Big Top Pee-wee Kiss Nearly Broke Pee-wee Herman

It was Paul Reubens‘ second turn at bat.

The actor, then 35, had already rocketed to fame as Pee-wee Herman, the bicycle-obsessed man-child from 1985’s Pee-wee’s Big Adventure — the feature debut from Tim Burton, who is back in cinemas this weekend with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

For his sophomore outing, 1988’s Big Top Pee-wee, Reubens relocated his alter ego from suburbia to a pastoral setting, where Pee-wee cared for talking animals while working on cutting-edge agricultural experiments like hot dog trees.

Burton did not return to direct; instead it was Randal Kleiser behind the camera, back at Paramount for the first time since directing the studio’s 1978 smash, Grease.

“I had a ball making that movie,” says Penelope Ann Miller, who played Pee-wee’s fiancé Winnie, on THR‘s It Happened in Hollywood podcast. “I loved Winnie, the prude little school teacher, who wouldn’t let him touch her and loved egg salad, and he hated egg salad.”

The first film dabbled in romance — who could forget the lovelorn Dottie (Elizabeth Daily)? — but Pee-wee skirted away from matters of the heart, uttering the legendary line, “You don’t wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I’m a loner, Dottie. A rebel.”

Not so in Big Top Pee-wee, for which Reubens wrote himself two love interests. It was with the second, the Italian aerialist played by Valeria Golino, that he envisioned a moment for the record books: The longest kiss in cinematic history. It was timed to beat the all-time record: a three-minute, five-second lip-lock between Jane Wyman and Regis Toomey in 1941’s You’re in the Army Now.

“They had to time it,” recalls Miller of the Big Top kiss, which beat Army Now by one second. “And then I see them, and I take the egg salad sandwich [I made for Pee-wee] and throw it in the river.”

But the marathon smooch was not a hit with test audiences, who got “fidgety,” producer Debra Hill told the Washington Post ahead of the film’s opening.

“Rumors flew that the petulant Pee-wee — or perhaps the recalcitrant Reubens — might boycott the picture’s July 21 premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre as well as the installation of his very own star on Hollywood Boulevard if the kiss were curtailed,” the Post reported.

In the end, the kiss was cut down to just a minute and a half — still long, but nowhere close to a record. Reubens’ Walk of Fame ceremony proceeded as scheduled and he did show up to the premiere the following day. “He rode in on an elephant,” Miller says. “It was quite the big to do.”

But Big Top Pee-wee bombed, earning just $15 million ($38 million today) against a $20 million budget, ending Reubens’ big-screen run until 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday for Netflix. His children’s show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse, ran successfully from 1986 to 1990 on CBS — until his 1991 arrest at an adult theater in Sarasota, Florida, sensationally derailed his career.

Reubens died in 2023 at age 70. His life and career will be the subject of a tribute night at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Sept. 14, where the centerpiece will be a screening of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.

For more on the making of Big Top Pee-wee, listen to the full episode of It Happened in Hollywood.