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In 1991, MTV Gave Pee-Wee Herman A Perfect Comeback Moment At The Video Music Awards

In 1991, the MTV Video Music Awards exhibited both showmanship and class when they allowed Paul Reubens to begin his comeback on their stage. Reubens, who died on Sunday (July 30) at age 70, made the most of the opportunity.

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Paul Reubens, Comic Actor Behind Pee-Wee Herman, Dies at 70 07/31/2023

Reubens, creator of the beloved Pee-wee Herman character, had been arrested in Sarasota, Fla. In July 1991 for masturbating in an adult theater. Even years before the Internet and TMZ, this was very big news – not important, to be sure, but deeply embarrassing and career-imperiling, especially for someone who had a big following among kids.

Such artists as Cyndi Lauper and Big Top Pee-wee director Randal Kleiser spoke out in Reubens' support, but far more celebs were quiet, while comics and late-night talk show hosts, including Arsenio Hall, who hosted the VMAs for the fourth year in a row, had a field day at Reubens' expense.

The MTV Video Music Awards, then at the peak of their influence, came to Reubens' support. At the top of the Sept. 5, 1991 show, the announcer said "MTV is proud to introduce someone who has been a friend for a long time." Reubens, in his Pee-wee costume, then walked on stage to a very warm response from the audience, which stood and chanted his name.

Reubens had a great line ready: "Heard any good jokes lately?," followed by "So funny I forgot to laugh." Reubens, who had probably spent the previous six weeks wondering if he still had a career, seemed genuinely moved by the audience response and said, "Thank you very much. That really means a lot to me," before suggesting that he had something to say.

"I just one have thing that I'd like to say to all of you out there and to everyone in the nation – and that is, Welcome to the 1991 MTV Video Music Awards."

MTV had created a perfect television moment – it wasn't overdone or overwritten. MTV had made a statement, but the network also trusted the audience to get the statement without beating them over the head with it.

With the 2023 Video Music Awards set for Sept. 12, the network can only hope that they handle unforeseen developments with as much class and grace as the producers did that year. (Joel Gallen produced the 1991 show. Doug Herzog, Judy McGrath and Gregory Sills were executive producers.)

R.E.M. Were the big winners on the 1991 show, with six awards, including video of the year for "Losing My Religion." That top award was presented by George Michael and Cindy Crawford. Michael would experience his own embarrassing arrest for lewdness in April 1998. Again, MTV helped right the ship by airing his laugh-it-off video "Outside," which was released six months later.

Franz Rogowski's Sexy, Lonely, Beautiful Worlds

"You and me, if we would both sit here naked, it would change the energy." That sounds like a safe bet, but Franz Rogowski is getting to a point here. "We wouldn't have to do anything. We'd just take off our clothes." He smiles at my nervous laugh, then gives an eyebrow raise that keeps his interviewer on his toes. This is the way Rogowski answers a question about the experience of filming a sex scene.

"You always depend on intimacy when you create scenes for a movie—it's more obvious when you're naked and you're moaning," he says. "But it's not just having sex, you know? Having a conversation can be very intimate—as now, in this lovely Zoom conversation."

Speaking with Rogowski, it seems, is not unlike watching him onscreen. The 37-year-old German actor has emerged as one of the most dynamic talents of his generation through a peculiar combination of wit, sexiness, vulnerability, and transparency. That last quality is key. His characters can behave cruelly, unbearably, or with bracing kindness and empathy; either way, Rogowski offers access into their vibrant, messy interior worlds. In his portrayals, they are funny and strange and deeply sad—the kinds of people we all recognize and who too rarely fill up the movies.

The honesty catches you off guard, and with that comes a thrilling unpredictability that explains his status as the art house man of the moment. The German auteur Christian Petzold cast Rogowski in 2018's Transit; the next year, the actor took on a small but pivotal role in Terrence Malick's World War II drama A Hidden Life. He's now a global star primed to soar, completing ADR in three different languages on a given movie, acting around the world, and learning new ways of working along the way. He is in production on Andrea Arnold's new movie, Bird, as we chat, shooting in the English town of Gravesend (Rogowski calls it "Brexitland")—near where the director grew up—and giddy at the fact that he knows nothing more about his character or storyline than what's on the pages Arnold gives him to act out for the day.

"We are dealing with all kinds of birdy issues here," he says of the mystery project. Is he into that bird stuff? "Yes. I think I am an owl." Okay, how so? After a pause, Rogowski hoots a few times in response. It is weirdly charming, and definitely confounding.

The superb film Passages (in US theaters August 4), which serves as the occasion for this interview, contains Rogowski's most explosive and delicate performance yet. Not coincidentally, his character is highly chaotic. We meet Rogowski's Tomas as a German filmmaker living in Paris, wrapping work on his latest movie. As he transitions back to regular life, he briefly loses interest in his long-term partner, the British Martin (Ben Whishaw), and finds himself intensely attracted to a French woman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), who worked on the project. He begins an affair, swiftly moves in with her, and then starts pining for his old life—setting a fraught and heated love triangle in motion.

"He's a fun character," director Ira Sachs says, before qualifying with a laugh: "I mean, he's a bad guy." When it came to casting, Sachs thought about Jimmy Cagney. "Orson Welles once said [Cagney] was the greatest cinema actor ever—which I think is not far from true. [He] played people whose actions seemed despicable, and yet you loved him." That model tracks here: Rogowski's warm expressiveness barrels through even the most selfish of acts. He plays Tomas with delirious commitment. "He's not really capable of putting a gloss over things or making something tidy when it's not," Whishaw tells me. "[Franz] is very frank. He's very direct. At least, that's how he seems to me."

Rogowski fell in love with acting and got his first acting lesson in the same moment. "I was looking in the face of my mother, and I was trying to figure out what she would want," he says. "Then I made the right gestures and I gave her a smile. She smiled back in return." He lights up at the memory. All these years later, the basic takeaway from that interaction still applies. He wants to act so we react; he wants to feel right along with his audience. And he wants to grow from that process each time.

To inhabit a person as tricky and volatile as Tomas, Rogowski looked inward. In some ways, he came out of Passages with a richer sense of self, as well as a better sense of his personal style. He took home some of Tomas's most provocative garments, including a striking snakeskin leather jacket, and has since integrated them into his wardrobe. He wears these pieces when out with friends, or at parties, or "maybe also at a campsite—you never know." He likes the feeling the clothes give him, creating "a little push" to stand out from the crowd.

Of course, Tomas's efforts at self-exploration come with a brazen disregard for the man with whom he's chosen to spend his life. Rogowski says we all know guys like Tomas, that there might be a little of him in all of us. "How would you describe his behavior?" Rogowski asks me, intrigued. Terrifying, human, and, perhaps, primal, I reply. "Mm-hmm. Primal," he says, delighted. "We all need some primal energy in our life. I've been working hard on the primal energy."

This leads me to wonder about Tomas's identity, and lack of labels. Rogowski brilliantly—and devastatingly—took on a very different kind of queer character in the undersung Great Freedom, which was released in the US last year, playing a man imprisoned for his sexuality. Rogowski disliked the description of that film as a "gay movie," preferring to think of it as a "story about love." But Passages' presentation of personal sexual and gender fluidity resonated with the actor, and you feel it in the freedom of his performance. "I sometimes wonder, How much of a man am I? How much of a woman am I? What and who defined that word for me? Certainly not me," he says. "I grew up in an environment that told me what it means to be a man. Being in [Passages'] triangle relationship allowed me to play with those concepts and to somehow revisit certain memories of mine—but also experience my own body in different temperatures or different forms."

Passages permits Rogowski to be blisteringly funny and strangely heartbreaking, but he also ably carries a very sexy movie. When Tomas reunites with Martin, they rekindle sexually in an explicit, authentic, and tender scene, captured in a gorgeous unbroken take. (Sachs has cited this as the reason that Passages received an NC-17 rating, which he decried as "cultural censorship." Mubi is choosing to release the movie as unrated.) "Ben and I didn't know what to do. We didn't know how to really prepare for the scene," Rogowski says. "All that happened was, we met on the day of shooting the scene, and we were like, 'Okay, how are we going to do this?' I think we trusted one another, and then we went for it. You touch each other, and yeah, to a certain extent, you become intimate and you enjoy the time being intimate."

"It was definitely one of the most thrilling experiences I've had of acting with someone, of creating a world with somebody," Whishaw says. "It was a deep thing he was bringing—and it was unpredictable."

Photograph by Nick Thompson; styling by Rose Forde; grooming by Jody Taylor

The first thing Christian Petzold noticed about Rogowski was his hands. "He can do everything with his hands," the director says. "He has a tactile relationship to the world…. He wants to touch the world." He keeps pointing out Rogowski's gentleness: the way he holds his lover's face in Transit, the way he saves another woman from drowning in a later movie, Undine. Rogowski may thrive in the scary, curious conflict that fuels Passages, but he brings an extraordinary heart to that space.

"Loneliness is something which is very important for him as an actor, because all heroes in the history of cinema are lonely," Petzold says. "They're sad, gentle giants. Something from this is in him."

Rogowski is not eager to discuss his private life, and knows that as his profile increases—as he keeps acting in English, working with bigger directors, and delivering performances to great acclaim—he will need to learn how to carefully answer specific questions about it. He tells me he turned to acting less out of a love for theater than a hatred of sitting through school. He has said he was bullied for his lisp; as Petzold puts it for me, instead of playing on a football team, Rogowski was "juggling and climbing on monkey bars," referring to the actor's brief stint in clown school. "He feels somehow like a bit of an outsider," says Whishaw.

Yet there remains a real openness—a playfulness in the way Rogowski converses, a willingness to share on a deeper level. At one point, yes, he'll ask me to imagine us sitting in our Zoom windows naked. In another, he'll reveal his personal challenges generously and genuinely. "I am not my best friend…. I try to be some kind of a father figure to my inner child," he says. "It's just me trying to be a bit more forgiving and see myself a bit from outside and how absurd I am. I struggle with that sometimes." He speaks a bit softer here. "I have a tendency to get lost in my own mind. Probably you've been there, being anxious for nothing, and then being even more anxious or getting depressed. There's so many distracting things out there."

Maybe he's describing a fear of losing control, like Tomas does in Passages. He likes the way I describe the character's behavior as "terrifying," especially for anyone in a long-term relationship. "I agree with you," he says. "I am also in a stable relationship, and I am not interested in this kind of man. I mean, it would be terrible! But I've been there and I know how it feels."

Or maybe he's giving me a window into that loneliness—a feeling he addresses indirectly at one point. "Being on the set is 80% sitting, lonely, on a chair, waiting for the next take," he says. "It's a lot about collecting your energy, a bit like a hunter—a hunter waiting, for hours and hours, for the elk or the owl or the deer to arrive."

Wait—isn't Rogowski the owl?

"Yes, that's true," he says. "I'm the hunter and the owl."

All interviews for this story were conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike. 

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'Kokomo City': Four Black Transgender Sex Workers Tell It Like It Is

(3 stars)

So many cultural conversations and legal fights are animated by the fear and loathing of trans people — i.E., those whose gender identities don't conform with the ones they were assigned at birth — that it's easy to forget most of us literally don't know what we're talking about.

"Kokomo City," D. Smith's impressive debut documentary about Black trans sex workers, arrives in time to be an audacious, endearing, illuminating, often amusingly ribald primer. At once a vivid group portrait and lucid social commentary, this fleet, visually lively slice of life offers a sometimes startlingly candid glimpse of realities that are too often obscured, demonized and relegated to the margins. Frank and disarmingly funny, "Kokomo City" is here to set the record straight — or, in the argot of the world the film inhabits, deliver the real tea.

The real tea is exactly what "Kokomo City's" feisty, self-possessed protagonists are ready to serve. The narrative centers mostly on four subjects: Liyah Mitchell and Koko Da Doll, both in Atlanta, and Dominique Silver and Daniella Carter, in New York. The film opens with Liyah recounting a particularly harrowing encounter, when she discovered that her customer was carrying a gun. What ensues is both terrifying and shocking, not least because of the way it ended (reader, she didn't marry him, but …).

Keeping the camera trained on Liyah's expressive face, intercutting with pantomimed reenactments and stylized images of guns twirling in the air, Smith brings a lilting sense of joviality to a story that, like almost every anecdote in the film, possesses a darker undercurrent of real, ever-present danger. "Kokomo City" bursts not just with the indomitable energy of the smart, mesmerizingly beautiful women Smith has cast, but with the contradictions of their lives, which have been witness to cruelty, exploitation and violence, but also growth, self-discovery, and unimaginable physical and emotional courage.

Smith, a Grammy-nominated former music producer, singer and songwriter, brings those chops to bear on a narrative that never flags. (She also brings her own lived experience: She has said in interviews that her music career was derailed once she came out as a trans.) Filmed in silky black and white, "Kokomo City" favors images of its heroines primping, posing and lounging languidly while they relate their home truths, but Smith keeps the beauty shots moving with quick asides, animations, neon-yellow screen titles and some very clever sound edits. Men have a voice in "Kokomo City" — we meet Michael Carlos Jones, an Atlanta songwriter known as "Lo," who is grappling with his attraction to a trans woman he met online — but the film is at its most galvanizing simply when it allows these women to tell their stories unvarnished, except for the nail polish.

Inevitably, common themes emerge, as "Kokomo City" becomes a meditation on masculinity, femininity, what constitutes pleasure, and the bitter price of personal and social denial. The film's most intriguing and insistent voice belongs to Daniella, whose monologues about race, class, gender and female solidarity are both bracingly honest and brilliantly astute. In fact, seen through a feminist lens, "Kokomo City" might be the perfect flip side to "Barbie": Both movies, after all, get to a reality of women's lives that Gloria Steinem identified years ago. At the end of the day, one way or another, we're all female impersonators.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong sexual references and images, graphic nudity, crude language throughout, and drug use. 73 minutes.

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