How Paul Reubens’ ‘Pee-Wee’s Playhouse’ led to ‘Boyz n the Hood’

Tributes to the goofiest actor with the most important coronary heart have made headlines this week because the world remembers Paul Reubens of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” fame, who handed away at 70 on Sunday.

However do you know that the present shares DNA with 1991’s “Boyz n the Hood?”

That’s a fairly large “however.” Let’s talk about the big but.

Within the late ’80s, a College of Southern California movie scholar named John Singleton was on the backside of the meals chain as a manufacturing assistant and safety guard on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

The set was swarming with on-screen expertise like Reubens and Laurence Fishburne — to not point out the roster of visitor stars together with Natasha Lyonne, Phil Hartman and even Oprah Winfrey.

The 19-year-old Singleton was decided to make a movie about rising up in south Los Angeles, and he’d already written the screenplay.

After Singleton’s untimely death in 2019, Fishburne — who performed Cowboy Curtis on the Reubens’ present — recalled his pluck.

“Day by day, John would go as much as Paul [Reubens] and ask, ‘Have you ever learn my script but?’ ” Fishburne told the Hollywood Reporter. “Paul would say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. I haven’t had the time.’ It turned out it was the script for ‘Boyz n the Hood.’ “

Singleton was insistent, when the time got here, that the actor would play a component within the movie.

When “Boyz n the Hood” was launched in 1991 with Fishburne as Livid Kinds, the coming-of-age drama earned nominations for Greatest Authentic Screenplay and Greatest Director on the sixty fourth Academy Awards — making Singleton the primary Black director ever to get a nod for the previous.

Stanley Clarke is one other connection between the irreverent cult TV show and the deeply shifting drama. He acquired an Emmy nomination for his work as a composer on an episode of “Pee-wee,” and went on to work with Singleton on three separate movies.

“John [Singleton] got here as much as me and acknowledged that he and I had been going to work collectively sooner or later,” Clarke mentioned. “I’m undecided what I assumed on the time, however who was to know that he would later ask me to attain his first function, Oscar-nominated ‘Boyz n the Hood,’ in addition to different movies, ‘Poetic Justice’ and ‘Greater Studying’?”