But her concerns were quickly put aside. The singer later told puppeteer Alison Mork that the talking chair was her favorite character.
“She was so willing to make fun and be such a good sport,” Reubens recalled on the DVD commentary track. “She so got the joke.”
Shore’s segment was shot on videotape while the rest of the special was shot on film. Although Shore nailed her performance, Orr was unhappy with the way the video and film were integrated.
“I was really disappointed with the video phone segments,” Orr recalls. “Dinah’s people told me to take particular care of how she looked. She looked great on the set, but I was very disappointed at the way it was filmed.”
Although Orr noticed the difference between the way Shore looked on set and on television, he never heard from her management or from Dinah herself.
“I don’t know if they ever saw it,” he says. “I don’t know if it was high on her must-see list.”
The Del Rubio Triplets, a musical act of three middle-aged sisters in miniskirts who performed acoustic versions of pop songs, performed a quirky rendition of “Winter Wonderland.” The trio had gained a cult following after a number of sitcom appearances on shows like Full House, Married…With Children, and The Golden Girls. Reubens was so impressed with the group that they were invited to appear in the first episode of the fourth season. Although Reubens loved their act, not everyone involved with the special was in on the joke. “The Del Rubio Triplets were an act I never got,” McGrath says. “But Paul seemed to love them.”
Before agreeing to appear on the special, k.d. lang made a request to Binder. “She wanted to do something different,” Binder recalls. “She didn’t want to just stand and sing by herself.”
Ultimately, she performed “Jingle Bell Rock” with Dirty Dog, Cool Cat, and Chicky Baby serving as her band. Her sequence took nearly half a day to film, the longest in the show.
Charo [Courtesy PhotoFest]
Reubens had met Charo in Hawaii while writing Big Top Pee-wee. He briefly flirted with the idea of writing a Pee-wee’s Playhouse Goes Hawaiian special, which would have involved the singer, but he scrapped the idea. Instead, when it came time to contact celebrities about the Christmas special, Reubens called Charo personally to ask for her participation.
Charo, who sang live during multiple takes, also made a striking impression on the cast and crew.
“The amazing thing about Charo is, when you meet her, she’s exactly like she is on television,” Paragon recalls. “She’s really charming.”
Of all the special guest stars, Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello spent the most time on the playhouse set. The two met Reubens on the set of their 1987 film Back to the Beach. Pee-wee appeared briefly in the film to perform The Trashmen’s 1963 hit song “Surfin’ Bird.”
Reubens had been a lifelong fan of the duo, so he really enjoyed another opportunity to work with his childhood heroes.
“When [Paul] appeared in our movie, he told me that his dream was to be a Mouseketeer,” Funicello recalls.
“Paul was just so excited to have them on,” Orr recalls. “He was really, really happy that they could do it for us, and they just absolutely got into it.”
Frankie and Annette got along famously together. Alison Mork noticed their strong connection while filming the last sequence, when Santa Claus comes to the playhouse.
“When we would cut between takes, Frankie wouldn’t let go of Annette’s hand,” Mork recalls fondly. “It was really clear that they were really good friends.”
Whoopi Goldberg was the last celebrity to be booked on the special. Although she wasn’t on the writers’ initial wish list, Reubens heard she was taping an episode of the short-lived program D.C. Follies on a neighboring soundstage and he personally invited her to be in the special. A big fan of William Marshall’s performance in Blacula, Goldberg was disappointed to find out that the King of Cartoons was not on the set her day of filming.
Pee-wee joins Frankie and Annette in Back to the Beach [Courtesy Paramount Pictures / PhotoFest © Paramount Pictures]
The decision to contract more than a dozen guest stars to perform in a single special might have resulted in disaster for the cast and crew, but the filming went off without a hitch.
“They all worked hard,” Orr recalls of the guest stars. “They loved being there. They would go around and look at the various puppets and things like that and they just totally got into the magic of the playhouse. It shows that everybody was having a good time. They became kids again, I guess.
Coal in Pee-wee’s Stocking
The producers and CBS planned an aggressive promotional campaign for the special, with Reubens and several of the guest stars giving telephone interviews from the set to journalists around the country. Reubens talked about the special, but he also continued damage control, explaining away his poor box office returns for Big Top Pee-wee.
“I like the movie a lot,” Reubens said during a 1988 interview. “I think it’s got a lot of funny stuff in it. I think maybe people just weren’t prepared for me to take such a big leap, ya know, as far as me becoming a leading man.”
Some critics wondered whether Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special would join the longstanding tradition of televised holiday specials or if it would fail to connect with the general public. With the stakes raised, Reubens needed his special to do big business.
More than nine million people watched the show on Wednesday, December 21, 1988, at 8 p.m., a mediocre viewing audience for the time slot (only 17 percent of all televisions turned on during that hour were tuned in to the special). The airing didn’t even crack the top 50 for the week and was a disappointment for CBS, whose execs had been hoping the special would give them a much-needed boost with a younger demographic in prime time.
“I think they were a little disappointed it didn’t get the adult ratings they were hoping for,” Binder recalls. “There wasn’t any criticism of the creative content; it was just questioning whether Paul had primetime chops.”
According to Judy Price, then the vice president in charge of children’s programming at CBS, the special may have suffered because it deviated too far from the formula that made the show successful on Saturday mornings.
“The Christmas special wasn’t one of my favorites,” she says. “It wasn’t really a big commercial success. It didn’t get big ratings. I think it sort of got carried away by its star power. It was gratuitous.”
While Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special might have been a disappointment to the network executives, it remains a standout in the series among Playhouse fans. The special has been released in three home video formats in 1988, 1996, and 2004 (laserdisc, VHS, and DVD, respectively) and has aired on Fox Family, MTV, and Cartoon Network. In recent years, Pee-wee Herman’s official website has allowed fans to stream the special for free during the holiday season.
Despite the ratings of the initial airing of the special, the cast and crew remain proud of their work on the show.
“The Christmas show itself, I thought, was very clever,” Binder says. “It still holds up.”
5: Foreclosure
Although the Christmas special rejuvenated the Playhouse cast and crew, Reubens was exhausted from the rigors of so many Pee-wee Herman projects. He was ready to let go of his Saturday morning timeslot. It had been fairly easy for Judy Price to get Reubens to renew his contract for two years in 1987, but she knew she would have to work harder to secure the show for a fourth and fifth season.
[© Ken Sax]
[© Ken Sax]
“I told him he would have to do two more seasons if he was thinking of having a package he could sell into syndication,” she explains. “That was always the goal of anyone doing a series. You have to build enough of a library in order to syndicate so you continue to make money from the show. But it was a huge commitment for him because he was involved
in every aspect.”
In order to reach the minimum number of episodes required for a syndication package, Reubens would have had to produce 14 additional Playhouse episodes, which would have been more than the 10 to 13 episodes required for one season of a children’s show. Price proposed that Reubens film 20 episodes in one year, deliver them all to CBS, and they would air half of those episodes for the 1989–1990 season and air the rest the following year. That would not only give Reubens enough episodes for syndication, but it would give him a much-needed break from Pee-wee Herman. After considering the offer, Reubens accepted.
Before Reubens continued on the show’s fourth and fifth seasons, he changed producers for the second time in three years. Steve Binder, who had produced the second and third seasons of the series as well as the Christmas special, was let go from the show without warning. He was replaced by the production team of Sonny Grosso and Larry Jacobson.
[© Ken Sax]
“Paul never confronted me,” Binder says. “He had his lawyer phone me and tell me that his manager had decided to bring in another production company.”
Instead of contracting staff writers to work on the entire season, Reubens and the producers hired a number of freelance writers to come up with individual scripts. This freed Reubens and John Paragon, who was a regular writer, to codirect the last two seasons. However, even with what may have been perceived as fewer on-set responsibilities, Reubens was still exhausted. As a result, the Playhouse writers were encouraged to come up with plots that centered on secondary characters, to add longer classic cartoons, and to show more educational videos, all in an attempt to limit Pee-wee’s time on screen. These strategies were regularly employed during the show’s fourth and fifth seasons, but in fact, Reubens had occasionally asked the writers to limit his screen time in earlier seasons, if his workload became too heavy.
[© Ken Sax]
“There was one episode we had written in which Paul was going to do a Patty Duke sort of thing, playing Pee-wee and his country cousin,” George McGrath remembers. “During production, at the last minute, Paul decided he didn’t want to do it because it was going to be too exhausting. I had to write a new episode over the weekend.”
One of the first public signs of Reubens’ fatigue arose in early 1989, when the actor gave an interview to Jane Wollman of Newsday on the show’s set. He was dressed in costume, and his sit-down was conducted during breaks in the shooting schedule. But, for the first time in over five years, the actor spoke without the character’s assistance.
“When you work twelve hours a day, you have no personal life,” Reubens said — as himself. “I’m up at five in the morning and on the set by seven. By the time I get home at eight, take a shower, and eat dinner, it’s already past my bedtime. It’s built into my schedule that I can’t get enough sleep.”
Despite his fatigue with the show, Reubens and his creative team came up with new ways to entertain their audience. The playhouse welcomed a new puppet character, a talking chandelier with a French accent (provided by Alison Mork), and a new animated segment called El Hombre, which featured a Latino superhero who fights crime in the inner city. The cartoon, which was illustrated on a black velvet canvas, was inspired by a painting Reubens had hung in his office.
Bill Freiberger, who wrote the segments, says, “I remember Prudence and I went to Olvera Street to find a copy of the painting to base it on. Ultimately, we ended up drawing our own version of it.”
While the sequences were stylistically different from anything else on the show, El Hombre had the unique distinction of being broadcast completely in Spanish without any English translations. According to Freiberger, this decision was an excellent example of the show’s central thesis.
“The basic message of the show was: accept everyone, no matter who they are,” he says. “That comes through in all the crazy characters that were in the show. I think El Hombre was Paul’s way of opening it up even more and making it more inclusive to people of different ethnic backgrounds.”
The 20-episode shoot went smoothly and, although Judy Price was doubtful that Reubens would sign on for two more seasons, she once again offered him the opportunity to renew through to 1993. Although he appreciated the offer, Paul Reubens felt he was finally beginning to burn out. The playhouse would go into foreclosure after the fifth season.
“Directing, producing, writing, and acting all at once is really exhausting,” Reubens said in a 1989 interview.
“He’d just felt like he’d done it,” said Michael McLean, Reubens’ agent at the time.
“Paul was exhausted,” Lynne Stewart recalls. “He was doing everything and that starts to wear on someone.”
Even the most casual onlooker would acknowledge that what Reubens had done was nothing short of astonishing. In five years, he had reached a level of fame that most comedians only dream of. He had successfully transitioned his career from an underground cult icon to the king of Saturday morning television. Pee-wee’s Playhouse had definitely defied the odds, inviting nearly 10 million viewers every Saturday morning into a wonderland of talking furniture, stop-motion animation, and kaleidoscopic sets. The show had been nominated for 38 Emmy Awards in five short years and it had totally redefined what a Saturday morning program could be, let alone what an audience for a Saturday morning show could look like.
On November 10, 1990, almost a year after the final episode was actually filmed, fans at home watched as Pee-wee Herman walked up his art deco, ice blue floor, pulled the arm of the Greek statue resting on a small white shelf, and walked over to his cherry red scooter that was emerging from behind a trick wall. He picked up his helmet, adorned with purple wings and a giant Cyclops eye, stepped on the scooter, and gazed directly at the viewing audience.
“The playhouse will always be here for everyone to play in forever and ever and ever,” Pee-wee said. “On that you have my WORD.”
Pee-wee had said the secret word, just as he had at the end of every episode. Beyond the playhouse, in living rooms, college dormitories, and restaurants across the nation, nearly 10 million people yelled back at their television sets in response for the final time.
[© Ken Sax]
With that, Pee-wee focused his eyes off-camera. The scooter ejected from its place, toward an adjacent wall, which opened as he raced toward it, projecting him out of the playhouse, over Mount Rushmore, off to a destination unknown.
After filming wrapped for the fifth and final season, the cast and crew went their separate ways. Most of the animators went on to different projects, citing Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a door-opener to future opportunities. John Singleton, a production assistant on the show, went on to direct Larry Fishburne in 1991’s Boyz n the Hood. The film made Singleton, 24 years old at the time of the film’s release, the youngest person ever to be nominated in the Best Director category at the Academy Awards. Fishburne (after changing his name from Larry to Laurence) went on to critical acclaim with lead roles in What’s Love Got to Do with It and The Matrix. S. Epatha Merkerson went on to star in Law & Order for 17 seasons, appearing in 390 episodes in total. The remainder of the show’s cast and crew took on other projects, spent time with family, and caught up on some much-needed rest.
Like Pee-wee, Reubens’ post-Playhouse destination was also unknown. He began his hiatus traveling to Italy, Hawaii, and Florida with friends.
“All we did was just get in the van and drive,” says songwriter Allee Willis, a friend of Reubens. “[That] year was about taking off and figuring out what the next move was. He had some great ideas, but not a concrete plan.”
“It was time to take a year off,” Reubens recalls. “I had actually made a list of things I wanted to do — learn Spanish, learn to play the sax — and I never hit one of them. At the end of [1990, while season five was airing], I decided I was going to take a second year off. That didn’t exactly go the way I planned.”
“The Incide
nt”
By now, what derailed Reubens’ career has become a part of pop culture infamy. In the evening of Friday, July 26, 1991, while visiting his parents in Sarasota, Reubens was arrested in the lobby of an adult movie theater for indecent exposure. Overnight, Pee-wee Herman went from the country’s most popular jokester to its biggest joke.
The media’s reaction to the arrest was brutal. The New York Post ran a front-page story with the headline, “Oh, Pee-wee!” with a small picture of Reubens in character and a large photo of his mug shot from the Sarasota police department. The difference between the two images was startling. Pee-wee’s crew cut was replaced by Reubens’ stringy black hair that flowed past his shoulders. His once-shaven face now had a full goatee. His trademark gray suit had been replaced by a white T-shirt, and his colorful playhouse backdrop had been exchanged for cold, gray cinderblock.
[© Ken Sax]
Throughout the show’s run, Reubens had gone to great pains to hide his true identity from the public, believing that the character worked better if the public thought Pee-wee was a real person. While Reubens’ name can be found throughout the credits of his various projects in technical roles, Pee-wee Herman was always listed as “himself.”
But as news of what many on the show still refer to simply as “the incident” circulated around the nation, the public’s reaction to Reubens’ arrest snowballed beyond control and expectation. Late-night comedians peppered their monologues with cringe-worthy jokes, and parents made hundreds of telephone calls to Playhouse advertisers expressing their displeasure over what had happened. In turn, these advertisers pressured the CBS network to withdraw the last five reruns of Playhouse that were to be broadcast before the fall season began.
Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse Page 12
