‘Pee-wee As Himself’ director Matt Wolf on really getting to know Paul Reubens; The Media’s appeasement to the President abounds

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

CBS News president Wendy McMahon has stepped down from her post as tensions escalate over ongoing Paramount Global-Trump settlement talks. With the deal already under scrutiny from senators, what’s in store for Shari Redstone's Skydance merger? Kim Masters and Matt Belloni dive into this and more major media shake-up stories.

Plus, Masters talks to director Matt Wolf about Pee-wee as Himself, which looks beyond the iconic character to the complicated man who created him. The two-part series draws from more than 40 hours of Wolf’s interviews with Paul Reubens, who spent much of his life guarding his privacy. The filmmaker also explains how those conversations revealed Reubens’ inner conflicts and why HBO pushed for more when it came to telling the late actor’s story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business.
0:05.6	The late actor Paul Rubin sat for more than 40 hours of interviews with documentarian Matt Wolfe,
0:11.5	whose two-part series, Pee Wee as himself, is now on HBO.
0:15.5	As viewers can see, getting at the man behind the beloved character was not always a walk in the park.
0:21.3	Some conflicts between us were genuinely interpersonal, but I would say most of it, that wasn't about me.
0:26.1	And I included these kind of barbed exchanges between us in the film because I felt like those really reflected Paul wrestling with himself and debating how much he was willing to show and share of his authentic
0:37.9	self with the world. Matt Wolfe explains how his interest in overlooked artists and forgotten
0:42.9	stories led to his portrait of the man behind Pee Wee Herman. He also talks about the actor's
0:48.2	struggle with his sexuality and reveals why HBO pushed for a two-part series to tell the late
0:53.8	actor's story. But first we banter.
0:56.6	Stick around. It's the business from KCRW. I am joined by my colleague in banter, Matt Bellany.
1:04.1	Hello, Matt. Hi there. So we learned from Trump talking during this Mideast trip that he had taken
1:10.2	that Bob Eiger had gone to the White
1:13.5	House, not something we read about, as far as I know, anywhere, and shown him plans for this
1:19.7	theme park that Disney is planning to build in Abu Dhabi. Donald Trump was quite complimentary
1:24.8	about this theme park, but as these things happen, he pivoted not
1:29.5	long after that and posted that ABC News was a disgrace and that George Stephanopoulos especially is a big
1:37.7	problem. So I would say yet more proof, appeasment is not working that well with this particular
1:43.6	person. No, yet the appeasement continues not working that well with this particular person.
1:47.6	No, yet the appeasement continues unabated.
1:56.0	I mean, we have seen over the last week or so several media companies moving to do things that Donald Trump would likely approve of. We saw Live Nation this past week add Richard Grinnell to its board of directors.
2:02.3	This is the president of the Kennedy Center under Trump and the revised Kennedy Center.
	...

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