Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse

by Caseen Gaines

  Going Back to the Playhouse

  Before Reubens could dedicate himself wholeheartedly to Big Top Pee-wee, he had to deliver the Playhouse’s second season he had agreed to. The show was a hit, attracting younger viewers to the once geriatric CBS network, but there were a number of communication problems between Broadcast Arts and Reubens’ team that needed to be addressed before production could continue.

  “The first season was a roller-coaster ride,” says Judy Price. “It was produced by this little outfit in New York. I wasn’t totally comfortable with them, but they had a real imaginative group.”

  [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  Price recalls one particular argument from early in the production process that exemplified the relationship between the two camps. Reubens wanted the playhouse door to be red and padded, as a visual reference to old diner booths. However, the team at Broadcast Arts installed the door in a different color because the material was more expensive in red. Ultimately, Reubens held his ground and his jagged red door became iconic.

  “Paul had a very definite vision for everything,” Price says. “He was involved in every aspect of that show. He would engage with the writing and art direction. Some would say he was difficult to work with, but he wasn’t really. If you listened to him and helped him see his vision through, he was a happy camper.”

  “The proof’s in the pudding,” Richard Abramson adds. “The show was unbelievable and is still successful. Was Paul easy to work with? No. Was he right about most things? Absolutely. Did he always handle himself in a completely professional and mature way? Not all the time, but that was the way he got his points across.”

  While Reubens’ creative vision drove the television series, the team at Broadcast Arts also saw themselves as bringing a unique set of talents to the table.

  Steve Oakes [© Steve Oakes]

  “At Broadcast Arts, we weren’t just taking the Pee-wee franchise and mass producing it. We had our roots in mixed-media and the renaissance of stop-motion animation,” says cofounder Steve Oakes. “We had the ability to do green screen and puppets from an artists’ perspective. The show had a real New York aesthetic. We respected the audience of youngsters, but spoke to an MTV, teenage audience as well.”

  With Reubens’ perfectionism and Broadcast Arts’ inexperience in producing a television show of Playhouse’s magnitude, it wasn’t long before tempers flared.

  “Paul was sort of serving his time in New York and that made for some tension,” Oakes says. “He is an artist that was very much hands-on with the approval of all the minutia of the show. He really delved into the details and ended up making the show great, but it was a chokepoint for expediting production.”

  Delays on the set were not only caused by Reubens’ approval process, but also by the erratic mood swings of Reubens’ manager and the executive producer of Playhouse, Richard Abramson.

  “I’ll be polite and say Rich was difficult,” Oakes says. “He would throw these tantrums. He even put his fist through a wall one day and broke a bunch of bones in his hand and had to have his hand in a cast for most of the second half of the first season. I would guess, from his point of view he was doing the right thing for Paul, but he was not conducive to a fun working relationship. Paul was in a good cop/bad cop relationship with Rich. Paul was the funny guy that delivered the laughs and Rich was controlling and demanding. He didn’t really have much empathy for what the process involved.”

  “I always tried to be reasonable,” Abramson says. “But at the end of the day, it was my job to support Paul.”

  The on-set scuffles often led to phone calls to Judy Price and Michael Chase Walker at CBS, who would drop what they were doing in order to check on the production.

  “I went out there several times because of problems,” Price says. “There were lots of fires to put out.”

  It got worse: disagreements over creative decisions quickly gave way to problems over finances. According to Abramson, Broadcast Arts had agreed to pay for all expenses involved with producing the show before production began. Abramson and Reubens would handle their own salaries and they’d handle the music, for which composers would be paid a flat fee of $5,000 per episode. In principle, this arrangement had long-term benefits for Broadcast Arts, but in practice caused severe short-term pain.

  “As the scripts were written, [Broadcast Arts] realized this was an expensive proposition and they weren’t going to make a lot of money,” Abramson says. “But in the beginning, it was the deal they wanted and the one they made.”

  “We were much too ambitious for our budget and that caused tension,” Oakes says.

  According to Oakes, Abramson would often request changes be made to the animation and that sequences be reshot. These demands caused the first season episodes to frequently run over budget and be delivered late to the network.

  Richard Abramson and Greg Harrison [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  “Sometimes we wouldn’t get a show delivered to CBS until Friday night,” Price recalls. “I freaked out every week. It was like I was looking at this great abyss, wondering if this was going to be the week I would jump.”

  “There were all these demands made to change things and shoot beyond our schedule,” Oakes says. “So we put a price tag on it and said, ‘If you really want to shoot these extra days, this is what it’s going to cost.’ Rich wasn’t very accommodating on any of those fronts, so we ended up in a lawsuit.”

  At the end of 1986, while Playhouse was just beginning to pick up steam in the ratings, Broadcast Arts sued Reubens for $900,000, which they said represented their share of the overages and the other monies owed.

  “Paul and his managers, in the dispute about the overages, were withholding our payment,” Oakes explains. “Not only withholding the overages, which we thought were fair for them to contribute to because they caused the overruns, but they weren’t even paying the base amount that was in our contract, even though we delivered the show.”

  The cocktail of unbearably hot New York weather, inadequate shooting conditions, and distance from Reubens’ homebase on the west coast, were enough reason for the star to want to move the production to Los Angeles for the second season.

  “They told us they were taking the show to L.A. and asked us to send over all the props and puppets,” Oakes recalls. “We said, ‘Okay, send us our payment. What’s it going to be?’ Of course, they didn’t, so the puppets stayed in storage until we got paid . . . and we didn’t get paid for a long time.”

  Ultimately, the two parties reached an agreement and Broadcast Arts accepted a small settlement for the overages. After a few more attempts to come up with a hit television show, Broadcast Arts went bankrupt and dissolved in the early 1990s.

  “Pee-wee’s Playhouse was our first TV show at Broadcast Arts,” Oakes recalls. “We aspired to evolve from doing commercials to long-form entertainment. One of the reasons why we were willing to go out on a limb financially was because we assumed that we’d make it up in toys and on the backend. We invested so much of our creative efforts and financial wherewithal that we thought we deserved to continue with the show.”

  “We never agreed to pay for overages,” Abramson maintains. “Our deal didn’t say we would pay for overages. It cost them more to do the show than they counted on, that’s the bottom line, but maybe that’s because they weren’t efficient enough. The deal was very clear and concise, which is why they didn’t get very much money from their lawsuit.”

  Rebuilding

  With Broadcast Arts withholding the show’s sets and puppets until payment was received, Reubens was left with the substantial problem of having to recreate the entire show from scratch. Gary Panter, along with Ric Heitzman and Wayne White, quickly redesigned a new set, taking advantage of the extra space afforded by the show’s new soundstage at Hollywood Center Studios. White also redesigned the puppets, using his original sketches as referen
ces.

  Globey’s look changed between the first and second seasons [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  As many fans have noticed, the show’s look dramatically changed between its first two seasons. The salesman and mutant toys were completely eliminated from the show. Most of the puppets received a facelift, with dramatic changes made to Globey in particular. His face remained in the same position — in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean — but the shape of his eyes changed, the brows increased mobility, and his nose went from thin and long to large and bulbous.

  [© Ken Sax]

  Puppet builders Marc Tyler and Steve Sleap were contracted by White to upgrade and remake a number of the puppets for the show’s second season. They were assigned to work on the Cowntess costume, replacing its eye mechanism with remote controls and making her body and hindquarters look fuller.

  Besides the additions made to the Cowntess’s body, the functionality of the puppet remained unchanged. “Cowntess was a big, giant costume that I would stand inside during the New York shoot,” George McGrath recalls. “There were two wooden sticks inside that moved the eyes and eyelashes. The mouth was a very heavy plastic that I would move with my hands. It was a very hot costume.”

  George McGrath and the Cowntess [© George McGrath]

  “They didn’t really need too much done to the puppet,” Tyler says. “All they really wanted was more cow.”

  As easy as it was to tweak the Cowntess, it was difficult to bring Randy back to the playhouse for the second season. The puppet used during the show’s first season was carved from large blocks of white pine, which meant that Randy was unnecessarily heavy and difficult to manage. Before the second season, White asked Tyler and Sleap to redesign the puppet from his original drawings, but he asked them to carve the puppet out of basswood, a lighter material, and make his head out of fiberglass, which enabled the puppet builders to insert mechanisms that might allow for eyebrow movement. Puppet operator Van Snowden, who was best known for being the actor inside of H.R. Pufnstuf and had recently signed on to work on Playhouse, was instrumental in suggesting changes that were taken into Randy’s redesign.

  Van Snowden [© George McGrath]

  “He wanted to be able to pull a string to open the mouth instead of lowering a string,” Tyler recalls. “So we had to mechanically reverse the action on that.”

  Despite the changes, Tyler believes the redone puppet was a suitable replacement for White’s original.

  “He was a perfect replica,” Tyler recalls. “I think we fooled most people.”

  In addition to working on two established characters, Tyler and Sleap worked on Billy Baloney, a new Playhouse character introduced in the show’s second season.

  Billy’s pint-sized stature was supposed to be much larger, according to Tyler. Wayne White’s original sketches had him coming in at 26 inches and the builders abided by those sketches. However, when the puppet was sent to Paul Reubens for final approval, White came back with news that Reubens wanted it smaller. Despite the quick turnaround time required for the rebuild, Tyler believes Reubens’ vision was correct.

  Billy Baloney and Pee-wee [© Ken Sax]

  “It stopped being a typical puppet when Wayne said to make him a little guy,” Tyler says. “I think it was a very cool decision.”

  Knowing exactly how the puppet would be used on the show influenced the kinds of materials Tyler and Sleap used in its construction.

  “We knew he was supposed to be a ventriloquist dummy,” Tyler recalls. “He wasn’t supposed to be a living character like Pterri or Randy. He was supposed to be a puppet.”

  As a result, Billy was made almost entirely out of polyethylene L200 foam. His head was covered with a thin layer of fiberglass, which enabled certain mechanisms to be mounted inside that could control his eye movements. Lynette Johnson, a miniature-clothing specialist, made his slacks and suit jacket.

  For Tyler, one of the most rewarding aspects of his work on Pee-wee’s Playhouse was seeing Billy turned into a toy.

  “Oh, I geeked out about it,” Tyler recalls. “I have one. The size and shapes are very close to the original. It probably works better than the one I had thrown together, frankly.”

  With the emergency puppet building already underway, the artistic team could turn their sights toward renovating and expanding the playhouse set. A multicolored wall was added that encased Pee-wee’s toys, and the crew installed a renovated kitchen with a built-in booth that matched the playhouse door.

  “If you have to make changes, why not make things better?” asks Prudence Fenton, the animation and effects supervisor.

  With the larger space, Reubens added two characters in Puppetland: Clocky and Floory. Clocky returned from the original live show. Kevin Carlson gave the character life through movement and voice. Carlson was a big fan of Edie McClurg’s performance in the original production, but he was instrumental in reinventing the character’s voice for the television show.

  [© Ken Sax]

  “When I first saw the character on the set and saw his wooden blocks with numbers painted on them that served as his teeth, I mentioned to Paul that they reminded me of braces,” Carlson remembers. “So I sort of lisped his dialogue. Paul liked it and agreed that I should do the voice that way.”

  Clocky was built from a large slab of foam. Cuts were carved into the puppet to create a textured look, and the puppet was then painted yellow with erratic red grid marks. The mouth’s mechanism was similar to that of a hand puppet, with a space provided where Carlson could spin the teeth-blocks as the character spoke. Large dowels were used to make Clocky’s sides undulate.

  Floory was another new character introduced in the show’s second season. Carlson, who also provided the character’s voice, liked the dichotomy between Floory’s off-putting looks and the way he was treated by the other characters on the show.

  “I just loved the fact that Floory wasn’t a monster even though he was sort of scary looking and he even sounded kind of scary,” he remembers. “Pee-wee just went towards him and said, ‘Well, I guess I’ve got a new friend.’ That was just very funny and nice to me.”

  Suzanne Kent as Rita Chandelier with Groundling Joan Leizman [© The Groundlings]

  With the move to L.A., Reubens dropped the five-person writing team and asked George McGrath to cowrite exclusively with him. Although McGrath and Reubens wrote the majority of the second season’s scripts without any additional help, Reubens gave his friend Max Robert cowriting credit on all of the second season episodes so he would continue to stay on the payroll. “Max was very ill at the time,” McGrath explains. “Paul, in one of the nicest gestures I’ve ever seen him make, kept him on staff although Max lived in San Francisco and only came down to work on scripts with us maybe two or three times.”

  The move also opened the door to casting changes. Mrs. Steve was written out, and Suzanne Kent, relieved of her duties working on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, was able to join the Playhouse cast as Mrs. Rene, Pee-wee’s high-energy next-door neighbor.

  Mrs. Rene was based on a character Kent had created at the Groundlings named Rita Chandelier, a chatty Hollywood agent. The character grew out of an exercise in one of Groundlings’ founder Gary Austin’s classes.

  “Gary would find something that he thought was funny and he would give you exercises to expand on it,” Kent remembers. “We did an exercise once to act as a relative that was close to you in your family, so I did my aunt. Part of my aunt, part of the women in my family, the New York Jewesses, and so that’s how she came to be.”

  Rita Chandelier had had a trajectory similar to Pee-wee’s. The character appeared on stage in several Groundlings shows and had even had a cameo in Cheech and Chong’s Nice Dreams, but with one notable change: the filmmakers changed the character’s name to Sidney the Agent. There are virtually no differences between Rita Chandelier and Sidney the Agent, but Kent made si
gnificant modifications when creating Mrs. Rene.

  “The character was similar, except Rita Chandelier’s main focal point was show business and her clients,” Kent explains. “Whereas Mrs. Rene’s main focal point was having fun and being flamboyant and being a shopper at all of the antique stores.”

  Because she had worked previously with many of the cast at the Groundlings, the actress had an easy job of assimilating into the group of Playhouse veterans.

  [© Ken Sax]

  “Everyone was just excited, and it was fun and colorful. It was like a big playground,” Kent recalls. “We all worked really hard. We worked long hours and we enjoyed each other’s company, so that made it better. I was familiar with the voices behind the puppets because I had known most of the people through the Groundlings, so that made me all the warmer toward the puppets.”

  As with the majority of the cast, Kent’s background as an improvisational actor helped her to create Mrs. Rene’s sense of style and love of fun. Although viewers at home never got to see inside the character’s house, Kent knew exactly what the Rene household looked like, down to the home décor.

  “Her house is filled with tchotchkes and all kinds of fabrics and glass bottles and vases and flowers,” Kent says. “You know, oriental rugs and hanging lamps. Not one space that’s empty. Everything’s filled with something. But neat, not dirty. Clean, but filled with lots of things. I also visualize Mrs. Rene having many little dogs, and playing mah-jongg, and just kind of being the social Jewish maiden in the neighborhood.”

  Gilbert Lewis did not reprise his role as the King of Cartoons; instead, the part went to William Marshall of Blacula fame. Vic Trevino was brought on to play Ricardo, a new character written for the show’s second season to replace Tito the Lifeguard, who was played by Roland Rodriguez during the show’s first season. The role of Dixie, the King’s cabbie, was written out.