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In deathbed audio, Paul Reubens recalled pain of being falsely labeled a pedophile

The two-part docuseries "Pee-wee as Himself" premiered Thursday at the Sundance Film Festival.

Directed by Matt Wolf, the two-part docuseries delves with uncommon depth into the actor and comedian's upbringing, rise to international fame and subsequent fall from grace, aided by its subject's vast photo/video archive and more than 40 hours of (sometimes cagey) interviews with Reubens, who did not reveal to the filmmakers that he had been diagnosed with cancer. As seen in contemporaneous footage, the earlier incident led actors Soupy Sales and Phil Hartman to call the performer a pervert and a deviant, respectively, while CBS dropped syndication of his popular children's program, "Pee-wee's Playhouse." The film expressly describes the latter as a "political case" brought by then City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and built on misconstruing Reubens' collection of vintage gay erotica as child pornography: As publicist Kelly Bush Novak says in an interview in the docuseries, "This was a homophobic witch hunt."

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