Paul Reubens has been teasing the coming of a new Pee-Wee Herman movie for ages. Every year there is some new piece of news about an imminent production. The trouble is, the rumor mill has ground on this one for so long that it’s in danger of joining the ranks of Guns ’n Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” — talked about for 15 years, then failing to live up to the expectations it cast.

Reportedly, Reubens approached Tim Burton, who did the original Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and was turned down.

The latest news is that the Pee-Wee project is in the hands of Judd Apatow and a script has been written by Paul Reubens and Paul Rust. But where things go from there is still up in the air.

IMDB does not even list such a project as in the works for Reubens, Apatow, or Rust.

Further complicating matters in getting to the bottom of industry news about a new Pee-Wee Herman project is that Paul Reubens admits to outright lying in interviews on the subject. Back in 2007, he teased about a Pee-Wee movie, but later acknowledged that he made the whole thing up. He told Jimmy Kimmel:

“Well, here’s the thing. I totally, during interviews, a lot of the time, lie. I make stuff up. The first time it ever happened, someone said ‘What are you doing next?’ And I said, ‘I’m building Pee-Wee Land.’ And it got printed and I started getting phone calls from investors. I made up on your show, and in a couple of other interviews, I was doing a Pee-Wee movie. So now everyone’s going, ‘When’s the movie coming out?’ And there’s isn’t a movie. It’s a little bit awkward.”

One thing that is sure is that Ruebens is playing a non-Pee-Wee character in the upcoming season of The Blacklist, starring James Spader. Word is that Reubens will play “a dapper, finicky ‘muscle’ who handles delicate situations in the criminal underworld.”