(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE THEME")
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In 1986, one of the most unusual and iconic kids' TV shows debuted.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE THEME")
PAUL REUBENS: (As Pee-wee Herman) Hey.
CYNDI LAUPER: (Singing) Come in, and pull yourself up a chair.
REUBENS: (As Pee-wee Herman) Like Chairry.
SUMMERS: "Pee-wee's Playhouse" had a zany cast of cartoonish people and puppets, like an armchair that could blink and talk and wave its arms and, of course, Pee-wee himself acting out the absurd plotlines, like his wedding to a bowl of fruit salad, complete with a veil.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE")
REUBENS: (As Pee-wee Herman) I love fruit salad.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters) Then why don't you marry it?
REUBENS: (As Pee-wee Herman) All right, then. I will.
SUMMERS: The man behind that character, Paul Reubens, is now the subject of a two-part documentary on HBO. It's called "Pee-wee As Himself." It tells the story of how a kid who grew up adoring "The Little Rascals" and "I Love Lucy" went on to revolutionize sketch comedy and children's television before falling into public scandal in his later years. Matt Wolf is the director and executive producer of "Pee-wee As Himself," and he joins us now. Welcome.
MATT WOLF: Thanks for having me.
SUMMERS: What do you think it was about Pee-wee that resonated with so many people?
WOLF: I think there's an impishness to Pee-wee, a rebelliousness, a sarcasm, but also a sweetness. There's something very timeless and tender about Pee-wee, and he can also be a brat. And within that character, there's an enormous range of emotions, and I found that to be true of Paul as well. So there was, I think, a certain level of authenticity to Pee-wee even though he had many enlarged kind of aspects to his persona. You know, Paul really wanted people to believe that Pee-wee Herman was a real person, and that became a sort of conceptual art project for him.
SUMMERS: So as Pee-wee is really starting to catch fire as a character, Reubens starts to, as he sort of describes it, bring the character out into the wild, and we get to this point where he's sort of going through his entire day as Pee-wee Herman. He's appearing on late-night shows. He's sitting for interviews. And he's doing all these things as Pee-wee Herman, not as Paul Reubens. He's sort of consumed by the identity of Pee-wee. Can you talk about that shift?
WOLF: Yeah. I think Paul made the decision to really strongly separate himself from his alter ego initially for professional and creative reasons. At some point in his trajectory toward pop culture kind of stardom, Paul decided to abandon the career of Paul Reubens and to only focus on the career of Pee-wee, and I think behind that, there were kind of deeper personal desires to maintain anonymity as Pee-wee Herman was becoming a star.
SUMMERS: It's interesting because you talk about his great desire to maintain that anonymity and to conceal Paul Reubens behind Pee-wee Herman, but there's also something else that you talk about in the documentary that Reubens was concealing, which was his sexuality. There's a thing that he says in the documentary that stuck with me. He says, I was as out as you could be, and then I went back in the closet. You spent time with him. You interviewed him for hours. How did you understand his motivations for doing that?
WOLF: Well, when I first met Paul, he made clear that he wanted to come out, but he had a kind of fraught relationship to that. I'm a gay filmmaker, and he was concerned that his sexuality would be too much of a focus in the documentary or that he might be framed as a gay icon. And, you know, we had strong generational differences. I think for an actor of Paul's generation, it just wouldn't have been feasible for him to become a prominent artist but also a children's entertainer if he was openly gay. And he made that decision out of necessity as a survival strategy, but it also became part of the personal fabric of his life.
SUMMERS: Throughout this documentary, there are these at times hilarious, at times very frustrating sequences where we hear you sort of off camera asking a question, and then Reubens is there and he's either refusing to respond or he's giving these very frustrating cryptic answers or he's sort of playing games with you. I just want to play an example of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF")
REUBENS: Your Honor, I feel like I'm being led right now.
WOLF: You are a little bit...
REUBENS: Yeah, a little bit.
WOLF: ...But go for it. It's only based on what you've said before.
REUBENS: Oh, no, it's not. It's based on your weird obsession.
SUMMERS: I mean, Matt, I interview people for a living, and I'm sitting here thinking how I might approach that, but let me ask you, was it challenging to interview Reubens since he's so adept at sort of sliding in and out of character in the moment?
WOLF: It was incredibly challenging and also totally thrilling. I mean, there was a competitive dynamic at play in our interview. And initially, I said, you know, people tend to expire around five hours. That's when people get tired. And Paul said, I'm not going to get tired. You're going to get tired. And I said, well, I could literally go on forever.
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
WOLF: And I realized as I was doing the interview, and Paul was, in essence, rebelling against the process, that this was portraiture. This showed who Paul was in his full complexity. And in that process and in that back and forth, he then would gradually and surely kind of reveal himself and also have moments of great clarity and sensitivity and self-reflection.
SUMMERS: One of the most infamous moments of Reubens' career came back in 1991. That was when he was arrested for exposing himself at an adult movie theater. He later pleaded no contest to charges of indecent exposure. And you cover this moment of his life in the documentary, as well as the later police raid of his home for suspected obscene material. But in watching, it seems like covering this part of his life, this chapter of his life, was a real point of tension and a struggle for creative control between you and Reubens. Can you talk about that?
WOLF: Yes. I mean, we never got to deeply dissect the experiences of his arrest. Paul and I were struggling, you know, for creative control, both on camera and off. And there came a point where we reached an impasse in which we weren't working together anymore because of these issues of editing and creative control. And it was a point at which I was kind of desperate to continue the process, to conclude the interview to address Paul's arrest, but then I found out about his health, along with the rest of the world, when he passed away.
SUMMERS: At the end of the documentary, we hear an audio recording that Paul Reubens made shortly before his death. Can you tell us about that?
WOLF: Yes. So, you know, I was scheduled to do a final interview with Paul, and we had a conversation in which I could tell something was wrong. And then I found out that Paul died on Instagram, along with...
SUMMERS: Wow.
WOLF: ...The rest of the world. Very few people knew the seriousness of Paul's struggles with his health or that he had been battling cancer for six years. So that made me completely reassess everything that I had discussed and done with Paul. But hours after I found out that Paul died, I got a call from his publicist and close friend, Kelly Bush Novak, and she said, you know, I tried to get to you before the news broke, and I couldn't, but Paul recorded something for you the night before he passed away. And I flew to Los Angeles and went to her office and listened to it. And it was devastating.
SUMMERS: I can't imagine what it's like to have spent - not only to have just grown up with Paul's body of work as Pee-wee, but to have worked so closely with him in shaping this documentary, and then to be sort of left with this gift after you'd found out that he'd suddenly died. Was there ever any question for you that that would be included in the documentary?
WOLF: I knew immediately after Paul passed away that I needed to rise to the occasion to make meaning out of the extraordinary circumstances I found myself in. You know, Paul was somebody who was just incredibly private, and this was part of that. And I needed to kind of make sense of what had happened through the course of our fraught relationship, but also to understand who he was and the choices he made both in the past but also at the end of his life.
SUMMERS: Matt Wolf directed and executive produced the HBO original two-part documentary "Pee-wee As Himself." It debuts on HBO and Max on May 23. Matt Wolf, thank you so much.
WOLF: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE THEME")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) "Pee-wee's Playhouse." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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