Streaming companies are teeming with superstar documentaries, however few of these motion pictures have impressed responses extra sentimental than Pee-wee as Himself. “It’s overwhelming to take that in,” director Matt Wolf tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The scope and depth of individuals’s emotional response to the movie has been shocking.”
The HBO two-parter, now nominated for 5 Emmys (together with excellent documentary or nonfiction particular), has united the numerous TV viewers who grew up with Paul Reubens, the Groundlings alum who subsumed his personal identification by means of the childlike character he popularized within the Nineteen Eighties. Pee-wee Herman‘s distinct model of buffoonery — his honking snort, his brattiness, his oddball aesthetics — felt like outsider artwork that someway made its method into the Saturday morning mainstream.
Wolf was a type of Pee-wee disciples. In actual fact, Reubens was the documentarian’s dream topic. What he didn’t count on was a tense relationship with an artist anxious to manage his legacy, having seen his popularity plummet after being arrested in 1991 for indecent publicity at an grownup movie show. “My first dialog with Paul, he stated, ‘I need to direct this documentary myself, and all people’s telling me I can’t, and I don’t perceive why,’ ” Wolf recollects. Pee-wee as Himself grew to become as a lot concerning the push-and-pull between filmmaker and topic because it was an examination of a sophisticated performer.
At first, Wolf assembled a movie he calls “rose-tinted and vanilla.” He didn’t need to disrespect Reubens, who died unexpectedly of most cancers in 2023. However friends who noticed Wolf’s early minimize may sense a sure edginess left within the margins. “I at all times inspired Paul to embrace his complexity, and I wanted to take my very own recommendation,” Wolf says. So he put extra of himself within the movie, which supplied alternatives to indicate Reubens wrestling with easy methods to reveal his full self.
Wolf, whose credit embody Recorder: The Marion Stokes Challenge and Spaceship Earth, interviewed Reubens for roughly 40 hours in complete, discovering him “unbelievably sensible and difficult, and at instances candy and at different instances cranky.” At one level, Reubens walked away from the undertaking. At one other, he struggled to search out the phrases to come back out as homosexual, having retreated into the closet within the ’80s in an effort to protect his profession. And till Wolf heard the voice message Reubens recorded for him the day earlier than he died, the director had no concept the particular person he’d spent a lot time with was sick.
As Wolf and his crew recut Pee-wee as Himself, they turned it into each a celebration and a meta dissertation on superstar. In contrast to the extremely micromanaged pop star hagiographies which have flooded {the marketplace} lately, the movie makes use of a transparent directorial hand as an instance its star’s psychology. That perception, in Wolf’s view, is a part of why audiences have responded so passionately to Reubens’ candor.
“He’s a generation-defining artist who was torn down by the media and misplaced management of his private narrative and utterly separated himself personally from his alter ego and was selecting, unbeknownst to me, on the finish of his life, to lastly share his story,” Wolf says. “That’s unto itself very intense, and I wanted to lean into that depth and to depict it with nuance.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone subject of The Hollywood Reporter journal. To obtain the journal, click on right here to subscribe.