Part biography, part live performance, Beauty Is Embarrassing<\/i> tells the story of this one-of-a-kind visual artist and raconteur. The film traces White\u2019s career from an underground cartoonist in New York\u2019s East Village to his big break as a designer, puppeteer, and voice-over actor onPee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/i> for which he won three Emmy awards. It follows Wayne\u2019s success designing and animating for other children\u2019s shows like Beakman\u2019s World<\/i>and music videos for The Smashing Pumpkins (\u201cTonight, Tonight\u201d) and Peter Gabriel (\u201cBig Time\u201d) through a dark period of struggle and self-reflection before emerging in his present-day incarnation as a respected painter and performer. The film, like White, embraces the ragged edges and messy contradictions of life, art, and family with rabid humor and honesty.<\/p>\n
For two years, filmmaker Neil Berkeley traveled with White through Houston, Miami, New York, Chattanooga, Nashville, and Los Angeles retracing Wayne\u2019s steps from childhood to parenthood. He peeled back layer after layer of Wayne\u2019s singular creative process and his astonishingly prolific career. In addition to the 300+ hours of footage shot by Berkeley and his team, the director discovered hours of video which White shot throughout his career including never-before-seen behind the scenes footage of the making of Pee-wee\u2019s Playhouse<\/i> \u2014 now included in Beauty Is Embarrassing<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Wayne White\u2019s trip to the top came relatively early in life but was followed by a fall that felt all too real. Yet, as Wayne explains in the film, there are sometimes second acts in life that take us to new heights \u2014 without compromise. At its core, Beauty Is Embarrassing<\/i> shows what it takes for one uniquely talented, profanely hilarious, and utterly uncompromising artist to make it in America.<\/p>\n
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The Filmmaker<\/strong><\/p>\n Neil Berkeley<\/strong><\/p>\n Neil Berkeley has been working as a designer and director in film and television for over ten years. His work includes main title design for some of TV’s most popular shows and he has directed several national commercials. He has also developed main titles for documentaries including The Cool School, Johnny Cash\u2019s America, Air Guitar Nation,<\/i> and Respect Yourself: The Story of Stax Records<\/i>. Since 2009, Mr. Berkeley has operated his design-based production company, BRKLY. Beauty Is Embarrassing<\/i> is Mr. Berkeley’s first feature length documentary.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’ve seen Pee-wee’s Playhouse<\/i>, you’re already familiar with the off-kilter sensibility of artist Wayne White, an iconic auteur of the weird, the silly, and the joyfully absurd who flatly refuses to grow up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":9883,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1216],"class_list":["post-273","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-arts-and-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n