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25 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

I'm reminded of him every time I jerk off at the movies. 

Well fuck, now I'm going to think about you thinking about him every time I jerk off at the movies.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

I caught a lot of the first part last night. Thought it was great. Love how they came up with the bike being the main part of Pee Wes’s Big Adventure.

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Posted

as a kid of the early 80's Pee Wee was our guy...even after the jerking shit..i dont' think anything that came after had the same impact as he and his show did IMO.

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Posted

Hearing him use his last breaths to deny being a pedo was sad.  That whole situation was bullshit.

Great documentary.  I was unaware of his early life and appreciate that he finally let us in.

And as @Deej mentioned - Elvira is lookin good.  Yes please!

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Posted (edited)

Very well done.  That last one count charge against him sounds like someone within circle of friends has an axe to grind.  He's a winner in my book.  BTW, if you are interested in some Gary Panter art/T-shirt images eBay wants your money.

Edited by Bevo&Pevo
Posted (edited)

Great article 

https://www.vulture.com/article/matt-wolf-pee-wee-herman-as-himself-documentary-paul-reubens.html?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=nym

Pee-wee and Me

 The film I made about my childhood hero was four years in the making, and it almost broke me.

 

5f7c940b438a4a95e57c63ab7481f5d7b0-pee-w

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When I approach someone to make a documentary about them, I write a love letter. In the 20 years I’ve been making films, I’ve written countless ones — to Siegfried & Roy, to soap-opera stars and reclusive musicians. Sometimes I’m appealing to their vanity, sometimes their sense that they’ve been wronged. Always, I end my letters with the same sentence: “Trust shouldn’t be expected. It needs to be earned.”

For years, my dream documentary subject was Paul Reubens. His groundbreaking television series, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, defined an entire generation of idiosyncratic children like myself. Throughout my childhood, a Pee-wee pull-string doll dangled above my bed, and I’d stare at it every night before falling asleep.

 

Quote

Five years ago, I started reaching out to Reubens through various interlocutors. In my love letter, I pitched a highbrow portrait of an artist. Pee-wee was a cult icon, but few people knew anything about his creator other than what they had read in the tabloids. My understanding was that Reubens preferred his privacy, and like most of my documentary subjects, he was an unconventional visionary ripe for reappraisal.

 

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Paul, as I came to know him, eventually sat down with me for 40 hours of on-camera interviews. We reminisced about his childhood in Florida, his early years as a performance artist, his meteoric rise to stardom. He also opened up for the first time about his sexuality and the relationship he gave up for his career. The film I made, Pee-wee As Himself, was four years in the making, and it almost broke me. Paul never fully ceded control. He refused to complete a final interview about the arrests that destroyed his reputation and held up our production for long stretches of time. For a while, he stopped talking to me, and I feared the project would never be completed. It would be Paul’s last private act, however, that allowed me to finish telling his story. On July 31, 2023, a week before our last interview was scheduled to take place, I learned along with the rest of the world that he had died of cancer. I was blindsided. My childhood hero, the person I had spent hundreds of hours getting to know, laughing and fighting with, had been dying, and I never had a clue.

 

Spoiler

Paul had contemplated making a documentary about his life for years, but said he didn’t like any of the directors he met with because they were reluctant to allow his input. The Safdie brothers, old friends of mine, who were rumored to be in talks with him to work on a new Pee-wee Herman film, asked him to talk to me instead.

It was the peak of lockdown when we met over Skype. When Reubens logged on, I had an awkward moment of starstruck silence. He had a sweet, almond-shaped face, and if you squinted, you could see a semblance of Pee-wee. But the man I was staring at was nothing like his alter ego. He was Paul. He sat on a groovy orange couch in front of a modernist flagstone fireplace and an expansive Los Angeles view. I complimented him on his home —  presumably the real-life inspiration for the playhouse from his children’s show — but he smirked and confessed, “It’s a photo from the internet.” Paul didn’t want me to see where he actually lived. I had been warned he might be difficult. There had been a series of professional fallings out, I was told. I would always say to skeptical colleagues, “I’m good with complicated people.”

Plus we were both gay. We were 30 years apart, and he was a celebrity, but at least we had that in common. Except Paul never enjoyed the freedoms I did as a young gay filmmaker. He had been as out as one could be during art school and decided to go back in the closet to pursue mainstream success. For most of his adult life, Pee-wee and Paul were two strictly separate parts of himself. I understood that choice as a survival strategy for gay men of his generation, but for Paul it was a source of shame and insecurity. He was strongly against his story being interpreted through a queer lens. “I don’t want to be depicted as a gay icon,” he said, “but I do want to come out in the documentary.” I never considered Paul to be closeted, but he had never discussed his sexuality publicly, and it was only later that I realized he had probably said the words “I’m gay” out loud just to a small number of friends. Persuading him to say so on-camera, I learned, would be a major challenge.

We spoke regularly for months   —   sometimes just hanging out, other times talking through the documentary process, and to what extent Paul might be able to influence the story. The dynamic between a documentarian and a subject is tricky. The relationships are more collaborative than people might expect because we documentary filmmakers don’t just need access. We invade the lives of private people with equipment and a crew, and we take their personal photos to scan and digitize. We ask subjects to sign release forms that grant us permission to use their life as the raw material for our work. Paul and I were bonding, but we were also working out how to get what we needed from each other.

He would FaceTime me often, and I would always pick up. No conversation lasted for just 15 minutes. We would talk for at least two hours each time. I began to informally interview Paul about his life. He shared videos of early performances and television appearances and the places where obscure recordings might exist if he hadn’t preserved them himself. We went through a list of close to 100 potential interview subjects  —  from his elementary-school crush to fellow celebrities. We were in what could be called a “honeymoon phase.” One night, stoned and lying on the couch, I answered Paul’s call. Formerly a prolific pothead himself, Paul knew how to make me laugh to the point of tears, and that night he was in rare form. My boyfriend of 20 years, Carl, has seen the full arc of these strange relationships that straddle the professional and the personal, and he warned me after I hung up the phone: “Watch out. You guys have absolutely no boundaries, and that could come back to bite you.”

 

In July 2021, I relocated to Los Angeles to begin production. Paul had invited me in to see his private world. He lived in a mid-century house packed to the brim with archives and collectibles. We would sit for meetings at his kitchen table under the Sputnik chandelier that figured prominently on the set of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Each evening at sunset, he meditatively spread dried corn and seeds around his driveway to attract wildlife. We would sit on a bench by his front door, quietly watching dozens of deer emerge from the surrounding hills. I felt we had become friends. He gave everyone in his inner circle carte blanche to speak with me, and I scheduled a dozen or so on-camera interviews. He asked me, though, to let him review the footage, which I’m not accustomed to doing. I indulged him because I had promised he would be involved in the process. That’s when we started butting heads. Paul hated how the first two interviews looked and came close to demanding reshoots. Then, without my knowledge, he asked the production designer for images of the interview frames on set.

As a director, I’m used to getting my way, and so was Paul. He asked our producer, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, to mediate a conversation about editing. As a condition to his participation in the project, we had agreed that Paul would have “meaningful consultation” during the making of the film but that I would have final cut. The more we talked, the clearer it became to him that for all his early input, documentaries are really made in postproduction, where he would have less of a say. Paul brought up the issue when the three of us were driving to the storage units where he kept decades’ worth of props and artifacts. Choosing my words carefully, I explained I planned to show him early cuts of the film to consider his feedback but it would be months before I could share anything. The conversation quickly escalated, and Paul raised his voice. He demanded the right to visit the edit room, and I was adamant that I needed to maintain my editorial independence. I never would have agreed to do the film if I knew that Paul would be breathing down my neck. He snapped back and said, “That’s exactly what you signed up for.” We arrived at the parking lot, and Emma left to let us have it out.

We got out and walked for a minute in silence before he said, “You and I have a lot more in common than you think. We’re scared of the same thing.” He was afraid of losing control of his own story again, and I was afraid of losing control of my film.

For three months, I filmed with Paul’s friends. Meanwhile, Paul refused to set a date for his own on-camera interview. I tried to ignore my growing anxiety that he might never be willing to tell his story in his own words. Then, on my last day of shooting, Paul was ready to get started  —  as long as we didn’t shoot at his home. By that point, I didn’t care. I just needed to keep things moving and film the interview. I asked for two days to prepare, and we staged a rented mid-century home. We decided the best method for filming would be through an Interrotron, the device invented by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris to project the interviewer’s face over the camera lens. This way Paul would be looking directly at the viewer throughout the documentary. I asked my cinematographer, David Jacobson, to put curtains around the camera so the only thing Paul would see in the interview chair was an image of my face. It was essentially a fancy version of our FaceTimes.

The afternoon before Paul’s first day of interviews, I got a frantic call. He was anxious that the backdrop and lighting wouldn’t feel right, and he wanted to spend another day perfecting it. I told Paul that we could reschedule if he wanted to, but after a long, purposeful pause, I said, “I’m going to take care of you.”

The next day, Paul was in the interview chair. He would spend an hour describing his first visual impressions as an infant or the colors and patterns of the wallpaper in his childhood bedroom. But when I tried to push the conversation forward, he squirmed, or made fun of me, or asked for a break. Every time I’d try a new question, he’d retort with a sarcastic remark or a wacky facial expression. Sometimes he’d answer a question and then digress into a 30-minute monologue about an elementary-school prank. I was growing concerned but kept a straight face.

Even with ten days scheduled, I wasn’t sure I could get Paul to let his guard down. He was on full display  —  slippery, rebellious, outrageous, and, in moments of reflection, deeply thoughtful and sincere, but he was still holding back. “I’m going to keep a few secrets, and even if I don’t, I mean, I will by nature,” he said at one point. “I’m the only person that knows everything about me, I think. There’s absolutely secrets that we all want to keep that make us attractive, that make us mysterious.” Now I realize that Paul wasn’t just battling me. He was wrestling with himself about how much to truly share on-camera.

On the fourth day, after 14 hours of interviews, Paul started talking about his college experiments with drag. He knew I was going to ask him next about his sexuality. He was fidgeting in his seat, jokingly asking for lollipops. Eventually, he pulled me aside and said, “I don’t know how to do this.” I said, “You just say, ‘I’m gay.’” We laughed. “Okay, if you say so,” he said. Paul sat back in the chair, and I continued to ask him pointed questions, which he dodged while speaking broadly about the word sexuality. Finally, I interrupted and asked, “Paul, are you gay?”

“This is something I’ve never spoken about ever,” he said. “I’ve spoken about it to a psychologist and a therapist. I’ve talked about it to very, very, very, very close friends … At Cal Arts, nobody didn’t know my sexuality, which was  —  did I say it? Did it come out? Gay.”

Suddenly, his body relaxed. For the next hour, he told me the story of his college boyfriend, his first true love, an artist named Guy, the devastation that followed when the relationship fell apart. “I was as out as you can be,” he said. “And then I went back into the closet.” They stayed in touch over the years until Guy was sick with AIDS. Their last meeting took place hours before Guy died.

That night after we wrapped, Paul FaceTimed me. I feared he was calling to take it all back, to tell me that he wouldn’t let me use the material we had captured that day. Instead, he told me he was relieved.

Despite our breakthrough, Paul was still evasive. Over ten days of filming, he had hardly discussed the arrests. More troubling, he was holding out on signing his release, and without that, we didn’t have the rights to use his interview or archival footage or to even tell his story. Emma threatened to shut down the production, and I stayed up at night terrified that we might not get the crucial final interview. Weeks went by and then months with Paul and the producers at odds, and the project was at a standstill. Every time my phone rang, my heart started pounding. Either Paul was calling me with grievances or Emma was updating me with bad news.

I was back in New York furiously working with my editor, Damian Rodriguez, to assemble the 40 hours of interviews I filmed with Paul, and the 1,000 hours of archival footage our archivist, Brittan Dunham, had already digitized. The production was losing money, but I thought if I made it to a rough cut, I could convince Paul to proceed. He needed to know what would be lost if the film imploded.

My communication with Paul had become tense and infrequent, and in one of our last conversations, he told me that I was the only person who could save the production. He warned that if I didn’t, I would regret it for the rest of my life. I pushed back: “Paul, you are at war with the producers, not me, and only you can make the choice to proceed with the film.”

Five months went by. Paul and I had stopped speaking. When we had to lay off the postproduction staff, I was devastated. My relationship with Carl was strained, my health suffered, and I didn’t know who would hire me after failing to finish the biggest film of my career. Then, on my birthday, I got a text from Paul with a Betty Boop animated GIF. “Happy 40th,” it said. He was a big believer in birthdays, and this gesture implied we might still be in good standing. Early the next morning, I woke to another text from Paul, asking to speak. He wanted to see if there could be a solution to continue making the film.

The determination I once felt nearly two years ago to win Paul’s trust had faded. I was skeptical and hurt, and I was trying to move on with my life and to start new projects. But I called him because I was scheduled to be in L.A. to shoot a freelance job that week. “I’d like to show you the first 45 minutes of the film,” I said. Two days later, we were in a screening room.

Paul arrived with his assistant, Allison Berry, who had worked with him for nearly 40 years. I was relieved that she joined because Allison was forthright with her opinions, and I suspected she had been advocating for Paul to finish the film. Before things went off the rails, I remember confiding to Allison about my struggles with Paul. “I think he trusts me,” I said tentatively. “Or maybe he doesn’t, and that’s okay,” she said.

I sat behind Paul and Allison as the rough cut played. Occasionally Paul laughed, but he asked to pause every ten minutes for a bathroom break. Each break grew longer, and I assumed Paul was taking time to absorb the experience of watching his life play out onscreen. Paul saw the scene depicting his relationship with Guy, illustrated with vivid, romantic Super 8 film, which Paul shot in the late 1970s.

At the end of the screening, he smiled. For the past two years, when I presented him with an idea, the best response I could get was, “I don’t disagree with that.” I’d say, “So does that mean you agree with it?” He’d clarify, “That’s a different category.” Paul said that in the bathroom, he was brainstorming what he should say to me about the film. “I look forward to helping you make it even better” was the response he came up with.

 

I left L.A. inspired by our meeting and optimistic for the first time in a year. Still, the path to completing Paul’s contract, securing the remainder of his archival material, and sitting down for that final interview was far from certain. Things got better and then they didn’t.

Whenever I expressed hope for a resolution, we’d fall backward toward the same conflict over editorial control. When Paul was stalling, I assumed he was afraid to discuss the arrests. I also wondered if he had always intended to take over the film during postproduction. But it was futile to figure out his thinking. The project seemed all but dead.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, we got word that Paul was ready to move forward. His team asked if we could film his interview in two weeks. I was shocked that Paul was ready and that he had signed his release. Before the shoot, he called me. His voice sounded strangely weak, and he asked me to sit down. I could tell something was wrong.

“I might not be able to stay as involved as I hoped,” he said. “But I know that you’ll make the film we discussed.” He continued, “I’m sorry that I was so emotional these past few years,” and I responded, “I’m sorry if I did things that upset you.” He said gently, “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Then after a long pause, “I trust you.” I was stunned. The only thing I could say back was, “I’ll do right by you.”

When I hung up the phone, I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t know what had just happened, but it was heavy. The next week, when I was shooting another freelance job before heading to L.A. to film the interview with Paul, I got a text from an executive at HBO. “Is this real?” she wrote, along with a screenshot from Pee-wee Herman’s Instagram account. It said, “Last night we said farewell to Paul Reubens, an iconic American actor, comedian, writer, and producer … Paul bravely and privately fought cancer for years.”

I felt my legs buckling. In a matter of seconds, my phone exploded with an onslaught of texts. Emma called me, her voice quavering, while more calls rolled in. Then I heard from Paul’s close friend and publicist, Kelly Bush Novak.

Kelly said she had tried to call me before the news broke, but she couldn’t reach me in time. “Paul recorded something for you the night before he died,” she said. A few days later, I was in her office listening to Paul’s deathbed audio. It was devastating. But there was no time to grieve. The project I thought would never see the light of day now had an ending. That night and the year that followed, I went into filmmaking mode. In the edit room, I’d sometimes cringe watching our exchanges. At one point, I told Paul, “I don’t think we’d be here if you didn’t have a tiny bit of trust in me.” He shot back, “You’ve made one documentary I liked, out of how many  —  six?” Other parts were revealing in ways I hadn’t quite understood in the moment. I tried to recall any indication he might have been sick. The only thing that came to mind was something he said off-handedly: “The key to keeping a secret is to tell nobody.”

The film I made about Paul premiered at Sundance in January. I was still angry for the way he treated me but also regretful that he wasn’t there. In the end, there was a limit to how much Paul would let me in. It has taken me a while to understand why. Paul spent his adulthood hiding behind an alter ego, and he took a leap of faith to share his inner life with me. He had made incredible art about self-acceptance but couldn’t find it for himself. The tragedy, I think, is that he was on his way.

The other day, I was writing a letter to a new subject. I was about to copy and paste my usual line — “Trust shouldn’t be expected. It has to be earned” — when I had a flashback to something Paul once said to me. It was at a moment when things were peaceful between us, and I was explaining how I imagined telling his story. “I’m realizing that you’re sort of making a love letter in the form of a film for me,” he said. “I don’t disagree with that,” I replied. Now that Paul is gone, I recognize he was right. Through my film, I was able to express that I loved him

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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