Paul Reubens and Jasbir (JB) Singh Ghuman became friends when the Pee-wee Herman actor saw Ghuman’s 2010 film Spork and got in touch to compliment it. Ghuman was already a fan of Reubens, because he, like so many who grew up in the ’80s, and many since, adored Pee-wee.
Years later, Ghuman was teaching an art therapy class to kids in South Central Los Angeles. He could relate to them, he told at audience at the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival, because “I grew up very urban, very swagger — like I was a B-Boy from Overtown, Miami, like, super, super low income.”
But he’s also a proudly queer mixed-media artist who was disappointed by what he saw as his students’ narrow views on gender. So he decided to make a film that he thought might open their minds, and sought to enlist Reubens because he knew his students loved Pee-wee Herman. He wanted to reach an LGBTQ+ audience, but also people with conservative views on gender.
“I was hoping that with Paul — because they’re all like Pee-wee heads — I could get this audience to come in that is of our community, but also outside our community. Because I really feel like the message has to go to people who were like, ‘I would never!’ And then hopefully I can achieve some sort of progression,” Ghuman explained.
Reubens said yes to what turned out to be his last film. Ghuman’s bold and adventurous “The Crown with a Shadow and the Search for Self” is probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
The endlessly inventive short is 3D and mostly animated, but has an ’80s or ’90s analog feel, with frequent glow-in-the-dark aesthetics. One artistic conceit is that the story has been recorded over an old wedding video on VHS. (Ghuman used his mother’s real-life wedding video.)
The short follows Oliver, a pink skunk clownfish voiced by Reubens. Pink skunk clownfish — in the film and in real life — are all born male, but have the ability to turn female. Within a community of the fish, the leader is female, but if she dies, the largest breeding male changes sex to become the new female.
Ghuman saw the fish as a fun metaphor for the idea that gender can be complicated, and fluid.
Reubens is far from the only famous name in the cast: Ghuman also reached out to the Spice Girls’ Geri Halliwell, who he didn’t previously know, to voice Oliver’s mom, and to transgender model, singer and performance artist Amanda Lepore to be the narrator. Tatum O’Neal voices a character named Razor, and trans actress-singer-model Krylon Superstar is The Deity of Dopeness. All are fantastic.
Both Lepore and Krylon were in attendance with Ghuman when he played the film last week at the Morgan Hill Community Playhouse for Poppy Jasper.
Lepore received the festival’s Icon Award after a screening, Q&A, and tribute to Reubens, in which drag performers The Queens of Campbell performed “Tequila,” the song Reubens famously danced to in a biker bar in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
Paul Reubens, J.B. Ghuman, and ‘The Crown With a Shadow and the Search for Self’
Working with Ghuman on “The Crown With a Shadow and the Search for Self” was a way for Reubens to publicly reconnect with the LGBTQ+ community in his final years. The actor died in July 2023 from cancer, but discussed his sexuality in the posthumous 2025 documentary Pee-wee as Himself, which is now streaming on HBO Max.
In the doc, Reubens explains that in his early life he was out of the closet — but that he then went back in.
By the time he was starring in the Pee-wee movies and the kids show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, he was best known for his alter ego. Pee-wee Herman had a girlfriend, Dottie, but came off as childlike and completely uninterested in anything sexual.
The character worked on many levels: Kids loved him for his irrepressible energy, honking laugh, and quick comebacks (“I know you are but what am I?”), while adults could appreciate him as a kind of parody of the wholesome kids-show performers of the 1950s.
The character’s popularity took a hit when Reubens was arrested for indecent exposure at an adult movie theater in 1991, becoming an object of cruel, widespread mockery. Reubens bravely addressed the situation at the 1991 MTV Music Video Awards, when he surprised everyone by walking out on stage in character as Pee-wee.
After sustained applause and chants of “Pee-wee,” he asked the audience, “Heard any good jokes lately?”
Reubens kept a lower profile in the subsequent decade, appearing (not as Pee-wee) in films like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mystery Men and Blow. He took another hit in 2002 when he was charged with misdemeanor possession of child pornography, because of images police said they found in his large collection of kitschy memorabilia and vintage porn.
Reubens pleaded no contest to the 1991 charges, and pleaded guilty to an obscenity charge in 2004. Prosecutors, in turn, dropped the child porn charge.
The Pee-wee Herman character finally made a triumphant comeback with a 2011 Broadway show and a 2016 Netflix film, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. It was the last time Reubens played the character onscreen.
The Poppy Jasper event was all about celebration and love — with a tinge of regret that Reubens had to spend so much of his life closeted. Pee-Wee peaked in a homophobic era when almost no one in the public eye was out, which explains Reubens’ decision to stay in the closet when he was best known as a children’s entertainer.
Ghuman said in his Poppy Jasper Q&A that much of his friendship with Reubens was built around encouraging the icon to honest and open.
“I had known he was gay for a long time, and a lot of our connection was… me just being like, ‘Dude, just be yourself. Like, fuck these clowns.’”
He noted that in Pee-wee as Himself, Reubens could finally be “extremely vulnerable, extremely honest.”
“It really is a legacy doc,” Ghuman said. “It’s beautiful, beautiful.”
A Plea for Education
Both Amanda Lepore and Krylon Superstar used the occasion to plead for education as an antidote to bigotry. Lepore particularly encouraged people to understand that being trans is nothing new.
“”People should be educated about things, because transsexuals have been around forever, and so have non-binary people, and every sort of person has been, way back,” said Lepore. “And I personally love learning about transsexual experiences from different decades. I’m always searching in my free time on YouTube and books… I’m very knowledgeable about it. I love it so much.
“And I think that people just should open their minds, like anything else. Nobody is the same. Even if you’re heterosexual and narrow minded, you’re not the same as someone else. You have to open your mind and realize that there’s all different kinds of people, but the world is not just black and white. It’s many colors, many colors. Many, many, many, many colors.
“The bottom line is just to be respectful to each other and kind and not keep people separate from each other. Why can’t we all just get along together no matter what you are? It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter in the long run. We all bleed, we all have to eat. We all do the same damn things.”
Poppy Jasper festival director Mattie Scariot asked Lepore when someone would make a doc about her, and Lepore joked that she can be a tough subject to film: “Anytime I see a camera, I start posing.”
You can read more of our film festival coverage here.
Main image: JB Ghuman, Amanda Lepore and Krylon Superstar at the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival discussing “The Crown With a Shadow and the Search for Self.”
