The spirit of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse is still alive at Club Nokia in Los Angelas, where Paul Reubens live stage act, The Pee Wee Show, resurrects the essence of the 80’s TV program at its best. After a recent show, Reuben’s stood around for a Q&A session, to which he was asked about the status of the Pee Wee’s Playhouse big screen adaptation. Reubens shared a great deal of info that all Pee Wee fans will rejoice in; including the possibility of Tim Burton returning to the director’s chair:
“The movie, we never left the Playhouse. You never saw Puppet Land. I mean, me and Cowboy Curtis went camping one time. There’s a couple episodes where you went, “Where are they?” But most of these were in the Playhouse. The movie has two scenes in the Playhouse. The beginning and the end. And the rest of the entire movie takes place outside the Playhouse.”
“The plot of the movie is, in the opening of the movie, right in the middle of the cartoon the film jams, it burns, it’s blacked out and when the lights come back up, the King is gone. The King is missing. The King of Cartoons has been kidnapped. He’s being held hostage by a character named El Chunky Boobabi (sp?). Chris Rock has already given me his word he would play him. And El Chunky is holding the King of Cartoons for ransom. So it’s all in Puppet Land.”
“I started to write this movie after the original Pee Wee Herman Show. I was offered all kinds of crazy stuff. Nothing I got offered was interesting. We wrote this movie called Pee Wee’s Big Adventure which wasn’t about a bicycle, it was about the Playhouse, and I later used the title for the bicycle movie. That movie never got made and it sat in a drawer for a long time. And several years ago when Tim Burton did Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, somebody said to me, “You know this is a great time. Charlie is going to be a great hit. You’ve got this script. Nobody’s ever read it. Can we read it?””
“And I thought, you can’t really read it. It’s really unreadable. I didn’t know how to write a script. So I thought, why don’t I just re-write it? So I started to re-write it, and re-write it and added all the puppets that came subsequent to when I wrote this movie. So this movie has been written for the past thirty years about four times. And I gotta tell you, after thirty years of 4 rewrites, this movie is so awesome, it’s so ready to get made. If I get to make this movie, you are going to be blown away. So I really hope I get to make it before Neil Patrick Harris has to play me. (He was in the audience.)”
Tim Burton’s Return:
Tim Burton is so busy. Tim may be an Executive Producer. Um..I have somebody in mind.
This is already a trip down memory lane, He-He!
