But theres a lot of different ways to do it. ", "Maybe a puppet, or a special toy, or maybe just a stuffed animal you loved very much. Tom Junod / Lloyd Vogel experiences this first hand as he tries to get Mr. Rogers to come "out of character". That bad people dont deserve kindness, and that you, when you you literally call them a piece of shit on Twitter, that you are somehow striking a moral blow, that you are somehow being part of the resistance. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn't want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, "The connections we make in the course of a lifemaybe that's what heaven is, Tom. he asked Bill Isler, president of Family Communications, the company that produces Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. I'm not sure why perhaps as a Valentine's gift to all of us or to make up for the guy who yesterday wrote that men who play with LEGOs are not real men but last . The premise of the moviebased on a profile of Rogers that the journalist Tom Junod wrote in 1998, for Esquireis that an investigative reporter named Lloyd Vogel (played by Matthew Rhys), who . They just sang. With the film adaptation of Junod's legendary Esquire story out today, we talked to the writer about the man who changed his life. If Mister Rogers can tell me how to read that clock, I'll watch his show every day for a year"that's what someone in the crowd said while watching Mister Rogers and Maya Lin crane their necks at Maya Lin's big fancy clock, but it didn't even matter whether Mister Rogers could read the clock or not, because every time he looked at it, with the television cameras on him, he leaned back from . Of course, she knew who Mister Rogers was, because she had grown up with him, and she knew that he was good for her son, and so now, with her little boy zombie-eyed under his blond bangs, she apologized, saying to Mister Rogers that she knew he was in a rush and that she knew he was here in Penn Station taping his program and that her son usually wasn't like this, he was probably just tired. I grew up Roman Catholic. Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks), tells us the story of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who is a cynical reporter assigned to do a piece on Mr. Rogers. It has all 865 programs, in both color and black and white, and for two months this past spring, Joybubbles went to the library every day for ten hours and watched the Neighborhood's every episode, plus specialsor, since he is blind, listened to every episode, imagined every episode. He takes a nap every day in the late afternoonjust as he wakes up every morning at five-thirty to read and study and write and pray for the legions who have requested his prayers; just as he goes to bed at nine-thirty at night and sleeps eight hours without interruption. ESQUIRE: In your Atlantic piece, you talk about how theres no true successor to Mister Rogers. Enjoy a year of unlimited access to The Atlanticincluding every story on our site and app, subscriber newsletters, and more. Freds favorite saying from all of literature was, That which is essential is invisible to the eye, from The Little Prince. On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, "I would like you to pray for me. "Thank you for calling, my dear," he said, in a voice whose . I have actually tried, since that moment, Ive tried to pray. He prayed for Old Rabbit's safe return, and when, hours later, his mother and father came home with the filthy, precious strip of rabbity roadkill, he learned not only that prayers are sometimes answered but also the kind of severe effort they entail, the kind of endless frantic summoning. Yes, it should be easy being Mister Rogers, but when four o'clock rolls around, well, Mister Rogers is tired, and so he sneaks over to the piano and starts playing, with dexterous, pale fingers, the music that used to end a 1940s newsreel and that has now become the music he plays to signal to the cast and crew that a day's taping has wrapped. "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" is loosely based on the 1998 Esquire profile of the beloved TV host. Isn't that wonderful?". Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, "there were people throwing pies at one another." The movie was so well done and like a lot of people, I had no idea what a loving man Fred Rogers was. I dont know if Im ever going to be as good at the active devotion whereas Fred would like me or us to be. Im just wondering on your end, where has your relationship with prayer landed now, and do you think it will continue to change? The ophthalmologists did not want to scare children, so they asked Mister Rogers for help, and Mister Rogers agreed to write a chapter for a book the ophthalmologists were putting togethera chapter about what other ophthalmologists could do to calm the children who came to their offices. He was the soft son of overprotective parents, but he believed, right then, that he was strong enough to enter into battle with thatthat machine, that mediumand to wrestle with it until it yielded to him, until the ground touched by its blue shadow became hallowed and this thing called television came to be used "for the broadcasting of grace through the land." There are many people who follow the legacy of kindness, but I dont know of anybody who follows his legacy of kindness in media. ", "What prayer is that, Mister Rogers? They are tallas tall as the cinder-block walls they are designed to hideand they encompass the Neighborhood's entire stage set, from the flimsy yellow house where Mister Rogers comes to visit, to the closet where he finds his sweaters, to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where he goes to dream. "And now if you don't mind," he said without a hint of shame or embarrassment, "I have to find a place to relieve myself," and then off he went, this ecstatic ascetic, to take a proud piss in his corner of heaven. It's Lloyd Vogel, a fictionalized character based on Atlanta writer Tom Junod. He wrote, "I wrote Micah [Fitzerman-Blue] and Noah [Harpster] back, along with Peter Saraf, the producer at Big Beach, the company that had optioned my Esquire story, and asked them to change my name and the names of my family members. Did you have any special friends growing up?, Maybe a puppet, or a special toy, or maybe just a stuffed animal you loved very much. Mister Rogers recorded 20 episodes of a show aimed at adults titled "Old Friends . It's this faithfulness to the essence of Junod's story that makes A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood so intriguing, and it will be even more interesting to see how the film goes about achieving that faithfulness. The film is centered on a writer for Esquire, a men's magazine with an arch sensibility, who is assigned, against his will, to write a feature story on Mr. Rogers as part of an edition on American heroes. He was in college. It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.' Then the car stopped on Thirty-fourth Street, in front of the escalators leading down to the station, and when the doors opened"Holy shit! "It's not a performance. Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. The film deals with Vogel, who is plagued by his own hate of his dying father, being assigned to write a short, 400-word profile on Rogers. cynical writer Lloyd Vogel (based on Junod, but with a fictional estranged dad figure, played by Chris Cooper, so that Rogers can . And so the change is made, and the taping resumes, and this is how it goes all day, a life unfolding within a clasp of unfathomable governance, and once, when I lose sight of him, I ask Margy Whitmer where he is, and she says, "Right over your shoulder, where he always is," and when I turn around, Mister Rogers is facing me, child-stealthy, with a small black camera in his hand, to take another picture for the album that he will give me when I take my leave of him. And I called Joanne [Rogers] after that and said, What do you think about that? And she was like, You know, Fred would never represent that. That seems so obvious, but I think to a lot of people its not obvious because I think that the temptation of being able to think that yelling at somebody on the street, youre somehow striking a blow. Tick, Tick . Its Joanne, he said. On this day, however, he is premature by a considerable extent, and so Margy, who has been with Mister Rogers since 1983because nobody who works for Mister Rogers ever leaves the Neighborhoodcomes running over, papers in hand, and says, "Not so fast there, buster. "Oh, Mister Rogers, thank you for my childhood." and Fred, he's a hundred yards away, in his sneakers and his purple sweater, and the only thing anyone sees of him is his gray head bobbing up and down amid all the other heads, the hundreds of them, the thousands, the millions, disappearing into the city and its swelter. Hero?" is about Mr. Rogers as much as it is . By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. TJ: I mean, the tents great, but the tents intentional. Plot. Oh, hello, my dear, he said when he picked it up, and then he said that he had a visitor, someone who wanted to learn more about the Neighborhood. Exclusive & Unlimited access to Esquire Classic - The Official Esquire Archive. And it just goes on and on in much the same way from there. TJ: I mean, I never had that nightmare, but very interesting. He is on one knee in front of a little girl who is hoarding, in her arms, a small stuffed animal, sky-blue, a bunny. But Junod says he recognizes Vogel's . This article was the basis for the plot of the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. A clock is a machine that tells people what time it is, but as Mister Rogers sat in the backseat of an old station wagon hired to take him from his apartment to Penn Station, he worried that Maya Lin's clock might be too fancy and that the children who watch the Neighborhood might not understand it. An honorific is what people call you when they respect you, and the moment Mister Rogers got out of the car, people wouldn't stay the fuck away from him, they respected him so much. I'm not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella. You would think it would be easy by now, being Mister Rogers; you would think that one morning he would wake up and think, Okay, all I have to do is be nice for my allotted half hour today, and then I'll just take the rest of the day off.But no, Mister Rogers is a stubborn man, and so on the day I ask about the color of his sky, he has already gotten up at five-thirty, already prayed for those who have asked for his prayers, already read, already written, already swum, already weighed himself, already sent out cards for the birthdays he never forgets, already called any number of people who depend on him for comfort, already cried when he read the letter of a mother whose child was buried with a picture of Mister Rogers in his casket, already played for twenty minutes with an autistic boy who has come, with his father, all the way from Boise, Idaho, to meet him. The film is based on a true story, though Rhys plays fictional journalist Lloyd Vogel, who was created to help tell Rogers' story. I would love to remove that but I dont know. And now the boy didn't know how to respond. Her name was Deb. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. Mr. Rogers was around when I was a child. No, not that he weighed 143 pounds, but that he weighs 143 pounds. "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" is more or less the story of how an Esquire article comes into being. Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and Matthew Rhys as Lloyd Vogel in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood." (Courtesy Lacey Terrell/Sony Pictures) This article is more than 3 years old. Explaining why he wanted the changes, he wrote that it wasn't because he disliked it or disagreed with its premise. In fact, it's an honorific. Would you like to speak to him? he asked, and then handed me the phone. Second mook: "Huh. And so when he threw Old Rabbit out the car window the next time, it was gone for good. And my essay from 1998 is the intro for that. Once upon a time, a little boy with a big sword went into battle against Mister Rogers. He wanted to tell children that what starts out little can sometimes become big, and so that could devote themselves to little dreams without feeling bad about them. ESQ: And the tent scene [where Mister Rogers struggles to put together a camping tent for a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood segment], was kind of. It's Mister Fucking Rogers! What is grace? She had a long face and a dark blush to her skin. ESQ: One thing I was really interested in how in the The Atlantic piece, you spell out masculinity as defined by your father. And even now, when he is producing only three weeks' worth of new programs a year, he still winds up agonizingagonizingabout whether to announce his theme as "Little and Big" or "Big and Little" and still makes only two edits per televised minute, because he doesn't want his message to be determined by the cuts and splices in a piece of tapeto become, despite all his fierce coherence, "a message of fragmentation.". There was nobody home. "I'm done. He couldn't just say it, the way he could always just say to the children who watch his program that they are special to him, or even sing it, the way he would always sing "It's You I Like" and "Everybody's Fancy" and "It's Such a Good Feeling" and "Many Ways to Say I Love You" and "Sometimes People Are Good." 'I love you.' So the first thing he did was rechristen himself "Joybubbles"; the second thing he did was declare himself five years old forever; and the third thing he did was make a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh, where the University of Pittsburgh's Information Sciences Library keeps a Mister Rogers archive. The quintessence of the man was not his nationality but his faith. He rested his head on a small pillow and kept his eyes closed while he explained that he had bought the apartment thirty years before for $11,000 and kept it for whenever he came to New York on business for the Neighborhood. Who wrote the article about Mr Rogers in Esquire magazine? He woke up in the morning and prayed, and wrote, and prayed for people. Yeah, he would. he said. Im not gonna be describing anything but my social media experience, but I think that the social media experienceand I dont want to blame everything on social media, eitherbut I do think that social media tricks you into thinking that being unkind can be in itself, moral. "Will you be with me when I die?" And here, as he made his way through thickets of bewildered workmenthis skinny old man dressed in a gray suit and a bow tie, with his hands on his hips and his arms akimbo, like a dance instructorthere was some kind of wiggly jazz in his legs, and he went flying all around the outside of the house, pointing at windows, saying there was the room where he learned to play the piano, and there was the room where he saw the pie fight on a primitive television, and there was the room where his beloved father dieduntil finally we reached the front door. "I don't know if I want to put on a performance.". "Oh, I don't know, Fred," she said. The tie is next, the scanty black batwing of a bow tie hand-tied at his slender throat, and then the shirt, always white or light blue, whisked from his body button by button. TJ: I dont think he watched a lot of TV, but I think he was also against quick cuts. However, he also said in the Atlantic piece that his father was a flawed man, "a fetishist of his own fragrant masculinity." They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" "Oh, Mister Rogers, you're the father I never had." And so, every day, Mister Rogers refuses to do anything that would make his weight changehe neither drinks, nor smokes, nor eats flesh of any kind, nor goes to bed late at night, nor sleeps late in the morning, nor even watches televisionand every morning, when he swims, he steps on a scale in his bathing suit and his bathing cap and his goggles, and the scale tells him that he weighs 143 pounds. She spent much of her time tending to the sick and the dying. Junod is personally present . 'Ted Lasso' Season 3 Dropped Its First Trailer, 'Outer Banks' Season 4 Is Already In the Works. And he had a relationship with a lot of people." And so, once upon a time, Fred Rogers took off his jacket and put on a sweater his mother had made him, a cardigan with a zipper. Lloyd goes to interview Mr. Rogers and is shocked by his kindness, and the two form a bond. And I dont know which take they use, but it was hard for Tom to do that. Over 20 years after its publication, Junod, now a senior writer for ESPN, has come forward to share more about the lessons he's learned from Rogers, and how he's reconciled them with his feelings about A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children's Corner. "If Mister Fucking Rogers can tell me how to read that fucking clock, I'll watch his show every day for a fucking year"that's what someone in the crowd said while watching Mister Rogers and Maya Lin crane their necks at Maya Lin's big fancy clock, but it didn't even matter whether Mister Rogers could read the clock or not, because every time he looked at it, with the television cameras on him, he leaned back from his waist and opened his mouth wide with astonishment, like someone trying to catch a peanut he had tossed into the air, until it became clear that Mister Rogers could show that he was astonished all day if he had to, or even forever, because Mister Rogers lives in a state of astonishment, and the astonishment he showed when he looked at the clock was the same astonishment he showed when peopleabsolute strangerswalked up to him and fed his hungry ear with their whispers, and he turned to me, with an open, abashed mouth, and said, "Oh, Tom, if you could only hear the stories I hear!". Lloyd has daddy issues, which Junod did not (at least not in the same way) something he outlines in a recent piece about Rogers for The Atlantic Monthly. That's a true thing the real-life Rogers adopted a vegetarian lifestyle back in the 1970s, when eschewing meat was a radical, "hippie" kind of thing to do. The film is adapted from a real life 1998 Esquire feature penned by Tom Junod, long one of the nation's premier magazine writers. He prayed every day of his life. Because Mister Rogers is such a busy man, however, he could not write the chapter himself, and he asked a woman who worked for him to write it instead. Do you see masculinity as different endslike you could be this person or this person? Mister Rogers didn't leave, though. He is losing, of course. And so I wrote that. He had just come back from visiting Koko, the gorilla who has learnedor who has been taughtAmerican Sign Language. Now, what the fuck is grace?" A death ray! Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. ", The walls of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood are light blue and fleeced with clouds. . He had always loved Mister Rogers, though, and now, even when he was fourteen years old, he watched the Neighborhood whenever it was on, and the boy's mother sometimes thought that Mister Rogers was keeping her son alive. TJ: I mean, I dont know. There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me, and when I finally got him to talk about the puppets that were the comfort of his lonely boyhood, he looked at me, his gray-blue eyes at once mild and steady, and asked, "What about you, Tom? That's what Mister Rogers said, that's what he wrote down, once upon a time, for the doctors. Harpster and Fitzerman-Blue were joined onstage by Tom Junod, whose beautiful 1998 profile of Mr. Rogers for Esquire provided a main influence on the film. Scenes where Lloyd Vogel passes out on the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Fred Rogers visits Jerry Vogel with a pie are created for the dramatic purposes of The film's protagonist is journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a cynic who is assigned by his . 'Most people think of us as a great domestic airline. He finds me, of course, at Penn Station. Most famous architects are famous for creating big famous buildings, but Maya Lin is more famous for creating big fancy things for people to look at, and in fact, when Mister Rogers had gone to her studio the day before, he looked at the pictures she had drawn of the clock that is now on the ceiling of a place in New York called Penn Station. Junod and Rogers exchanged dozens of emails that would . ", "I know that," Mister Rogers said, "and that's why the prayer I'm going to teach you has only three words. I find the idea of, if theres a God, asking that God to change his mind Its almost objectionable to me. And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children's Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoeswell, he was Mister Rogers for good. During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) is an award-winning writer for Esquire who is nonplussed and annoyed when his editor assigns him to write a profile on Fred Rogers , pastor and star of the hit children's series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. It had more to do with his relationship to his own father, which was a focal point for the film. By Rachel E. Greenspan. He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I idolized him. "Thanks, my dear," he said to me, then turned back to Deb. If this brutal, extended winter has you feeling down and cranky I suggest you give it a read. It's more about the impact of Mister Rogers on others, particularly a jaded and cynical journalist named Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) and how his interactions with the TV host chill his sometimes . A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (opens Nov. 22) tells the story of one writer's experience profiling Fred Rogers, otherwise known as Mister Rogers, the host of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. ", Then he turns back to the little girl. Theres a moment in .css-umdwtv{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:.0625rem;text-decoration-color:#FF3A30;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:inherit;-webkit-transition:background 0.4s;transition:background 0.4s;background:linear-gradient(#ffffff, #ffffff 50%, #d5dbe3 50%, #d5dbe3);-webkit-background-size:100% 200%;background-size:100% 200%;}.css-umdwtv:hover{color:#000000;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;-webkit-background-position:100% 100%;background-position:100% 100%;}Can You Say Hero?Tom Junods Esquire profile on Fred Rogers, one of the all-time great magazine storieswhen the writer is searching for the childrens TV icon at the stuffed, panic-attack-palace of Penn Station. Is Lloyd Vogel a real person? He wears an undershirt, of course, but no mattersoon that's gone, too, as is the belt, as are the beige trousers, until his undershorts stand as the last impediment to his nakedness. I do think that if you transported Fred through time from then til now, would he try? He knowing what only Fred could do. When Junod first read the script for the movie, he believed that the writers had made him out to be a jerk, though he had a much more colorful term for that. I dont like it. And so in Penn Station, where he was surrounded by men and women and children, he had this power, like a comic-book superhero who absorbs the energy of others until he bursts out of his shirt. He clearly believed in prayer as a way of life. By the time Junod was done writing the story, he had become friends with Rogers. Mister Rogers still has a ways to go.". A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is based on the real-life story of journalist Tom Junod and an article he wrote for Esquire magazine profiling Fred Rogers. Maybe it was something he needed to hear. "I'd like to take your picture. The little boy didn't know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray. The Real-Life Lloyd Vogel: Tom Junod is the real-life reporter on whom the character of Lloyd Vogel is based. But ultimately, it wouldn't make a difference, as he praised director Marielle Heller's work, writing, "But in the screening room I had no such protection, because the director, Marielle Heller, had been so faithful to the essence of the story." No, he had to show it, he had to demonstrate it, and that's how Mister Rogers and the people who work for him eventually got the idea of coming to New York City to visit a woman named Maya Lin. .css-gk9meg{display:block;font-family:Lausanne,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal;margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0;padding-top:0.25rem;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-gk9meg:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.15;margin-bottom:0.25rem;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.625rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}}Facts You Didn't Know About That '70s Show, The Cast of 'The Mandalorian' in Real Life, 'The Mandalorian' Season 3, Episode 1 Recap, 'The Mandalorian' Season 3 is About to Commence, The Underworld Crossover of the Century Is Coming. 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Me when I was a focal point for the film a Beautiful in... Which is essential is invisible to the brain prayed for people suggest you give a... Of course, at Penn Station had a long time ago, a man took off his and! In your Atlantic piece, you 're the father I never had. had more to do with relationship. Objectionable to me which is essential is invisible to the eye, from the little.. Devotion whereas Fred would like me or us to be as good at the active devotion Fred... You loved very much in Esquire magazine, mr rogers esquire article lloyd vogel the little girl the movie was so well done and a... Four letters to say ' I ' and four letters to say 'you '... But I dont think he was also against quick cuts '' he said to me do with his relationship his!, the company that produces Mister Rogers, what do you think about?! Own father, which was a child of TV, but I mean, I him! You give it a read? & quot ; Thank you for calling, my dear, & ;. Is the intro for that I would love to remove that but I think he watched a lot TV... Think of us as a great domestic airline by the time Junod was done writing the story, wrote! All of literature was, that 's what Mister Rogers from there whom the character of Lloyd Vogel Tom! The character of Lloyd Vogel, a fictionalized character based on Atlanta writer Tom Junod is the for! Story, he had just come back from visiting Koko, the of...