Pee-wee's Big Adventure
Pee-wee's Big Adventure is a 1985 American adventure comedy film directed by Tim Burton in his feature-film directorial debut. The film stars Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, along with Elizabeth Daily, Mark Holton, Diane Salinger and Judd Omen. The screenplay, written by Reubens with Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol, tells the story of Pee-wee's search for his stolen bicycle and has been compared to the 1948 Italian film Bicycle Thieves.
Following the success of The Pee-wee Herman Show in 1981, Reubens was hired by the Warner Bros. film studio and began writing the script for Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Impressed with Burton's work on the short film Frankenweenie, the producers and Reubens hired him to direct. Filming took place in California and Texas. The film was scored by Danny Elfman, marking his first among many collaborations with Burton.
Pee-wee's Big Adventure was theatrically released on August 9, 1985, by Warner Bros., grossing over $40 million in North America. It became a cult film and continued to accumulate positive feedback. It was nominated for a Young Artist Award and was followed by two standalone sequels, Big Top Pee-wee and Pee-wee's Big Holiday. Its financial success, followed by Burton's equally successful Beetlejuice in 1988, prompted Warner Bros. to hire Burton to direct the 1989 film Batman.
Plot
Pee-wee Herman, a childlike man in a grey suit with a red bow-tie, has a cherished, heavily accessorized bicycle. His neighbor and enemy, Francis Buxton, wants the bicycle and offers to buy it. Pee-wee refuses; as he rides off, Francis warns him he'll be sorry for turning down his offer.Dottie is an employee at the local bike shop who has a crush on Pee-wee, but he does not reciprocate. As Pee-wee goes on a shopping spree, his bike is stolen, but the police are not overly concerned with the theft. Pee-wee assumes Francis took it, and confronts him, but Francis' father convinces Pee-wee that Francis was not responsible. Pee-wee offers a $10,000 reward for the bike. Francis, who did indeed pay to have someone steal the bike, is disturbed by Pee-wee's relentlessness and pays to have the bike sent away. That evening, Pee-wee holds an unsuccessful evidentiary meeting of friends and neighbors to find the bike, and rejects Dottie's offer of help. He then visits a phony psychic who misleads Pee-wee into believing his bike is in the basement of the Alamo Mission in San Antonio. In haste he leaves his wallet behind.
Pee-wee hitchhikes to Texas, getting rides from a fugitive convict named Mickey, and from Large Marge, the ghost of a truck driver. At a truck stop, Pee-wee finds his wallet is missing, and pays for his meal by washing dishes. He befriends Simone, a waitress who dreams of visiting Paris. As they watch the sun rise from within a roadside dinosaur statue, he encourages her to follow her dreams, but Simone tells him about her boyfriend, Andy, who disapproves. Andy appears and tries to attack Pee-wee, who escapes onto a moving train. Pee-wee arrives at the Alamo, but learns at the end of a guided tour that the building does not have a basement.
At a bus station, Pee-wee encounters Simone, who tells him she broke up with Andy and is on her way to Paris. She tells Pee-wee not to give up searching for his bike. Pee-wee calls Dottie and apologizes for his behavior. Andy spots Pee-wee and resumes chasing him. Pee-wee evades Andy at a rodeo by disguising himself as a bull rider. He is forced to ride a bull, and gets knocked out before the bull pursues Andy. He visits a biker bar to make a phone call, and a biker gang threatens to kill him after he accidentally knocks over their motorcycles. He wins them over by dancing to the song "Tequila" in a pair of platform shoes, and they give him a motorcycle for his journey, which he crashes immediately.
He awakens in a hospital and sees on television that his bike is being used as a prop in a film. Pee-wee sneaks into Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank and grabs the bike. Security guards chase him across the studio lot and through several active sets before he escapes. Pee-wee then discovers a burning pet shop and rescues the animals. The firefighters declare Pee-wee a hero, but the police arrest Pee-wee for his intrusion at the studio. They return Pee-wee to the studio to face Warner Bros. president Terry Hawthorne. After Pee-wee pleads his case that the bike belongs to him, Hawthorne decides to drop the charges and return Pee-wee's bike in exchange for the rights to adapt his story into a film starring James Brolin as "P.W. Herman" and Morgan Fairchild as Dottie. In the film, presented as a James Bond parody, the characters must retrieve their stolen motorbike – which contains an important microfilm – from the Soviets. Pee-wee has a cameo role as a hotel bellhop, though his voice has been dubbed.
Seeing the film at a drive-in theater, Pee-wee gives refreshments to the different people he met along his journey. He also encounters Francis, who tells reporters that he taught Pee-wee how to ride. Francis claims to be knowledgeable about Pee-wee's bike, but sets off one of the bicycle's gadgets, catapulting himself into the air. Ultimately, Pee-wee decides to depart with Dottie, claiming to have already "lived" the adventure on screen.
Cast
- Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman, an eccentric man-child whose bike was stolen.
- Elizabeth Daily as Dottie, a bike shop employee who is Pee-wee's friend and has a crush on him.
- Mark Holton as Francis Buxton, a spoiled man-child who is Pee-wee's enemy and neighbor.
- Diane Salinger as Simone, a tourist stop waitress who dreams of visiting France.
- Judd Omen as Mickey Morelli, an escaped convict who claims he was incarcerated for cutting a tag off a mattress.
Special appearances
- James Brolin as "P.W."
- Morgan Fairchild as "Dottie"
- Tony Bill as Terry Hawthorne, the president of Warner Bros. Studios.
- Twisted Sister
Production
After a failed audition for Saturday Night Live in 1980, Paul Reubens developed The Pee-wee Herman Show for the Groundlings sketch comedy theater in Los Angeles, which led to an HBO special in 1981 and several appearances on Late Night with David Letterman.Steve Martin introduced his manager Bill McEuen to Reubens, who subsequently hired him on as a client and convinced him to go on an American tour. Reubens's tour of 22 cities was billed as The Pee-wee Herman Party and included sold-out shows at New York's Carnegie Hall and Los Angeles's Universal Amphitheater, where Warner Bros. executives greenlit a full-length Pee-wee Herman film.
Reubens's original concept was a remake of Pollyanna, his favorite film, with Pee-wee Herman in the Hayley Mills role. While writing the script, he noticed that many at Warner Bros. rode bicycles around the backlot and requested one of his own. This inspired him to start a new script.
After writing a tentative screenplay, according to producer Richard Gilbert Abramson, Warner Bros. had approved a director for the film but it was a choice that neither he, McEuen or Reubens felt was appropriate for the project. Taking inspiration from Sylvester Stallone, who refused to cede creative control to studios, Reubens turned down Warner Bros.'s choice for the director, and the studio then told him to find someone "approvable, available, and affordable" within a week.
Reubens had heard about Tim Burton at a party the same night that he had gotten permission from the studio to get an extension on his director search. "I screened 'Frankenweenie and I spoke to Shelley Duvall, who was a friend of mine who was in," Reubens explained. "I knew Tim was the director about 15 seconds into Frankenweenie, like the second or third shot of it. I was looking at the wallpaper in this bedroom and the lighting and just going, 'This is the guy who has style and understands art direction.' Those were two really important things for me and my baby, I guess, and you know it just happened to luckily all work out."
After hiring Burton, Reubens, Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol revised the script. They read Syd Field's 1979 book Screenplay and wrote the script according to the book's advice. "It's a 90-minute film, it's a 90-page script," Reubens explained. "On page 30 I lose my bike, on page 60 I find it. It's literally exactly what they said to do in the book...There should be like a MacGuffin kind of a thing, something you're looking for, and I was like, 'Okay, my bike.'" The film has been described as a "parody" or "farce version" of the 1948 Italian classic Bicycle Thieves.
Casting
The film features several of Reubens' fellow cast members from the improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings who had previously appeared in The Pee-wee Herman Show, namely Phil Hartman, Lynne Marie Stewart, John Paragon and John Moody. Jan Hooks was also a fellow Groundling, and both she and Hartman would go on to become cast members of Saturday Night Live in 1986.The producers, directors and writers were all present during the audition process. The filmmakers initially wanted Louie Anderson, a rising stand-up comedian at the time, for the role of Francis. Actor Mark Holton later theorized that his own shorter stature and affordability influenced the decision to cast him in the role.
Diane Salinger had been an actual waitress as a teenager. While she hailed from Delaware, she adopted a southern accent for the role of Simone, which she developed just minutes before her audition. After being cast, Salinger, a Shakespearean-trained actress, almost rejected the role, due to a scene in the script that involved Pee-wee's dog, Spec, licking its behind and then Pee-wee's mouth. The scene did not make it into the finished film.
Twisted Sister appeared in the film following an earlier encounter between frontman Dee Snider and Reubens at an MTV New Year's Eve party, where the two expressed mutual admiration for each other. In early 1985, the band were visiting California in preparation for several shows at the Long Beach Arena when Reubens contacted Snider about the band possibly doing a cameo in the film during the chase scene, which he envisioned passing through a Twisted Sister video shoot. While Snider initially suggested using the songs "We're Not Gonna Take It" or "I Wanna Rock" for the sequence, much to his delight, Reubens specifically requested "Burn in Hell".
Hartman, Stewart and Paragon would also later appear on Reubens' TV series Pee-wee's Playhouse. Stewart would also appear in the films Big Top Pee-wee and Pee-wee's Big Holiday, as well as the 2010 Broadway revival of The Pee-wee Herman Show. Salinger would also appear in Pee-wee's Big Holiday.