August 1985.
It’s the dog days of summer, during the dog days of the most bodacious decade.
“Back to the Future” owns the box office, spending its first three weeks after its July 3 release as the No. 1 movie in America before slipping to second, only to begin another eight weeks in the top spot after that.
But there’s an actor in another Michael J. Fox flick who hits it big that August with two movies.
On Aug. 9, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” came out, with Mark Holton playing Francis, the man-child who steals Pee-wee Herman’s bike, sparking Pee-wee’s hilariously surreal road trip to find it. Two weeks later, on Aug. 23, “Teen Wolf,” a comedy with Fox portraying an average teen who must come to terms with the fact he’s a werewolf, was released. Holton played Chubby, one of the teammates on his high school basketball team.
Holton quickly realized that “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” was going to be a smash when he went to the film’s premiere — which aired on MTV — at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, an event that featured his own interactions with a cavalcade of ‘80s stars, including Rodney Dangerfield, Alice Cooper, Mr. T and David Lee Roth.
“That was a crazy, crazy night for me because, first of all, I thought, ‘This film has legs. This is great,’” he tells TODAY.com in a phone interview. “And then just even back then, before the internet, with just television and radio, it was just carpet-bombed with ads.”
“That movie got huge laughs. It was a really electrifying screening,” Paul Reubens, who created and played the Pee-wee character, said in the 2025 HBO documentary “Pee-wee as Himself.”
The movie reportedly cost between $6 million and $7 million to make and would go on to earn $40 million, the kind of success no one saw coming.
“What it was called at the time was a ‘sleeper hit,’ which meant that it was a surprise to people, including Warner Bros., that people liked it. And people really liked it,” said Reubens, who died in 2023.
Moviegoers certainly really liked Francis, a role Holton says he got after he did a reading of the famous “I know you are, but what am I” scene with Reubens.
“By the time I made it back to my apartment and checked my machine, my agent said, ‘Call us,’” he recalls. “I call them, and they’d already booked me on the film. I went, ‘Really? Well, OK, when do we start?’ It was just kind of magic right from the start, and here we are, 40 years later, the magic just keeps coming.”
The film turned the Pee-wee Herman character into a full-blown sensation, ushering in what Reubens called in the HBO documentary “Pee-wee mania.”
“There wasn’t a moment in the ‘80s that wasn’t really super cool to be me,” Reubens said.
Holton speaks well of the experience of making the movie, calling the production “a well-oiled machine.” He also gushes about “Teen Wolf” and what it was like working with Fox, who helped round out Holton’s character.
“He was a lot of fun, just a hoot and a half,” he says of Fox.
“Mike and I just hit it off so much that he started making suggestions,” he adds. “‘Well, why don’t we have Chubby do this, Chubby do that?’ And all of a sudden, Chubby kind of morphed into the player that was the total underdog with the hook shots and all that stuff. And I absolutely loved it. And then by the end of the film, they’re lifting me on top of their arms and carrying me off the court. So it was pretty trippy.”
“Teen Wolf” has carved its own fan base over the years among those who saw it in theaters or on countless airings on cable — heck, even LeBron James has chimed in about it. It spawned a sequel (starring Jason Bateman) and a Saturday morning cartoon and was adapted into MTV’s much darker dramatic series in 2011, which itself would lead to a 2023 movie on Paramount+.
“Teen Wolf” seemed like a footnote ahead of its release, but Holton was excited for it after Fox became a huge star in “Back to the Future,” generating further interest in “Teen Wolf.”
“I figure, ‘Well, this is going to keep it riding the coattails of this film and Michael J. Fox’s megastardom.’ Yeah, it was encouraging to have the wind of sails when it hit your back, so to speak,” he says.
When it comes to “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and “Teen Wolf,” Holton doesn’t prefer one over the other — “I enjoy them for different reasons,” he says — but both roles mean something to him.
“I couldn’t pick a winner looking back in hindsight. They were both wonderful experiences,” he says about the films.
The summer of 1985 helped shape the course of Holton’s career. He would go on to have a small but memorable role in 1988’s “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!” and star alongside an unknown actor named Jennifer Aniston in the 1993 cult classic “Leprechaun.”
After “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and “Teen Wolf” came out, he was on his way.
“It was just kind of like back to the grindstone of beating on doors and dealing with rejection, but a lot farther along — I didn’t realize it at the time — than I was before that summer,” he says.
The public has certainly not forgotten Holton. He appears at conventions and is amazed at the response he has gotten from fans.
“I had no idea the love waiting for me out there. The stories, people walking up and saying, ‘During COVID, this film helped me keep my sanity. I would watch it every day, and it was the only thing, the bright spot in my life for months,’” he says.
“You meet people, they come up and say, ‘Can I have a hug?’ ‘Well, yeah, come here. You need a hug?’ And they’ll say, ‘My dad just passed away,’ or something like that. So, yeah, I have a real connection to the people that come in,” he adds.
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