Inside Pee-wee's Playhouse Read online

  When Draizin returned home, he couldn’t shake the memory of his experience and the unique comedian who had engaged him from the stage. He decided to return the following week with two friends.

  “We sat there,” Draizin recalls, “and after the show they looked at me and said, ‘This guy’s terrific.’ You’ve got to go back there and talk to him.’”

  Despite the advice of his friends, the agent left without speaking to Reubens.

  The following day Draizin was walking to his office on Sunset Boulevard and ran into Tracy Newman, a Groundlings member he recognized from his previous trips to the theater. Draizin expressed interest in Reubens and within a few days, Newman had brokered a meeting between the two. Reubens and Draizin hit it off right away, and, at the end of the meeting, the agent offered Reubens representation. All he had to do, he said, was run it by his bosses at APA before things became official.

  Despite his excitement about discovering new talent, Draizin’s enthusiasm was challenged when he returned to the office.

  “I brought his headshot to the agency,” Draizin says. “It was an eight by ten with ‘Say hello to Pee-wee’ written on it. I passed it around the office and told the bosses that I wanted to sign him. They all looked at the headshot and thought it was a joke.”

  Unbeknownst to his bosses, Draizin signed Reubens anyway.

  Shortly after Reubens signed with Draizin, the stoner-comedy duo of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong made their way to the Groundling Theatre, scouting talent for their latest film.

  “I made a few trips down to the Groundling Theatre on Melrose and used talent from there to cast the remaining roles [in Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie],” Chong explains. “Paul Reubens was our first choice because he was the funniest original talent I had ever seen. His character Pee-wee Herman came to life as a separate entity.”

  Pee-wee Herman makes his screen debut in Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie [Courtesy PhotoFest / Universal Pictures © Universal Pictures]

  Pee-wee Herman made his film debut in Next Movie. At first, the character appears as a wimpy, foul-mouthed hotel clerk who attempts to get the duo arrested. He reemerges later in the film in full performance mode with his trademark look and routine. The film was a commercial success, and many reviewers singled out Pee-wee’s sequences as high points.

  Even comedian Steve Martin took note of Reubens’ performance. Martin, who was signed to APA, went into a meeting at his agency to lobby for Reubens to be signed.

  “He came in and said, ‘There’s a guy named Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman,’” Draizin recalls. “My bosses just looked at me. I said, ‘Yeah, he’s great. We represent him.’”

  With the attention Pee-wee was attracting on stage and screen, Draizin began submitting the character’s headshot to casting agents around the country. Within no time, the casting directors at Saturday Night Live wanted to “say hello to Pee-wee.” Reubens auditioned and made it to the final round of callbacks, but lost the job to Gilbert Gottfried. For Reubens, snl was the holy grail of opportunities. Rejected, he flew back to Los Angeles to regain his spot tossing Tootsie Rolls in the Groundling Theatre.

  Answering the Door

  Opportunity came in the form of Dawna Kaufmann, a television producer with an idea and a problem. She was the associate producer on a short-lived CBS late-night comedy show called No Holds Barred, a program designed to compete directly with snl by featuring a similar style of humor. However, censors frequently accused the show of presenting content that was inappropriate for network television, so frequently in fact that every episode was a struggle to get on the air. The torturous process inspired Kaufmann to come up with ideas for television show concepts that would be immune from the censors’ knives.

  Dawna Kaufmann [© Dawna Kaufmann]

  “If you want to be edgy, you’ve got be a little clever,” she explains. “So I thought it would be wise to come up with a late-night show that couldn’t be touched by the censors because we would never say a naughty word and we would never have any explicit sexuality. We wouldn’t have anything we could be attacked for, but it would be subversive. Everyone would know what we were talking about, but we wouldn’t be directly saying anything that would put us at risk.”

  She thought about other kinds of shows that had a similar format. As her brain raced through all of the flickering images she had seen on television, she thought of a novel question — what if television’s future lay in its past?

  “Variety shows always resonated with me,” Kaufmann recalls. “I remembered watching Soupy Sales when I was a kid. He’d literally open a door and something exciting would happen. As a little kid I watched lots of those shows and I was deeply influenced by them and that style of entertainment. That was the motivation to come up with a show that had a playhouse idea. It would have a narrative structure, but every couple of minutes something would happen. A new door would open and you’d be taken on a new ride, sometimes with puppets or cartoons, but it would always be different.”

  Kaufmann told her best friend, actress Cassandra Peterson (who later went on to pop-notoriety as the cult icon Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), about her late-night television show idea. A light bulb switched on over Peterson’s head.

  “She was in the Groundlings and told me there may be someone in the group that would have ideas I could work with to create a show,” Kaufmann recalls. “I had contacts in the industry and could pitch the show to plenty of people in show business. So I went down and saw Paul’s act and thought, ‘Well, here’s a guy who would make a good host.’”

  Peterson took the producer backstage after the show and introduced her to Reubens.

  “I wanted to do a show for television; didn’t have much money, but had a lot of contacts,” Kaufmann recalls. “He mentioned he had an agent and contacts too. We decided to put our heads together and start working on a show.”

  Phil Hartman [© The Groundlings]

  Kaufmann and Reubens went out to dinner the following day to discuss the particulars of The Pee-wee Herman Show, their new venture titled after The Pinky Lee Show and The Soupy Sales Show. With their sights set on television, Kaufmann decided to market the stage show as a “live pilot” for network television consideration and provide as many industry insiders as possible with comp tickets in the hopes that one of them would offer a deal. Because of his access to actors, Reubens would spearhead casting. In turn, Kaufmann would be responsible for recruiting the crew. However, even if they didn’t pay cast and crew, there would be costs associated with producing a live television pilot. They’d need to construct sets, print posters, and mail hundreds of promotional materials publicizing the event. Although both partners wanted to give this their all, neither had the money to make it happen. Reubens excused himself from the table and made a telephone call to his parents Judy and Milton Rubenfeld, asking them for a loan of $8,000. They agreed.

  Lynne Stewart [© The Groundlings]

  “The first time we made money on the show a check got cut to them,” Kaufmann recalls. “It was really helpful for Paul to ask Milton and Judy for the money. It gave us the ability to make the show a reality.”

  According to Doug Draizin, Reubens had been interested in expanding his presence at the Groundlings to a full-length performance even prior to Kaufmann’s offer.

  “Paul and I had discussed doing a one-man show at the Groundlings, with him doing different characters,” Draizin recalls. “But the Groundlings weren’t having it. They thought it was a conflict of interest. There was a lot of politics.”

  The first person brought on to the proposed TV show was Groundling Phil Hartman, whose improvisational skills proved crucial in providing a much-needed boost of confidence for Kaufmann and Reubens. During their first meeting together, Hartman created the character of Kap’n Karl; it was so perfect, the young producer knew immediately that the show had the potential of landing a network television deal.


  [© Abe Perlstein]

  “You know when you’ve got it right and I knew we had it the minute Phil sang the hand-washing song during our first meeting,” she recalls. “It was so hilarious and Paul’s reaction to it was right on.”

  Fellow Groundlings Edie McClurg, John Moody, John Paragon, and Lynne Stewart were among the first cast. Reubens asked them to come up with original characters that would fit the show’s avant-garde format, and within no time, iconic characters like Jambi the Genie, the disembodied, green head-in-a-box; Kap’n Karl, the salty seaman with caterpillar-like eyebrows (named after Kaufmann’s father); and Miss Yvonne, the buxom beauty with a bouffant, were born.

  In creating her character, Lynne Stewart fashioned Miss Yvonne’s dainty yet feisty demeanor after Sandra Dee and Marilyn Monroe. Creating a character and having the ability to run with ideas creatively is Stewart’s strong suit.

  “Lynne is one of the best comedy character actors in this country in terms of women who create their own characters as opposed to women who play ones that a playwright created,” Gary Austin says. “She creates incredibly great comedy characters. Some of the best characters I’ve ever seen have come from Lynne Stewart.”

  In addition to the humans, the appropriately named Puppetland was inhabited by a handful of characters made of cloth and foam. Phil Hartman voiced Monsieur LeCroq, an ornery reptilian wingman for his business partner, Mailman Mike, while Edie McClurg created Clocky, a large papier-mâché yellow-and-red map of the United States that would remind Pee-wee of his appointments. John Paragon voiced one of the most integral puppet characters, Pterry-Dactyl, Kap’n Karl’s pet. A rod held up the main frame of Pterry-Dactyl’s body and controlled his mouth movement, while two more manipulated his wings. Although his appearance would later change, his frame was thin with a bright red tongue permanently hanging out of his mouth and thick brown eyebrows to match his seafaring owner.

  For many of the Groundlings, the opportunity to work on a live project that would hopefully give way to a television deal was a dream come true. While several Groundlings were included in the show, there were even more who hoped to be included in the production in the future.

  “They kept saying they were going to add more parts for people,” Groundling Joan Leizman recalls. “Nobody really knew if it was going to happen.”

  Cassandra Peterson wouldn’t have minded a chance to share the stage with her peers.

  “In the Groundlings, I always did these sex-symbol characters, so Paul didn’t really see a place for me in the show,” she recalls. Instead, Peterson worked as an usherette, handing out programs, while dressed as a little girl in a yellow-and-white gingham dress.

  Paul Reubens and Lynne Stewart in rehearsals [© Abe Perlstein]

  In addition to casting Groundlings, Reubens recruited the musical comedy duo Rick and Ruby, played by Brian Seff and Monica Ganas. He had first heard of them after a member of the Groundlings saw them play in 1978 at Robin Williams’ wedding in San Francisco. She told Reubens that if the band ever played a gig in Los Angeles, he would have to go see them. When the band played The Palomino Club in North Hollywood in 1979, Reubens attended with gifts in hand.

  Brian Seff and Monica Ganas as Rick and Ruby [© Brian Seff]

  “There were these three toy ray guns in our dressing room when we were finished with our set, with a note that read ‘a gift from a fan,’” Brian Seff recalls. “They were from Paul. He came backstage and invited us to see his act at the Groundling.”

  Ganas and Seff went to see him and loved the act. The three maintained a long-distance friendship for the following year until Reubens called with an invitation for Rick and Ruby to appear as Mr. and Mrs. Jelly Donut in his upcoming show. They agreed and relocated to L.A.

  Two additional non-Groundlings were involved with the show. Mario “Ivan” Flores, a Mexican teenager who lived near the theater, was cast in the small part of Salvador Sanchez. Dora Romani, a singer in her seventies, performed an opening number before performances.

  “She was a woman that Paul and I knew from a little Italian restaurant,” Kaufmann recalls. “Dora was about five feet tall and five feet wide, a little butterball grandma. She was an opera singer and loud like Ethel Merman, shamelessly going from man to man and heaving her bosoms in their faces. She would sing to them and push their girlfriends out of the way while she sat on their laps. It was hilarious.”

  Gary Panter holding the soundtrack for The Pee-wee Herman Show that features his artwork [© Abe Perlstein]

  As Reubens was assembling an acting army, Kaufmann created a crew. Although underground artist Gary Panter is best known for his illustrations, Kaufmann knew him from a punk manifesto he wrote in the early 1970s. She invited him to see Reubens perform at the Groundling and asked him to contribute to the show. Panter liked the act and suggested he serve as production designer; his responsibilities would eventually include publicity illustrations, set design, and puppet fabrication.

  With Gary Panter came his wife, Nicole, a musician with a large local following due, in part, to her time managing the underground punk band The Germs. She was brought on as “the cool consultant,” appraising the scripts to find bits that worked and those that didn’t.

  Upon Gary’s recommendation, Kaufmann hired Jay Cotton to compose and play the show’s score. Although Cotton’s behavior was often wild and unpredictable during rehearsals, his musical abilities exceeded everyone’s expectations.

  “The little flourishes Jay put in were so creative,” Kaufmann recalls. “They were like exclamation points at the end of every song. They were thrilling to listen to.”

  “Jay’s very talented,” Nicole Panter explains. “He’s crazy as a shithouse rat, but in him Paul got someone very talented who was willing to work for very, very cheap.”

  Guy Pohlman, a member of the show’s technical crew and Cotton’s understudy, agrees with Nicole’s sentiments about his talents.

  “He was a fair pianist, but he had a vision for that show,” Pohlman recalls. “He had a sense of humor and it fit perfectly with the Groundlings. He had the tone exactly right for a children’s show that was a little risqué.”

  The cast collaborated on the script, drawing on their unique talents and senses of humor to produce the live pilot.

  “The show was initially created by Dawna with Paul, but once that snowball started rolling down the hill, the rest of us were incorporated into it and added our body of knowledge and cultural references to it,” Nicole Panter explains. “Phil Hartman and Edie McClurg both contributed elements to the show that are beyond value. They were very similar in that they had a very deep well of material to draw from. Both of them were really well-spoken, quick-on-their-feet performers. I see their fingerprints all over the show.”

  By day, Kaufmann would audio record the improvisational rehearsal and turn them into script pages at night. She remembers the writing process fondly.

  “I loved collaborating with everyone and I think Paul did too,” Kaufmann recalls. “We’d go out to dinner usually and talk about what worked and what didn’t work. Then I would go home and I would write a new script, and the next night at rehearsal we’d go through it, and if people had new ideas to add, we’d throw them in.”

  Paul Reubens and Phil Hartman rehearse, and Pee-wee Herman and Hermit Hattie (Edie McClurg) on stage [© Abe Perlstein]

  While developing the script, the Pee-wee Herman character began to grow as well. As unlikely as it might have seemed when the project began, in the months preceding the show’s debut, Pee-wee matured. It was like a show had been based around a character from a television commercial.

  [© Abe Perlstein]

  “When we started, he was not a host of any kind, he was just a character,” Kaufmann recalls. “So we all helped [Paul] find his motivation as a character, along with the story line about him wanting to fly. It was exciting to be a part of that and t
o see it come together. During those days, I really felt I was in Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney world, putting on a show in a garage. We really pulled it off quite nicely.”

  Live from Los Angeles, It’s Saturday Night

  Reubens arranged for the show to run on midnights at the Groundling Theatre after the Friday and Saturday night regular Groundlings performances, where Pee-wee Herman had made his debut a few years earlier. The cast and crew of nearly 40 worked together to bring the show to fruition as opening night neared.

  Some of the cast and crew of The Pee-wee Herman Show [Courtesy PhotoFest]

  “Gary created this great lime-green-and-purple poster,” Kaufmann recalls. “As we were gearing up to opening, I would go around at night with different people in the cast and we would slap up these posters all over town. I’m amazed we didn’t get arrested because that was never a legal thing to do, but it was helping to set the stage for this underground event that was going to be opening.”

  Kaufmann exhausted her Rolodex to get every person she knew with ties to the entertainment industry in to see the show. While much has been written about the show’s runaway success with the public in its early days, most of the audience was made up of Hollywood insiders, not members of the general public.

  “I was bringing in everyone who had even a tangential contact in Hollywood,” she recalls. “They would all get free tickets. We were just papering the house to get warm bodies in there and build a buzz. It wasn’t about making money as a play, it was about getting seen by people who might take interest and want to develop it as a television show.”