‘Pee-Wee As Himself’ is the late Paul Reubens like you’ve never seen him

This intriguing documentary, based on hours of interviews with the performer before his death, tells the full story of the man who created Pee-Wee Herman- and his surprising hidden life.

A great deal has been written lately about documentaries about celebrities, and how filmmakers have to balance telling an honest story with continuing to secure the cooperation of their subject or, if the subject is deceased, their estate.

Pee-Wee As Himself, directed by Matt Wolf (who made the great Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project), is unique and especially intriguing for the way it handles this question. The film is based on 40 hours of interviews with Paul Reubens, the actor and performer best known for creating and performing the character of Pee-Wee Herman. At some point, Reubens stopped cooperating with the project, and then he died of cancer in 2023.

In the interviews we see, the tension is noticeable, as we see Reubens pushing back a lot, and getting annoyed at times with his interviewer, at one point even declaring that he only liked one of Wolf’s previous films.

Would this film have been released in this form, if at all, if Reubens were still alive? It’s possible that it would not have, although I’m glad it did, as it’s one of my favorite documentaries of the year so far.

In the interviews with Wolf, Reubens came out publicly as gay, something he never did in his lifetime, although he was out all along to his family and closest friends. It’s a bit of a sad story, in that Reubens had a male partner for a time in the early 1980s, at the dawn of his career, and then appears to have never been in a committed relationship again for the rest of his life.

Indeed, the project is ultimately about identity, in more than one way. It’s about Reubens being gay and keeping it a secret most of his life, and also about the question of where Paul Reubens ends and Pee-Wee Herman begins. Adding another layer, Reubens battled cancer for several years, which would eventually kill him. The vast majority of people in his life were unaware of that- the filmmakers included.

So in other words, a lot is going on here. And that’s before we get to the part about Reubens’ pair of very controversial arrests.

Pee-Wee as Himself debuted at Sundance in January, and it lands on HBO this Saturday, in a two-part documentary that runs for more than three hours. That’s a lot of time, but the film fills it well, featuring the interviews, volumes of video footage, and extensive photos from throughout Reubens’ life and career.

The film goes in chronological order, beginning with Reubens’ childhood, and then going into his early career on stage and with the Groundlings, and his honing of the Pee-Wee Herman character, one of many he developed at the time. The first half of the film leads up to Tim Burton’s film Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which turns 40 years old this year, with the second half beginning with the story of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

Reubens’ Pee-Wee Herman character had a pedigree that had nothing to do with children’s television- it came from the Groundlings, and the late 1970s L.A. performance art scene, and other things that were decidely for adults. Yes, Captain Kangaroo was an influence, but so was Andy Warhol.

That this idea was adapted into a popular and successful Saturday-morning TV show, one that had the backing of a TV network and lasted for four years, is a small miracle. Reubens, at one point, looks right into the camera and says “yes, there was a gay subtext on Pee Wee’s Playhouse.”

Also, I had always assumed that Pee Wee’s Big Adventure was meant as a homage to De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, but Reubens reveals an inspiration for its origin that had nothing to do with that.

As for Reubens the man, we learn that Reubens was beloved by his Hollywood friends, but could sometimes be prickly and fight with collaborators over control- a trend which continued up until the documentary. His falling out with former friend Phil Hartman, who co-wrote Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, was especially ugly, as we see Hartman discussing with Howard Stern at the time.

And then came that 1991 arrest, when Reubens was nabbed for indecent exposure in a vice sting at a porn theater at his hometown of Sarasota, Fla. I admit, that when 13-year-old me heard about this — I still remembering a bunkmate at summer camp, listening to the news on the radio, blurting out, “Pee-Wee Herman got arrested for exposing himself in a movie theater!” — I thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened in history.

But of course, the truth was sadder than that, and it essentially cost Reubens his career for a time, although his Hollywood friends for the most part remained supportive (he ended up pleading no contest. And while Pee Wee’s Playhouse had wrapped up by that point, CBS ended up pulling the re-runs after the arrest.)

However, when it comes to the 1991 arrest, the film leaves a lot of questions unanswered, possibly because, as an on-screen title tells us, Reubens declined to do another interview to talk about that very subject.

If he was gay, what was he doing at a heterosexual porn theater? I still remember the news stories about this, which listed the actual title of the movie Reubens was seeing (that movie has an imdb page), as well as the exact masturbatory act he was accused of committing.

Was he there to cruise, and if so, did he somehow convince the cops to arrest him for something else and not for that? Did the months and years of embarrassing tabloid coverage and late-night jokes completely miss that?

A later arrest, after Reubens was investigated for possessing child pornography around 2002, was almost certainly appears to have been a misunderstanding, involving Reubens’ massive collection of vintage erotic art.

This, it’s clear, took a massive toll on Reubens, although once again he managed to avoid being outed, and was able to continue his career. It’s a painful thing, I’d imagine, to be falsely accused of being a pedophile, and this was before QAnon started doing that to every celebrity, every day.

Indeed, Reubens — who always wanted to be an actor — ended up having a respectable career as a character actor and TV guest star, in movies such as Blow and shows like 30 Rock.

In the later part of his life, he returned to the Pee-Wee Herman character, with a popular stage show that played on Broadway, and later with a third movie. I was at one point, in 2020, supposed to interview him, when he was promoting a touring stage show, but that fell apart when COVID canceled the tour.

Pee-Wee As Himself has successfully threaded the needle of how to tell an honest story about a famous person in the documentary form. Few documentaries in recent memory have managed this, although another great one earlier this year, Art For Everybody, did the same with Thomas Kinkade’s legacy. It’s a fond remembrance of this artist and man, and also an honest one.