art. And I think kind of saw a path of being an underground performer. But Paul had more mainstream aspirations. And when he wasn't Getting cast in roles besides being on the Gong Show.
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Alison Stewart
That was hilarious.
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Matt Wolf
Yeah, it is. He did amazing stuff on the Gong Show.
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Alison Stewart
Amazing.
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Matt Wolf
That was a dead end. I think he realized that he was funny and to go with it. At the time, comedians like Andy Kaufman were doing comedy in a way that intersected with performance art. And people like Robin Williams were getting television specials. And so Paul saw that as an avenue. And that's when he discovered the Groundlings, which really changed his life and gave birth to that character.
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Alison Stewart
And it was so interesting. I never knew that he and Phil Hartman were such good friends.
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Matt Wolf
Yeah, it was Phil Hartman, Paul and a comedian named John Moody, who really were this holy trinity within the Groundlings, the real breakout stars. And they all collaborated intimately on the creation of the Pee Wee Herman show, the midnight show that Paul would put on there.
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Alison Stewart
That show looked like it was a riot. Like in the early days, it was so raw. It was so. It was so out there. What was the original response to it, that. That one man show?
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Matt Wolf
I mean, the initial show, which wasn't a one man show, it really was the product of collaboration with all these other gifted improvisers and punk artists like Gary Panter. The original response, I think immediately was ecstatic. It was something that clearly was becoming a cultural phenomena immediately. And I think it was because Paul and his collaborators built a full world. They built a world for his impish character to live in and a constellation of characters who brought out this sweetness and subversiveness that came to characterize Pee Wee's world.
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Alison Stewart
I wanted to ask you about Gary Panther. Would you explain to people who he was?
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Matt Wolf
Gary was initially a graphic designer who got involved in record labels, but he became the preeminent artist of the punk movement in Los Angeles and just made some incredible logos and album covers, but also comics like Jimbo. And Paul would go to Vinyl Fetish, the record store next door to the Groundlings. And he loved everything Gary did. He asked him to make a poster for his play, and Gary said, I want to design the whole thing. And what Gary made became, in some ways, a blueprint for Paul's children's television show, Pee Wee's Playhouse.
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Alison Stewart
In playing Pee Wee Herman, he made a decision to sort of become Pee Wee Herman. He went on the Dating Game as Pee Wee Herman. Why was it important for him to sort of give over himself to Pee Wee?
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Matt Wolf
Well, Paul always said to me, I wanted people to believe that Pee Wee Herman was a real person. And that's why Pee Wee was a conceptual art project. So part of the early experiments with that notion was to bring Pee Wee out into the wild. And the Dating Game was his first experience with that. He, in the film recalls going to the audition for the show in character as Pee Wee. And everybody just looked at him immediately. They gravitated to him like a magnet. And it's hilarious to see him being chosen as the winner of the show. Spoiler alert. But, you know, I think he started to realize the character isn't as good or as strong if people are thinking about Paul. And he sort of abandoned the career of Paul Reubens to focus on the career of Pee Wee.
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Alison Stewart
That's why it was like performance art. I mean, the character of Pee Wee was performance art.
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Matt Wolf
Yeah. I mean, when Paul really started to get known by a national audience, it was when he appeared on the early David Letterman show and he became a sort of regular who would do these kind of skits that would be in front of rear projections and green screens. And him and David had an incredible rapport. But as Paul says in the film, he was doing performance art in mainstream pop culture. And that was unprecedented to the extent that he was doing it. And that artistic ingenuity coupled with the level of ambition that Paul held, it really broke new ground.
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Alison Stewart
How did Paul Rubens deal with the idea that Pee Wee became very famous, but Paul wasn't as famous?
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Matt Wolf
Begrudgingly. I think that Paul at once appreciated his anonymity and also had an ambivalence about the fact that people didn't know who Paul Rubens was. When the title for the film Pee Wee as Himself comes from his credit in his debut film, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, in the end credits, it says Pee Wee played by himself. And when Paul's writing credit came up with Phil Hartman and Michael Vorhol, nobody knew who Paul Reubens was. And that was a source of tension for him, particularly with, you know, Tim Burton, who would go on to have this enormous career as a film director. But not everybody knows that Pee Wee's Big Adventure was his first film when he was 26 years old.
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Alison Stewart
I'm talking to director Matt Wolf about the two part documentary Pee Wee as Himself. It drops on HBO and Max this Friday. So in the 1990s and 2000s, Rubin faced two media scandals and arrests for indecent exposure in adult cinema and mistaken charge of child pornography. How did these arrests and the scandal around them and everything, how did it break down the wall between Pee Wee Herman and Paul Rubens?
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Matt Wolf
I mean, it was devastating for Paul, obviously, but he had spent his entire career so diligently creating this separation between Pee Wee Herman and Paul Reubens. And that really worked for him, and then it didn't. And the world met Paul Rubens through this scary mugshot. So it was a worst case scenario for him. And what Paul would say to me is that he was in a prolonged state of shock. I think it was years of really just being in a kind of state of shock about the consequences of what happened. We look at it now and think of that initial incident as being pretty provincial. But this was the early days of the media's kind of growing appetite for salacious takedowns. And Paul was an early casualty of that.
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Alison Stewart
So you were born just a couple years before Pee Wee's Big Adventure was released. What did Pee Wee Herman mean to you before you started this film?
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Matt Wolf
Well, I came of age on Pee Wee's Playhouse. And I wouldn't have been able to put words to it at a time, But I think it was really my first engagement with art that I had a strong emotional relationship to. I was transfixed by that television show. And I had that kind of iconic Pee Wee pull string doll. And it dangled above my bed all the way through my adolescence. And I looked at it every night before I went to bed and high school photography class, I took a picture of him. And that photo still hangs on my refrigerator today. So Pee Wee became, in some ways, an intuitive touchstone for me, even if I hadn't, in specific terms, analyzed why. And Paul Rubens remained a sort of point of fascination because he was unknown. And I often make films about people who might be called unconventional visionaries. And I like to do a reappraisal. So while Paul was, you know, while Pee Wee was well known, Paul wasn't. And in some ways, he kind of fit into my wheelhouse.
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Alison Stewart
All right, the film airs. Somebody wants to make a version of this film, a new fictional version. Who would you want to play Pee Wee Herman? I have a. My choice. But who would you want to play Paul Rubens?
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Matt Wolf
Oh, God, I have no idea. I'm sure there's some 3D scan of Paul and that he would prefer to play it himself. I don't know. I can't speak for him, but he was a big Timothy. Okay, I buy it.
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Alison Stewart
Chalamet playing Paul ribbons.
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Matt Wolf
I can see that. I mean, he wears those little bow ties sometimes for those award shows.
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Alison Stewart
But I was thinking about, like, just watching the first half of the film. I mean, he was good looking. He was like a gorgeous guy.
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Matt Wolf
Oh, he was. He was gorgeous. Yeah, he was beautiful. And some of the best archival is by Paul's friend Anne Primmy. These gorgeous photographs of Paul and his gender bending friends in high school in Sarasota, they look like they were shot out of the Warhol factory. And in fact all of them were obsessed with Andy Warhol. So there's just some revelatory, incredible archival footage from a period in which nobody has seen Paul. And it's also very rare that archival exists from that late 70s period in these art scenes. So you know Paul. Yeah, he was a just magnetic, compelling person across all eras of his life.
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Alison Stewart
I'm telling you. Timothy Schell may watch it this weekend. I am talking to director Matt Wolf about the two part documentary Pee Wee as himself. It drops on HBO this Friday. Thank you for coming to the studio.
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Matt Wolf
Thank you so much for having me. I'm Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, our team has been reporting high quality news about science, technology and medicine. News you won't get anywhere else. And now that political news is 24 7, our audience is turning to us to know about the really important stuff in their lives. Cancer, climate change, genetic engineering, childhood diseases. Our sponsors know the value of science and health news. For more sponsorship information, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.