Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse

by Caseen Gaines

  With the arguable exception of Randy, the door-to-door salesman was the undeniable antagonist of the show’s first season. With his too-large head resting atop his too-small body, his physical presence alone was enough for Pee-wee to slam his vinyl red door and scream really loud with horror. Ric Heitzman was the man inside the salesman’s oversized, mascot-inspired costume, and he played the role with the rigidity of your typical unsuccessful traveling salesman.

  Allison Mork and Chairry [© George McGrath]

  There is no playhouse puppet more beloved and remembered than Chairry, Pee-wee’s overstuffed seafoam blue armchair voiced and operated by Alison Mork. The puppet was backless, which allowed Mork room to sit atop a sand bag. She would inch her way into the puppet and, once inside, her arms slid into the puppet’s. There was a foot pedal used to operate Chairry’s mouth and wooden dowels to control her eye movements.

  When creating the look of the puppets, the creative team sought to stake their claim with other popular children’s entertainment of the day. “I brought a very anti-Muppet stance to the whole project,” White says.

  “We were also cartoonists and that cartoon-vibe runs through the show,” Heitzman explains.

  Kent Burton animates the Dinosaur Family [© Kent Burton]

  Steve Oakes at Broadcast Arts had called on reinforcements from Aardman Studios in England to animate the Penny cartoons. “We didn’t know much about the project,” Nick Park recalls. “We were told what the assignment was and got to it.”

  According to Richard Goleszowski, an animator from the show’s first season known to most as Golly, the creation of Penny was an international collaborative process.

  “Penny was Paul’s idea,” he recalls. “His initial idea was to do a classical cartoon that looked like it was made in the 1930s. He had this idea for a character with pennies for eyes.”

  Despite the initial idea, Reubens and the production team at Broadcast Arts were undecided on how she should look.

  “They sent over some of Gary Panter’s designs to England for us to get inspired and it was quite a shock,” Golly remembers. “We weren’t used to that style of American underground comic art. Instead, Nick Park decided to send over some sketches of Penny in a Wallace and Gromit style. Paul was happy, and we flew out to America to get started.”

  In order to achieve the stream-of-consciousness narration for the cartoons, dozens of preteen girls were given large glasses of Coca-Cola and were asked to talk freely about whatever interested them. The process gave the animators the freedom to create a script and animate on the fly.

  “It’s a very creative thing to do, to animate like that, because you have to find a story through all of the narration,” Golly says. “It makes the process more creative because you have to find a way to make it work.”

  However, the young girls’ chatter covered some ground the animators simply couldn’t use, which created a surprising problem. “Whitney Houston was a massive star in the summer of 1986 and it seemed she was every little girl’s hero,” Golly remembers. “We had hours of tape of kids going on about how much they loved her.”

  After animating 10 Penny cartoons, the “Aardmans” were called back to England. Broadcast Arts animator Dave Daniels took up the responsibility of finishing the remaining three cartoons.

  “The thing I tried to do was emulate their style as much as possible,” he says. “I spent several days studying what they had already done with Penny. I was trying to throw away my individual look. I just thought about it as an actor would. When you go on stage, you’re trying to throw yourself completely into a part. That’s what I was trying to do with Penny.”

  Despite his best efforts, Daniels’ style came through on the segments he animated. Careful observers may notice variation in the look and style of the Penny cartoons during the first season.

  “I tended to have a little more of a speedy, Warner Brothers animation style to it, which isn’t necessarily good because there’s an understated subtlety to the Aardman stuff,” Daniels says. “They brought a lot of really small, nice touches to it. My style was more active and more American, but theirs were filled with more dry wit and restraint. I think theirs are better, to be frank, but I tried really hard to follow their rules and not do my own thing.”

  [© Kent Burton]

  [© Sal Denaro]

  The dinosaur family sequences in the first season were animated by Kent Burton, and it was Burton who had come up with the initial concept during a brainstorming session with the production team.

  “I thought that maybe Pee-wee could have a time machine and would go back to the days of the dinosaurs,” he says. “I wanted them to be realistic and do dinosaur sorts of things. I thought it would be a good education for the kids to learn about prehistoric times. The producers liked the idea of dinosaurs but they wanted it to be playful, so they came up with a whole mouse-hole concept, with dinosaurs that looked like toys. That was fine with me. What meant a lot was that I asked for dinosaurs and they gave them to me — which was great after suffering through so many boring commercials I was used to animating.”

  The dinosaurs being constructed [© Sal Denaro]

  Burton also helped design and physically sculpt the latex figurines that he used to animate the sequences.

  “I had the idea of putting pterodactyl heads on them,” he says. “And although I didn’t design the mother and father, I sculpted them. We knew that we wanted the dinosaurs to be upright and have tails, so the designs kind of came together naturally.”

  The dinosaurs, like the food items in the refrigerator, were constructed using metal armatures on which dino skins were stretched, similar to the way the gorilla was constructed for the original King Kong film. The metal skeletons for the dinosaur family were constructed by Sal Denaro, who was left uncredited for his work.

  Art director Sid Bartholomew and Playhouse guest star Calvert DeForest [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  Stephen R. Johnson, director of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video, was brought on board to direct the series. His MTV directing style greatly enhanced the look of the show, although his lack of planning before shoots frequently caused delays.

  “He was very much in charge,” Golly recalls. “He’d be very dramatic and loud. He’d change things at the drop of a hat. It was very exciting working with him, but he’d always be getting in arguments with the producers.”

  Creating the Cast

  The job of casting Pee-wee’s Playhouse posed some early problems. While an ensemble of actors was already in place from The Pee-wee Herman Show, not all were invited to join Reubens on his Saturday morning TV show. Lynne Stewart, Phil Hartman, and John Paragon were asked to reprise their roles, but the remaining members were not asked to come over and play. Although the personalities of his character remained unchanged, the spelling of Kap’n Karl’s name was changed to the more traditional “Captain Carl.” Stewart and Paragon signed on right away, but Hartman took more convincing.

  “There was a lot of jealousy between Paul and Phil,” Richard Abramson explains. “They were close friends, but Paul never really went out of his way to help Phil in his career, and Phil felt like he was always in Paul’s shadow. In a way, he was.”

  [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  After the release of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and before filming had begun on Playhouse, Reubens was invited to host Saturday Night Live as Pee-wee. To make certain the character was written into sketches that would work for his unique sense of humor, Abramson convinced Lorne Michaels to allow Hartman and John Paragon to join the show’s writers for the episode Pee-wee hosted. Michaels agreed.

  “I don’t know if that’s ever happened before or since,” Abramson says.

  When Saturday Night Live was casting for its following season, Hartman decided to audition. At the time he was a regular on Pee-wee’s Playhouse. He asked Abramson to put in a telephone cal
l to Michaels in advance of his audition to help his chances of getting on the show. Abramson did, and within weeks, Hartman was hired. But the SNL schedule limited his accessibility to Reubens and ensured he would only be able to play Captain Carl for one season. According to McGrath, Reubens felt Hartman’s departure from Playhouse showed disloyalty. News that Hartman’s focus had shifted to another project put a permanent damper on his relationship with Reubens.

  “Paul actually was angry about this, rather than happy for Phil’s success,” he says. “He was really nasty to Phil and felt the reason he got the job was because Paul [had originally] brought him there as a writer. They didn’t speak for years.”

  Although several Groundlings joined Pee-wee on Saturday morning, there are several factors that led to others not being invited to move to New York, among them that the original cast of the stage show had almost no ethnic diversity. Reubens wanted the program to more closely reflect the viewing audience, so changes were made to incorporate more people of color into the cast. According to Richard Abramson, it was important to Reubens that the playhouse be a place where people of all backgrounds could feel at home.

  “Both Paul and I grew up in a situation where we were a little bit of outcasts growing up, especially in grade school where I was the only Jewish kid,” he explains. “That’s why the main idea behind Pee-wee’s Playhouse was that you don’t have to be the coolest and best-looking kid on the playground to still have friends. You can be different and still be successful. That’s the way the show was designed.”

  Johann Carlo and Pee-wee [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  To increase the diversity of the show, John Moody’s Mailman Mike was replaced by S. Epatha Merkerson as Reba the Mail Lady. Merkerson was a relatively unknown actress who had just landed a small role in Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It.

  “It was one of those wild things where I went to audition and I thought I was funny and the person I auditioned for didn’t,” Merkerson recalls. “And so I had blown the job. And I guess weeks later they got new casting people.”

  Gilbert Lewis and Johann Carlo were cast in the newly created roles of the King of Cartoons and Dixie the Cab Driver, respectively.

  In between filming projects, Reubens would often grow his hair out past his shoulders and sport a goatee. Although he was never photographed without his classic crew-cut while dressed as Pee-wee, many of his friends and associates were used to seeing Reubens with long locks and facial hair. “When I went in to audition, I didn’t realize his name was Paul Reubens,” Carlo remembers. “I asked him where Pee-wee was. I saw Paul, but with his long, stringy hair he kind of looked like a hippie. I thought he was a producer.”

  Larry Fishburne [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  With the majority of the cast in place, the production hit two major casting problems. Dozens of people had auditioned for the role of Cowboy Curtis, but no one worked.

  “They brought in all these models,” Reubens recalls. “Guys who were great looking and weren’t right.”

  After a day of casting, Reubens remembered that Larry Fishburne, who was a friend of the spotlight operator for The Pee-wee Herman Show at the Groundlings, was in New York.

  “I called him up and said, ‘Will you come down and read this?’ and we cast him like thirty seconds later,” Reubens recalls.

  “I was there when he interviewed,” says Kevin Ladson, a production assistant on the show’s first season. “I said, ‘You’re Larry Fishburne from Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club!’ and he said, ‘Yes sirree!’ He had the accent and he came full-on in character.”

  For the role of Mrs. Steve, the snooping next-door neighbor, Reubens wanted Suzanne Kent, a Groundling alumna. Despite her interest, she was unable to join the Playhouse cast.

  “I wanted to do Pee-wee, but it was a timing issue with It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” Kent recalls. “I couldn’t do both, and I guess my agent had committed to Garry Shandling first.”

  The role ultimately went to Shirley Stoler, a character actress best known for her starring role in The Honeymoon Killers. It was a concession that Reubens was forced to make and one that he remained unhappy with for the duration of the shoot because Stoler was a deeply polarizing presence on the set.

  Shirley Stoler flips the bird on the Playhouse set [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  “Shirley was probably the laziest actress I’ve ever worked with,” McGrath says. “When she was supposed to play ring-around-the-rosey with the kids, she stood in one spot and flapped her arms. If she was ever placed near furniture or a window ledge, she would try to sit down. She was always whining and had a really low, negative energy. She kept complaining that she was ‘drowning in her own moisture,’ which only made everyone near her more aware of the heat.”

  Despite McGrath’s assessment, Stoler’s on-set attitude was a source of amusement to many others. Kevin Ladson was in charge of making the coffee, in addition to his other responsibilities. One day his busy schedule led to a memorable interaction with Stoler.

  “I didn’t change the coffee pot for at least nine hours,” he recalls. “As I was going to change the coffee, Shirley insisted that I get her a cup. I looked at it and it was beyond mud. I told her it was totally undrinkable and she said, ‘Just give me what’s there.’ I went back and forth with her a few times, but she insisted on getting a cup right then and there. I poured her a cup and she wanted it black, with just a little Sweet ‘N Low. She drank the muddy coffee and said, ‘Mmmm! This is the best coffee I’ve ever had!’”

  Designing the Opening

  To film the episodes, Broadcast Arts rented a SoHo loft that had been used previously as a sweatshop. Before construction could begin on the set, the entire space had to be gutted and cleared of sewing machine tables and spinning wheels.

  “It was quite funky, but suited our needs,” Steve Oakes explains. “It was a wonderful hole in the wall. We converted it into a stage, but it was sort of a flophouse. Pee-wee’s flophouse.”

  Although the space was large enough to film in, the conditions were less than desirable.

  “This little production company was not fit to produce a mixed-media live-action show,” Prudence Fenton recalls. “They wouldn’t even rent a real stage. The space didn’t even have enough electricity to supply all the lights. Every fifteen feet there’d be a pole to hold up the loft ceiling, so the set had to be designed around them. The stage was on the fifth floor and we had this huge air conditioning truck we called ‘Airy’ feeding cold air in from downstairs because Paul liked it cold. He’d be in the suit and everyone else would literally be in down jackets.”

  As shooting began on the live-action set, producer Fenton and animator Phil Trumbo began working on the show’s opening title sequence, an amalgamation of animation, live-action, and special effects, designed to establish the colorfully unpredictable world that the viewing audience was soon to encounter.

  The camera set-up for shooting the beginning shot of the opening credits [© Richard Kent Burton]

  Work on the opening began in early July. According to Trumbo, who directed the animation portion, Reubens had a very specific concept in mind. “He wanted it to feel sort of like you’re coming out of a national park,” Trumbo says. “He wanted the funky sign, and the camera to come across this place that looks like outsider art or some weird roadside attraction filled with all these wacky characters. Then the camera would go into that place.”

  After meeting with Reubens to discuss his vision, Trumbo storyboarded the sequence. He and Fenton split the animators into two groups, with half working on the exterior model for the playhouse and the rest working to create the fantasy forest landscape through which the camera navigates before arriving at the playhouse door.

  When storyboarding was completed and the set designed, Trumbo and Fenton began preliminary test shots on the animated sequence. Initially, their tests failed to match up with Reubens
’ concept.

  “I would work out the moves and show it to Paul in a rough state before we did all of the animation,” Trumbo says. “I want to say we did about twenty versions of it before we had a basic move that he liked. At one point, when we both were getting frustrated, I got a camcorder and said, ‘Geez, will you just take this around the set and give me an idea what you’re looking for? I feel like we’re trying to give you something and we’re not accomplishing what your vision is.’ He literally took this big camcorder and wandered around the set with it. He didn’t produce anything that helpful, but it was important to say, ‘We want to do your vision but we’re not quite sure how to accomplish it. How do we do that?’”

  Despite the tedious approval process caused by Reubens’ perfectionism, Fenton feels his feedback significantly enhanced the final product. “We showed him that move every day for seven weeks, twice a day, and every time he made a suggestion it always made it better,” Fenton says. “But it was a lengthy process.”

  The seven-week routine finally came to an end when Trumbo joined forces with Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh, who was going through a similar process with Reubens composing the theme music. They ran into one another on the Playhouse set.

  “Mark and I were waiting to see Paul at the same time,” Trumbo says. “As we were waiting, we talked about what we were doing, and Mark was going through the same revision process with the music. Paul just wasn’t hearing what he wanted. When we got into Paul’s dressing room, I put in my black-and-white animatic of [our] latest opening sequence motion test. Paul had a boombox and a VHS player. I told Mark to cue up his audio and, when I signaled, we’d both push play. I said ‘go’ and pushed play on the visuals. Mark pushed play on the audio and we played the music and the visuals together. It looked really cool and Paul said, ‘Yeah, these both look cool. Go ahead.’ It was kind of like, hearing the music and seeing the picture together, it made sense to him.”