Doc Watch: Pee-Wee as Himself (2025)

Watched:  05/26/2025

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Matt Wolf

Watching Pee-Wee as Himself (2025) is a strange journey.  There was a lot I didn't know up until when he joined The Groundlings, and then there was what I did know -  including the two arrests.  But in the end, the film kind of unravels a bit in a way that seems almost inevitable - surely director Matt Wolf laying the trail to let us know this is coming.

Beyond that, the doc faces the same problem that I found with the recent Steve Martin documentary.  It's a lengthy film, it criss-crosses the years and draws connections, but the subject is so practiced at maintaining their inner-selves, and their privacy, that even at the end, you feel like you barely saw anything even after 3 hours.  

Jumbles of photos from a childhood are interesting, but don't tell a story.  Talking heads commenting on what they're already framing are useful, and provide color, but it feels very carefully managed - we're told it's carefully managed.  We keep seeing the collections, but there's no discussion of what's in there, or why (and as a collector, I know there's a story behind everything).  We see his parents, but they won't ever come out and discuss them beyond "his dad was macho and may not have liked Paul's lifestyle".  His mother is a non-entity.

Both Paul Reubens and Steve Martin, who agreed to let themselves be known via documentary, still want to control, and so we get a look through a very narrow lens, which is better than nothing, but it feels more questions are raised than are satisfied.  If you want to spend time with how Pee-Wee came to be - then we've got a great film for you.  If you want to know Paul Reubens, that may not really happen.  

But tracking Reubens from art-kid in Sarasota, Florida to art student at CalArts to working actor in LA to the Groundlings to who Pee-Wee is and how he came to be is good stuff.  And probably instructive to Millennials and younger who don't get the 1980's pop-art/ punk aesthetic that the show used and which Pee-Wee inhabited.

Pee-Wee's rise was unlikely.  The character seemed to repel as much as appeal (my memory was that most of the parents found him a nightmare when I was young), and the shift from late-night curiosity to mid-morning kid's entertainer was kind of odd, in its way.  The doc tracks how that happened - and the answer is really that a bunch of kids went to see his movie (I know I did) and CBS decided to throw money at him. 

Seeing how the show came to be is exciting!  Would I have watched a whole doc just on the show? - absolutely.

But it becomes clear the documentary really exists to clear Reubens' name and share the damage done for a guy who, because he was in compromising situations more than he was caught doing anything that bad, got dragged.  And you can't really talk about what happened honestly unless you see what led up to the arrests.  And, then, why Reubens had a hard time recovering. All that they do as well as I think Reubens was able to deal with it on camera. 

For the record, (a) I generally liked Pee-Wee from when I snuck a watch of the special on HBO and (b) I was confused in 1991 why the cops were arresting anyone in a porn theater, and felt like he was getting a really bad rap.  And that was when I was a 16-year-old living in Texas.  Then, when the 00's-era charges regarding child erotica didn't stick the way the prosecutors wanted, but similar charges had stuck with Jeffrey Jones, I figured they didn't actually have anything.  It's not really a subject that's easy to sweep under the rug. 

I think it's fair to say that Reubens was difficult.  The filmmakers don't seem very willing to get much on the record or into detail unless they have interview footage, but people keep saying it in interviews, and  thanks to an old Howard Stern video, we see Phil Hartman, who was in the original Pee-Wee stage show at the Groundlings, admit they're estranged and why, and it's hard to watch.  We know Reubens fired his manager.  And, in the end, he kind of dropped out of his own doc.  

Had he lived, it's not clear it would have seen the light of day.

The interview subjects are an interesting who's-who.  And a reminder of who has passed.  Lynne Marie Stewart is featured (and she passed recently), David Arquette, Tim Burton, Laurence Fishburne, Natsha Lyonne, Signal Watch fave Debi Mazar has a good chunk and Signal Watch patron saint Cassandra Peterson appears...  And some of Reubens' attorneys.  

I did find it odd nothing was said about the passing of John Paragon, Stewart or what happened with the crew from various Pee-Wee related efforts.  I know this wasn't about them, but...  Paragon was there for both Reubens and Cassandra Peterson, and it feels like that partnership was just swept aside in this doc, whereas Peterson talks about him ad nauseum in her bio. Maybe a different doc on The Groundlings should happen before everyone is too old or gone.

I do think this will be maybe the final word on Reubens unless something nuts comes to life.  He'd already rehab'd his image through the 2000's and 2010's, and people were generally happy to see him in things.  And maybe the film doesn't always make him look great, but it does make him seem far more human than any interview I'd previously seen.

Difficult or not, private or not, the Paul Reubens we see here is a @#$%ing delight.  I loved his social media presence.  That he'd stopped appearing anywhere does make sense now that we know he was ill.  But here he's a pain (Pee-Wee was *always* a pain, lest we forget).  He's smart as hell and funny in disarming and impish ways.  Challenging.  But also a very real person and you can see the mind that cooked up Pee-Wee in a spark in his eye.

I enjoyed the doc for what it was, and maybe wanting ore is okay.