Pee-wee Herman, created and embodied by Paul Reubens, came into the world in 220, when Reubens was a member of the Groundlings comedy troupe.
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Reubens intended for these shows to drum up movie interest, and they did: Apatow saw a Los Angeles performance, and soon afterward he and Reubens formed a partnership.
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Since Reubens, and therefore Pee-wee, is no longer the most appropriate face for a kids' franchise anyway, Reubens has been shopping a screenplay about Pee-wee's spiraling life.
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Katz says that Reubens, ''unlike many of us, understood business.
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" Reubens said, "I don't know what the Groundlings does anymore.
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Reubens never imagined his goofy alter ego would be a success.
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"I'm next to the voice of the Little Mermaid," Reubens said.
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Decades in, Reubens retains his masterful, almost perverse, sense of comic timing.
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This weekend it invites children to follow the comedian Paul Reubens, a.k.a.
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Reubens read aloud from another box with glee: ''Suzanne Somers's 403-Way Poncho!
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Hartman, Reubens recalls, thought he was bowing to crass careerism and squandering his gifts.
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Reubens started at the Groundlings in 1976, after Newman had left for New York.
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Hartman and Reubens worked together on Pee-wee's Playhouse and later Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
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I noticed his painting first, which was an expressive remix of Reubens' The Lion Hunt.
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In 2010, Reubens revived his original Pee-wee stage production, The Pee-wee Herman Show.
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As far as I can tell, Reubens didn't offer an explanation until 19 years later.
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Reubens last reprised his iconic character for the 2016 Netflix movie Pee-wee's Big Holiday.
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"Paul Reubens," the base of the frame might read, "born that he might live again."
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Gary Panter was also Reubens' co-writer on the original script for Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
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In a recent phone interview, the man behind Pee-wee, Paul Reubens, discussed the new movie.
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"I've been doing a whole bunch of these over the last year or two," Reubens said.
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It happened again the following year, when Paul Reubens led a November episode as Pee-wee Herman.
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Paul ReubensCreditCreditArt Streiber for The New York Times Paul Reubens wanted to show me his favorite Walgreens.
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"Pee-wee's not older in the movie, but I am," said Mr. Reubens, who is now 63.
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"They didn't have a permit to open the theatre, so it was just a company," Reubens said.
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Well I'm a HUGE fan of the Reubens, so I was super excited to get into that one.
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In 1991, Reubens was arrested for masturbating in an adult movie theater in his hometown of Sarasota, Florida.
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At 63, Reubens has been digitally altered to appear younger, and the effect is that he appears ageless.
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With each take, Reubens shifted emphasis and emotional inflection, offering up different flavors of ham here, unexpected subtlety there.
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Paul Reubens (better known as Pee-Wee himself) partnered with Paul Rust (Arrested Development) on the new movie's script.
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That night they rarely mentioned Herman, the character who shares a body with actor and actual human Paul Reubens.
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But in 1985, Reubens found himself on the big screen starring in the cult favorite Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
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During the show's Broadway run, Reubens was approached by producer Judd Apatow about creating a new Pee-wee adventure.
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And not for nothing, but the actor who portrayed Pee-wee, Paul Reubens, has the same number of letters.
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Reubens was subjected to ridicule, and TV studios and merchandisers rushed to distance themselves from the Pee-wee character.
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That was before I realized that Paul Reubens is but a man, after all—appetites, missteps, enhancements, and all.
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Plot details are scant, but the show will star Sharon Stone, Garrett Hedlund, Frederick Weller, Beau Bridges, and Paul Reubens.
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In The Village Voice 290 years later, the cultural critic Richard Goldstein hailed Reubens as an emblem of ''anarchic queerness.
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The mode also features an all-star cast including Paul Reubens, Seth Green, Jay Pharaoh, Sasheer Zamata and Ike Barinholtz.
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In the seventies, both were in the Groundlings improv workshop, in L.A., where Reubens created his character Pee-wee Herman.
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Reubens, dressed in a newsboy cap, a black T-shirt, and a denim jacket, showed up a few minutes later.
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Reubens, 67, is expected to tell behind-the-scenes stories about the making of the 1985 film during the talks.
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Hartman began his career with the famous L.A.-based improv group The Groundlings, alongside future Pee-wee Herman actor Paul Reubens.
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Inside, an engineer worked a computer while a director, Khris Brown, patched in remotely and led Reubens through his 26 lines.
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In the darkened booth, hunched over his script with his reading glasses on and his arms crossed, Reubens appeared very small.
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I'm curious what it's like to be known more for an invented persona, like Elvira, than as the artist Paul Reubens.
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The Plaza Restaurant is on Walt Disney World's Main Street USA, and serves American comfort food like burgers, meatloaf, and Reubens.
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You should know at the start: Paul Reubens, the actor by now better known as Pee-wee Herman, is my cousin.
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Mazar once dated Paul Reubens, but in 2002 she married Gabriele Corcos, with whom she hosted the Cooking Channel series Extra Virgin.
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Reubens drifted away from Wound Care and arrived at a rack of tourist junk: Walk of Fame shot glasses; vinyl Clippers purses.
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Reubens told me, ''I've had so much feedback from people saying, 'I was so confused as a kid, and your show helped.
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This would eventually vanish in postproduction, thanks to digital retouchers whom Reubens had hired to pore over the film frame by frame.
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Played by Paul Reubens, Gerhardt's storyline was nothing but bizarreness for its own sake, and it cemented 303 Rock's off-kilter reputation.
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Reubens had a pile of cards to sign for fans of the "Star Wars" character he voices at Disneyland and Disney World.
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The 92nd Street Y will host a screening of the film, which debuts Friday on Netflix, followed by a conversation with Mr. Reubens.
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Reubens has worked steadily (with a couple of breaks in the early '633s) since the late 1970s on a wide variety of projects.
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The tour will take him around the country, where Reubens will host a screening of the film and then speak to the audiences.
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But by hiring a staff largely from outside the industry for Pee-wee's Playhouse, Reubens managed to make something both strange and broadly appealing.
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In addition to Reubens, the movie stars Joe Mangianello, Jessica Pohly, and Alia Shawkat, and it was directed by Wonder Showzen veteran John Lee.
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I recognized Patton Oswalt, Paul Reubens and a few others, but not everyone — and in any case, why should the reader have to guess?
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" And one of the crew guys said, "Excuse me, Mr. Reubens, but that's my favorite part of 'Big Adventure,' when you're on the motorcycle.
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If nostalgia is king of Hollywood, Netflix and Reubens seem to say, then Pee-wee Herman is its eccentric, bow-tied eternal boy prince.
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In July 63, police arrested Reubens at an adult movie theater in Sarasota, where he was visiting his parents, and charged him with indecent exposure.
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When I asked Reubens how this connected to his own experience with the obliteration of privacy, though, he said he didn't even remember the line.
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Saigon Sandwich If banh mis are to San Francisco as Reubens are to New York City, Saigon Sandwich is indisputably the Katz's of the West.
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This was, of course, around the time, under painfully dubious circumstances, that Reubens pled no contest to a self-abuse charge in a Florida theater.
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Nonetheless, Reubens's desire to return remains in some tension with his bunker mentality — from the start, Pee-wee offered Reubens a way to transform into, and armor himself within, his own ventriloquist dummy; when Pee-wee grew popular enough to attract interviewers, Reubens often insisted on receiving them in character, and in the credits for Pee-wee projects the character was listed as played by ''Himself.
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Our four hapless heroes are held captive by Willard Wyler (voiced by Paul Reubens), a filmmaker who uses dark magic to rope them into his gorefests.
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During his down time, Reubens engaged in thrift-store binges he likened to acts of rescue, filling his house, and several storage lockers, with salvaged treasure.
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Last July, Reubens joined Lee and his editor, Jeff Buchanan, to fine-tune the scene in which Joe and Pee-wee first meet, at a diner.
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And there's no hipster shit on the walls—you come, you eat sloppy Reubens, you drink high-octane beer, and you go home fat and happy.
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Steven Soderbergh had cast Reubens in a coming HBO project, and he had also booked multi-episode arcs as a guest actor on ''The Blacklist'' and ''Gotham.
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We interrupt our previously scheduled review of Pee-wee's Big Holiday to bring you an actual letter given to critics by Mr. Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens).
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Seeing a giant human head dwarfing the works of Damien Hirst, Roy Liechtenstein, and Peter Paul Reubens is thrilling and perplexing, especially once you realize they're real.
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In a few years' time, Reubens was simultaneously preparing his second Pee-wee film, Big Top Pee-wee and working on seasons 4 and 5 of Playhouse.
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Paul Reubens of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" fame said he knew he wouldn't be cast as soon as he saw one of the other actors who was auditioning.
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Of course, that's par for the course for Pee-Wee, the giddy, gray-flannel-suit-clad manchild whom comedian Paul Reubens has been playing since the '70s.
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In Pee-wee's Big Adventure, the film that introduced Reubens (and Tim Burton) to mainstream audiences in 1985, that event was Pee-Wee's beloved bike getting stolen.
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Pee-wee made his first onscreen appearance in 1980's Cheech and Chong's Next Movie; by 1985, Reubens had his first feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
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Manganiello, 39, has publicly expressed how thrilled he's been to join Reubens as the (seemingly ageless) 62-year-old actor revives his signature character for the Netflix movie.
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Reubens later contacted Manganiello and told him he'd been working on a Pee-wee comeback movie and that he might be reaching out to him with a role.
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"Pee-wee's Big Holiday," directed by John Lee and produced by Judd Apatow and Mr. Reubens, will have its world premiere at the festival before showing on Netflix.
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Sharing her insecurities with a friend (Paul Reubens), Olivia quickly launches into another relationship with Eric (Frederick Weller), who harbors his own shadowy motivations, before abruptly going missing.
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Van Veen was known for teaching Peter Paul Reubens, but there are a few aspects of the painting that revealed van Veen as the true author of the work.
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Reubens was ahead of his time in his breezily progressive handling of identity politics, which dominate the comedy we consider most relevant today, though his strategies were vastly different.
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When I referred later to the homoeroticism of the straw joust, Reubens flashed a grin unmistakable in its mischievousness and replied, ''I have no idea what you're talking about.
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Reubens was particularly excited about one bit of rainfall: NBC had ordered a pilot for what he hoped would become a brand new Pee-wee prime-time variety series.
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It soon becomes clear that David is somehow connected to the ship and its lone occupant, an alien artificial intelligence named Max (voiced by Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens).
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Paul Reubens, the actor best known as Pee-wee, is gunning for a late-in-life comeback, as the Hollywood Reporter has revealed in an in-depth new feature.
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In 1991, Paul Reubens, the actor who played Pee-Wee Herman, was arrested for allegedly masturbating in a Florida porn theater, and then pled no contest to the charges.
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In another "before they were famous" moment, here's pre-Pee Wee Herman Paul Reubens performing as part of the duo "Suave and Debonair" with future voice of Jambi Jon Paragon.
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It's been six years since Reubens launched a stage revival of the Pee-wee Herman Show in Los Angeles and New York, marking his real return to Herman's fantastical universe.
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Amid the frequently cynical atmosphere of stand-up, Reubens saw how sweetness could be counterintuitively provocative: Working comedy clubs, he gave out pirate hats and deputized audience members to distribute candy.
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It's also the first Pee-wee Herman project in the 25 years since Paul Reubens decided to end Pee-wee's Playhouse's five-season run and was later arrested for indecent exposure.
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A graduate from California Institute of the Arts' theatre program, Reubens began incorporating members of the underground art scene to help him develop Pee-wee Herman's aesthetic in its earliest stages.
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After all, just because we're cruising into August doesn't meant that you should take the opportunity to eat Reubens and dance your ass off in the beautiful summer sun for granted.
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Of course, it's impossible to talk about Pee-wee or Reubens without mentioning the scandal that briefly derailed Reubens's career and drove him out of the public eye for a time.
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At Comic Con, a four-day convocation of cosplayers set against the fight for global hegemony between Marvel and DC Comics, Newman and Reubens were part of the personal-appearance cavalcade.
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Signs are promising in the first full trailer for Pee-wee's Big Holiday, which features studly Magic Mike star Joe Manganiello playing best bud and life coach to Pee-wee (Paul Reubens).
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The super-popular first-person shooting video game is getting its first movie adaptation, starring Seth Green, Paul Reubens — and Kit Harrington as the futuristic villain trying to control the solar system.
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"They are using numbers trying to make it seem that the average cost will just go away if these people aren't here," NAS study author Kim Reubens told fact-finding site Snopes.
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So yeah: The same sort of stuff is percolating in Pee-wee's Big Holiday, though not as boldly or explicitly as in Pee-wee's Playhouse or Reubens' original Pee-wee stage show.
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As anyone familiar with Pee-wee likely remembers, Pee-wee's fall from grace was prompted by Reubens' 1991 arrest for indecent exposure after he was caught masturbating at an adult movie theater.
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Reubens has been quite candid about his belief that Pee-wee's allure is dependent on a certain youthfulness; as far back as 2007, he was worrying that he was aging past the character.
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Pee-wee is ''probably'' a means for Reubens to plumb the recesses of his soul, he said, but not in any way he copped to being conscious of: ''You'd have to ask a psychologist.
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They acknowledged that Reubens created the show, that he fought for their creative freedom, and that in the end it was him who made the final call on every aspect of Pee-wee's Playhouse.
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The real-life version of that chance meeting was at an Emmys party in 2011, when Reubens was nominated for The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway; Manganiello was there with his True Blood family.
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I've seen and loved Pee-wee's Big Holiday three times now, the new comedy co-written by and starring a still-energetic, 63-year-old Paul Reubens as his famous alter ego, Pee-wee Herman.
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If you know the character, you likely know the context: In 1991, Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure in a Florida porno theater, a victimless crime in an appropriate masturbatorium during the pre-internet age.
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Even though Paul Reubens has kept popping up as Pee-wee Herman here and there for years, it's been nearly three decades since he last made a movie as his famously goofy and inventive character.
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Out on the waterfront, you can catch whiffs of the smoked meat from John Brown Smokehouse, a bare-bones, Kansas City-style barbecue restaurant serving burned ends, Reubens and pulled-pork-and-French-fry sandwiches.
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The most important step in this plan was the hit ''Pee-wee Herman Show,'' a stage production that Reubens mounted in Los Angeles in 21981, which led to a 22010-week Broadway incarnation later that year.
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If you closed your eyes, it was easy to imagine that Pee-wee himself had burst into the room, engaged in some nonsensical game of repetition and that it was him, not Reubens, mouthing every line.
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Paul Reubens is making his comeback as Pee-Wee Herman next month with Pee-Wee's Big Holiday, a Netflix exclusive film he's been working on with Judd Apatow and writer Paul Rust for a half-decade.
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Another member of the improv group The Groundlings, Paul Reubens had perfected the art of his famous character Pee-Wee Herman by the time he auditioned for "Saturday Night Live" for the 1980 to 1981 season.
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The movie is perfectly appropriate for children, too, but whether the kiddies of 2016 will get Pee-wee, the man-child character played by Paul Reubens, the way an earlier generation did is hard to gauge.
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This week in art news: the Berkshire Museum earmarked 13 works to sell at Sotheby's, the ICA Boston closed an exhibition by alleged sexual harasser Nicholas Nixon, and the UK barred a Reubens oil sketch from export.
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Pee-wee's Big HolidayThe real-life version of that chance meeting was at an Emmys party in 2011, when Reubens was nominated for The Pee-wee Herman Show on Broadway; Manganiello was there with his True Blood family.
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During the day, my cellmate and I debated which Detroit restaurants stacked the tallest Reubens and one-upped each others' potato salad recipes, while at night slices of pizza and chicken gyros danced and tumbled through my dreams.
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For the 2010 production of "The Pee-wee Herman Show," Mr. Korins designed each step to be 10 inches high, so that the star Paul Reubens "clomped up and down like he was a small child," he said.
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Paul Reubens, who starred as the the popular character in the TV show Pee-wee's Playhouse and three movies, announced he will be touring in celebration of the 35th anniversary of his breakout film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
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Reubens created the Pee-wee Herman character in the late in 1970s while a member of the Groundlings, the long-running Los Angeles comedy troupe that cultivated future stars like Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Phil Hartman, and Melissa McCarthy.
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Netflix snapped up the Paul Reubens comeback vehicle as an exclusive in February of last year, and it's going to join movies like Beasts of No Nation and Adam Sandler's The Ridiculous Six on Netflix's roster of original films.
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"I get to do something I love, that I created and that I made all the rules up to," Reubens says of happily putting Pee-wee's gray suit and red bow tie back on and resurrecting that infectious giggle.
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Almost from the moment Reubens became famous, cultural-studies scholars, feminist writers and queer theorists seized upon and celebrated this quality: In 220 the academic journal Camera Obscura devoted a chunk of its May issue to essays analyzing Pee-wee.
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Paul Reubens has somehow managed not to visibly age at all since the last time he donned the grey suit and red bowtie—possibly thanks to spending the better part of the last decade in the climate-controlled environment of Walgreens.
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Arriving in the thick of the Reagan '80s, ''Playhouse'' offered a funhouse-mirror vision of the Eisenhower-era United States that Reubens grew up in — its excess, its materialism, its hypocrisy, its racism, its hairstyles — with an added slathering of Los Angeles punk.
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Pee-wee also owes debts to experimental theater, cabaret and the conceptual prankishness of the artist Allan Kaprow, whose Happenings Reubens discovered in the early 1970s when he enrolled in the theater program at California Institute of the Arts, where Kaprow taught.
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Reubens and Phil Hartman, a friend and fellow Groundlings performer (who died in 1998), conceived of the character together; Pee-wee was a hit with Groundlings audiences and soon became a regular on the Late Show With David Letterman and other talk shows.
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Here in the US, most of us are familiar with a basic set of supermarket cheeses: Cheddar, Parmesan, maybe some jack, and, of course, Swiss, the holey stuff we melt over Reubens, pile onto a ham sandwich, and fold into fluffy diner-style omelets.
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Chris Sarandon, Catherine O'Hara and Paul Reubens (best known as Pee-wee Herman) all contributed voice work to "The Nightmare Before Christmas," though critics mostly lauded director Henry Selick's attention to detail, which garnered the film an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects nomination.
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Maybe that's because after the scandals — one arrest for indecent exposure at an adult theater that ended with a "no contest" plea, another arrest on charges of possessing child pornography that were eventually dismissed — Reubens would rather focus on lighthearted goofs than subversive, edgy comedy.
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In creating Pee-wee, Reubens, in a somewhat genius stroke, figured out that the line between the world of late-night television and early morning children's television was blurrier than most people realized — and thus, a specific kind of humor could appeal to both audiences.
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Reubens, who is 63, wore a nondescript outfit that struck a compromise between aging Angeleno scenester and high-school math teacher: loosefitting jeans bunched at the ankles; leather walking shoes; baggy black T-shirt; Casio calculator watch; large sunglasses that fit directly over his rimless eyeglasses.
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The most straightforward description of Mosaic is that it's a mystery about the disappearance and presumed murder of a famous children's book author, Olivia Lake (Sharon Stone — who needs her own quality show now, preferably one with Paul Reubens, who flanks her here as her gay BFF).
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Richard Goldstein may have said it best in an old Village Voice article, written not long after Reubens found himself mired in his second high-profile sex scandal: The virtue of vintage erotica is that it leaves an ambiguous space between the image and its meaning.
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It provides plenty of opportunity for Reubens to mug it up with his usual Pee-wee laugh and chortle, and he and co-writer Paul Rust (Comedy Bang-Bang, Arrested Development) nail some truly great moments; Pee-wee impressing the Amish community with his ballooning skills is a particular high point.
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Though Reubens hadn't appeared in character as Pee-wee for a year and a half at that point, CBS was still airing reruns of his show; once news of his arrest broke, CBS quickly pulled the reruns, causing many to mistakenly assume his show had been canceled because of the incident.
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Paul Reubens returns as Pee-wee Herman, the suspended-in-time man-child he's been portraying since the '80s, and while there's a bit more make-up involved and the suit's a tad looser this time around, it's otherwise impressive how effortlessly the 64-year-old actor slips back into the role.
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Between seasons of ''Playhouse'' — by which point Pee-wee had hosted ''Saturday Night Live,'' appeared on the covers of Rolling Stone and Life and released ubiquitous merchandise (T-shirts, action figures, magnets, windsocks) plastered with his face — Reubens took to growing his hair and wearing a goatee to go incognito: Peter Pan turned bus-stop drifter.
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