Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse

by Caseen Gaines

  The studio was willing to offer a development deal on a Pee-wee feature, but they expressed concerns about Reubens’ limited fan base and presence in the national mainstream. His appearances on David Letterman were frequent and grabbed attention, but there were deep concerns about his nationwide popularity and whether people would pay to watch Pee-wee Herman’s antics for longer than a few minutes.

  Reubens worked on a script with Michael Varhol (a screenwriter and friend of McEuen) and Phil Hartman during the weekdays. On weekends, he embarked on a cross-country, 22-city tour billed as The Pee-wee Herman Party. The series of dates, which included a stop at Carnegie Hall, sold out every performance and generated an abundance of positive publicity in every city Pee-wee played. Abramson invited the executives at Warner Brothers to the final performance, which was held at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. As expected, the crowd laughed for and cheered as Pee-wee performed for over an hour. Backstage, the executives were handed the first draft of a film script entitled Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. They skimmed through the first few pages and immediately green-lit the film.

  Warner approved a $4 million budget, a small price tag for a feature length movie released by a major studio. According to Abramson, they had approved a director for the film, but it was a choice that neither he, nor McEuen, nor Reubens felt was appropriate for the project. They asked the executives for a week to find another director, one who might be available, acceptable to everyone, and affordable.

  Pee-wee outside the women’s room during an appearance at Caroline’s Comedy Club in New York [© Wendy Basille]

  “Lisa Henson, Jim Henson’s daughter who was an executive at Warner Brothers, suggested we go see Frankenweenie, a short film by a new director named Tim Burton,” Abramson says. “They were screening it at Fox, but when I got there, it was sold out. A few days later, I was still bothered by missing the screening, so I called up Disney. They set up a screening room for Paul and I and about ten minutes in, we looked at each other and knew this was the guy. We went back to the studio and, within a few hours, Tim was in our offices working on the movie.”

  Long before Burton rose to fame with films like Batman, Beetlejuice, and Edward Scissorhands, he was a 28-year-old employee of Disney Studios making short films that were rarely seen by anyone outside of the filmmaking crowd. Frankenweenie was a short film and it starred Reubens’ friend Shelley Duvall, who also felt strongly that Burton would be the right director for Big Adventure. With the studio’s go-ahead, the newly completed team began working on the film.

  “There were a lot of changes made to the script while it was in development and even more when Tim came on board,” Abramson says. “Tim had more influence on the film’s look and the characters surrounding Paul than [on] the way Paul performed as Pee-wee Herman. I think he left Pee-wee alone because he was smart enough to realize Paul understood the character better than he did.”

  [Courtesy Warner Bros. / PhotoFest © Warner Bros.]

  While Burton mostly took his cues from Reubens when it came to the way Pee-wee would react in certain situations, he did find places in the script where his creativity could fly.

  “He added the clown stuff,” Abramson recalls. “Actually, we had to cut it back a bit because it was getting too dark. If you look at everything Tim has done, Big Adventure is the brightest film he’s directed.”

  For the most part, the collaboration between Burton and Reubens was smooth sailing. Burton was excited to be directing his first feature film, while Big Adventure seemed to signal that Reubens may be headed for the stardom he had been working toward.

  “Paul had opinions about stuff,” Abramson admits, “but [he] fell in love with Tim as a director. They had disagreements about some things, but they were all resolved. He had a lot of faith and trust in Tim.”

  One of the biggest arguments between Burton and Reubens was over a scene early on in the film where Pee-wee and Francis Buxton, the film’s antagonist, engage in a series of schoolyard taunts. According to Abramson, Burton felt the scene was becoming repetitive and monotonous and needed shortening, while Reubens wanted it extended beyond what was written in the script. Ultimately the studio forced a compromise and cut the scene somewhere between where the two parties wanted.

  While Burton and Reubens got along well on the set, problems soon arose between the director and the studio. Burton was running the film over budget (in fact, its final cost was just over $6 million) and he was behind schedule, which caused occasional tension on the set.

  “Once you start making a film, there isn’t much a studio can do besides yell at you for going over budget,” Abramson explains. “It was Tim’s first live-action feature and it just took longer than we expected for him to shoot it.”

  Although the film’s creative team was excited about Big Adventure when production wrapped, Warner Brothers weren’t sure they would release it. The studio executives were doubtful that the film would attract an audience and some thought it might be better to cut their losses instead of spending the money making prints of the film and publicizing it across the nation. Reubens and his team were crushed.

  “Warner Brothers didn’t believe in the picture until it was a total success,” Abramson says. “It came out August 9 and, even today, any movie that comes out that late in the summer isn’t a film that they plan on running for a long period of time.”

  [Courtesy Warner Bros. / PhotoFest © Warner Bros.]

  The film’s producers talked the studio into giving Big Adventure a trial run in three cities, and Reubens’ team was allowed to choose one of the test screening locations. Abramson and McEuen chose Austin, Texas, a city that had had a particularly strong outpouring of support among college students during the Pee-wee Herman Party tour a year earlier. To ensure that Pee-wee’s fans turned out to support the film, Abramson came up with a plan.

  “I took my own money and made up a little television commercial of still pictures from the movie,” he remembers. “We also leaked to the press that Pee-wee was going to make an appearance. We had to turn people away from the movie theater.”

  Eighty-seven percent of the audience at the Austin test screening stated that they would “highly recommend” the film to others, which was music to the studio’s ears. With the other screenings also going well, Warner Brothers scheduled Pee-wee’s Big Adventure for release and began booking appearances for the character across the nation. Pee-wee Herman, the underground cult star, was entering the mainstream.

  2: The Pitch and the Hit

  Michael Chase Walker, the west coast director of children’s programming for CBS, was hired by the network to breathe some life into their Saturday morning lineup. While the network was dominating in the primetime ratings thanks to shows like Murder, She Wrote and Dallas, they were having an impossible time attracting a young audience. Because the network’s top-rated shows were attracting viewers over 50 years old, it made little sense to advertise the Saturday morning lineup during their highly successful primetime slot. As a result, the shows the network aired on Saturday mornings got little attention, and CBS consistently finished behind NBC and ABC in the ratings.

  Walker’s assignment was to acquire new properties that he thought would raise CBS above the pack. With the arguable exception of Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies, the network was struggling to attract visionaries whose work would appeal to the 6-to-11-year-old age group coveted by Saturday morning advertisers. Walker’s background in animation and enthusiasm for the medium made him a natural fit for the job.

  “My passion in life was always animation,” he says. “I was basically someone out there in the wilderness saying animation was going to come back big, we’d better all be on board.”

  The first significant property Walker tried to bring to the small screen was Louis Sachar’s book The Sideways Stories from Wayside School. The idea was to have a dynamic mixed-media show with live-action elements interspersed with
stop-motion. The blackboard would come alive and the pencils would speak, ideas Walker thought might make the project a successful Saturday morning series.

  However, the higher-ups at CBS were disinterested, though they felt the project might be more attractive if a star were attached. CBS was still licking its wounds from Pryor’s Place, Richard Pryor’s failed children’s television show produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. The show was expensive to produce and its poor ratings caused a huge financial loss to CBS. The network was reluctant to take a chance on any future properties, but executives might be willing to listen if a big enough star were attached to the project and if the show had an animated format.

  As Walker was trying to brainstorm who might be a good celebrity to approach with his Wayside idea, he was invited to an advance screening of Big Adventure in July, a month ahead of its theatrical release. Although he was hardly a fan of the character, Walker was marginally familiar with Pee-wee Herman from his appearances on David Letterman. When Reubens had still been an underground star, Walker had noticed the actor’s profile rising throughout the early 1980s, although he hadn’t really given the character much thought. However, that changed once the film started rolling on the big screen.

  [© The Groundlings]

  “I sat through it and just thought this is the guy,” Walker remembers. “I think I was more attracted to Tim Burton’s view of everything than Pee-wee himself. The whole opening segment of Pee-wee getting breakfast with the contraption was just absolutely spot-on and I knew it would make for great children’s programming.”

  Walker was also amazed by the unique stop-motion animated sequences sprinkled into the film’s narrative. There was a dinosaur gnawing on a bicycle, eyeballs that shone in the night sky, and a phantom trucker named Large Marge whose face morphed from human to monster on the screen.

  “It was exactly where I thought motion pictures should go and I wanted to be the first to bring that experience to television,” he says.

  Walker called Bill McEuen to discuss the possibility of a Pee-wee television show, but he was told by McEuen that Reubens had his sights set on being a movie star and television would be a step backwards.

  “There was great reluctance at the time because when you’ve done a movie, doing a Saturday morning children’s show isn’t the next thing on your agenda,” says Judy Price, then vice president of children’s television at CBS.

  As Reubens and his team were preparing for Big Adventure’s nationwide release, a team from Broadcast Arts, a New York–based animation production company run by Steve Oakes and Peter Rosenthal, flew out to Los Angeles to pitch ideas for a children’s television show to the major networks. The upstart company had gained notoriety for its series of 10-second MTV station identifications while the network was in its infancy. This led to a Clio Award for excellence and creativity in advertising and design, and a new office in Manhattan with access to a large network of independent artists. Broadcast Arts landed a meeting with Walker days after he had approached Reubens.

  The executive liked what he saw on their demo reel, but he became ecstatic when he recognized a Crest toothpaste ad that had attracted his attention months earlier. The ad featured a small boy walking in the darkness toward the dentist, past ominous looking trees with human-like faces, straight out of The Wizard of Oz. The boy walks into an old Victorian house for his dental appointment and is given a clean bill of health. The entire town erupts into happiness. The boy is treated to a convertible ride, a ticker-tape parade, and fireworks. The spot integrated various animation styles to tell a complete story in a compact period of time.

  “What I liked about it was that it wasn’t polished,” Walker explains. “There was a crude, rustic quality to it. It wasn’t Madison Avenue. It was a quirky netherworld they created through animation and the obvious collaboration of some brilliant artists.”

  Walker’s gears started turning. He told the Broadcast Arts reps his idea and swore them to secrecy.

  “I’m trying to do this show based on the Wayside School books with Pee-wee Herman,” he said. “And I’d love to do it with you.”

  The team was instructed to come back with some animation designs that would work well in a school setting but retain a left-of-center sensibility. Within a few weeks they returned with sketches for a number of segments including food that was alive in the cafeteria fridge and a family of dinosaurs living in the science room.

  “It was exactly the presentation I needed,” Walker recalls. “I just had to get past Paul’s agent.”

  [Courtesy PhotoFest / Warner Bros. © Warner Bros.]

  The opportunity came a few weeks later at the movie premiere for Big Adventure. Warner Brothers had thrown a huge carnival-themed party in promotion for the film, attended by celebrities like Eddie Murphy, David Lee Roth, and Alice Cooper. The event was televised on MTV, an up-and-coming cable network that had invited Pee-wee on air several times in the preceding years.

  “One of the most important aspects of Paul’s success was MTV,” Richard Abramson says. “In the early days of MTV, you could get anything on. It was one channel and they weren’t a big corporate entity with a huge presence around the world like they are today. They were just about fun, and I worked to make Pee-wee the mascot of MTV. He would do the New Year’s Eve show and other things for them and the idea was to build up enough credits with the network so that when it was time to publicize the movie, MTV would owe us. It was important to make Pee-wee hip and there was nothing more hip in the ’80s than MTV. [The network was] very important in telling people it’s okay to like Pee-wee.”

  Walker was able to get in to the premiere, but when he saw the spectacle, he knew his chances of getting Reubens involved in the TV project were slim.

  “I was thinking, ‘Shit, there’s no way they’re going to do a Saturday morning show,’” he says. “I was so frustrated because I knew I had a hit on my hands.”

  Despite his pessimism, Walker was able to sidestep McEuen and directly approach Abramson to speak to him about bringing Pee-wee to Saturday morning TV. He was met with another cold shoulder.

  For the next several weeks, Walker continued to make regular phone calls to Abramson — none were returned. After months of unwanted solicitation, Abramson finally called Walker back to tell him that Reubens was still not interested.

  “I said, ‘Just let me have five minutes,’” Walker recalls. “‘If I don’t convince you that this is the exact right career move for you, I’ll walk away from your doorstep and never darken it again.’”

  Abramson agreed, and on the night before Christmas Eve, Walker met with Abramson and Reubens, armed with Broadcast Arts’ designs and demo reel to make the pitch for Pee-wee Herman to join CBS. Although the response in the meeting was tepid, there was one glimmer of hope that a deal might be possible. As Walker says, “Paul looked at me and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a children’s show.’”

  With the Christmas holidays, Hollywood went dark, and Walker sat in limbo for over a week, waiting to hear back from Reubens’ team. The days felt like millennia, but when the calendar page turned to January, there was good news — Reubens was interested in working out a deal.

  [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  A meeting was set up between Reubens, Abramson, Walker, and several representatives from Broadcast Arts. While the Wayside School idea was in the forefront of Walker’s mind, Reubens had other plans.

  [© John Duke Kisch / CBS]

  “The initial concept was for the show to be much more animation heavy and not rely on his presence, to save him from having to be on set for weeks on end,” says Steve Oakes, co-founder of Broadcast Arts. “But he got into it and immersed himself in the project. He really became the centerpiece and more than just a host.”

  It was in this meeting that Pee-wee’s Playhouse was born. Reubens proposed taking elements from his HBO show and modifying them for an audience of chil
dren. Where on stage the playhouse appeared small and compact, on television it would look like an expansive clubhouse. There would be plenty of opportunity for new animation produced by Broadcast Arts, but also vintage cartoons from the golden age of animation.

  “The initial meetings were really quite wonderful,” Oakes recalls. “We were thinking about kids’ shows and we were getting nostalgic, while still being conscious of catering to the emerging style of MTV and a visually literate generation.”

  Although five years had passed since The Pee-wee Herman Show, Reubens had never totally abandoned the playhouse concept. On Letterman appearances he was frequently referred as a “children’s show host.” Pee-wee also recorded a song called “I Know You Are, But What Am I,” written by stage show composer Jay Cotton, and the song reinforced the image of Pee-wee in a playhouse where no girls were allowed. Many cast members of the original stage show revisited the playhouse set in a segment of the 1982 short-lived television show Twilight Theatre.

  “They wound up cutting everything out except what Paul did with Steve Martin,” says Brian Seff, who played Mr. Jelly Donut in the original stage production. “But that wasn’t Paul’s fault. It was the producers’.”

  Walker told Judy Price about his idea and she agreed that the network should try to work out a deal with Reubens. While the star and his management were receptive to the idea, they were not totally convinced that a Saturday morning children’s television show was the next logical career move. Big Adventure had nearly recouped its entire budget on its opening weekend and now Warner Brothers wanted a sequel. Pee-wee Herman appeared to be on a trajectory to be the country’s newest, if not most unconventional, cinematic leading man. However, Walker had successfully sold Price on Reubens and the two continued the task of convincing the actor and his management to swim in the less-glamorous waters of children’s television.