He moved his hand from her wrist to her palm and extended his other hand to me. As for Mister Rogers himselfwell, he doesn't look at the story in the same way that the boy did or that I did. David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. "Bunny Wunny," she says. Lloyd goes to interview Mr. Rogers and is shocked by his kindness, and the two form a bond. Once upon a time, a little boy with a big sword went into battle against Mister Rogers. Koko weighed 280 pounds because she is a gorilla, and Mister Rogers weighed 143 pounds because he has weighed 143 pounds as long as he has been Mister Rogers, because once upon a time, around thirty-one years ago, Mister Rogers stepped on a scale, and the scale told him that Mister Rogers weighs 143 pounds. "No!" What's more, it's based on a true story, with a few of the names changed. Tom Hanks channels Mister Rogers in a movie about how the legendary kids' TV host saves a magazine writer, and could maybe save all of us. This was not a bad thing, however, because he was in New York, and in New York it's not an insult to be called Mister Fucking Anything. It was the first time I had read the story in a really long time. This article was the basis for the plot of the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. And he had a relationship with a lot of people." Youll probably need an infusion of something like this to restore your faith in humanity after an overload of Frank Underwood. 85+ Years of outstanding fiction from world-renowned authors. I just try to ask for some sort of affirmation, you know? While the film does look at the burgeoning friendship between Rogers (Tom Hanks) and writer Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), it focuses primarily on Vogel's personal life and how much it has been impacted by this newfound friendship. "Oh, I don't know, Fred," she said. 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. ESQ: So my relationship with prayer has ebbed and flowed my entire life. Tom Hanks plays Fred Rogers, the minister who became a children's TV host then beacon of hope for a struggling society, and also the person who saves Lloyd. I'm glad I know that. he asked Bill Isler, president of Family Communications, the company that produces Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I idolized him. Notes. Read it all when you have time, especially if youre binging on House of Cards this weekend. TJ: I mean, I dont know. ", "Old Rabbit. If we wanted to go into the house, we should have called first. 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. That was on fire, right? I n early 1998, Tom Junod received an assignment that was outside his wheelhouse. At first, I chalked this up to some Neighborhood of Make-Believe voodoo energy, but now I have a legit answer. 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. It would not be easy, nofor in order to win such a battle, he would have to forbid himself the privilege of stopping, and whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity. He looked very little in the backseat of the car. Your prayers are just wonderful." Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: "Well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.". Would you do something for me?" 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." "Oh, I just knew that whenever you see a little boy carrying something like that, it means that he wants to show people that he's strong on the outside. And the fact that Im talking to you at a fashion show with a turtleneck on, you know, the irony is not lost on me. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. 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. He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. At work the next day, Lloyd plays off his shiner as the result of a softball injury and very reluctantly takes a 400-word profile of Mr. Rogers assigned by his editor at Esquire in an effort to . Junod asked the filmmakers to stark his trail name lower the names of urgent family members, which exactly how page became Lloyd Vogel in your movie. 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. Bill had driven us there, and now, sitting behind the wheel of his red Grand Cherokee, he was full of remonstrance. 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. Fred Rogers loved her very much, and so, out of nowhere, he smiled and put his hand over hers. Rogers as a peasant to explaining the world to remove son. 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. I bring up the Pam Bondi thing in the The Atlantic piecewhere they actually use Fred to hound somebody. For my father, everything that was important was visible to the eye. There are some stories we can analyze all we want, but sometimes there are stories in which, no matter how much we pick them apart, what's on the surface for us to appreciate is more . We hate that.' Advertisement His editor at Esquire asked him to profile Fred Rogers, the beloved television personality and Presbyterian minister. Freds favorite saying from all of literature was, That which is essential is invisible to the eye, from The Little Prince. ESQ: I wanted to ask you about that nightmare scene [where Lloyd Vogel, the character loosely based on Junod, dreams that he's a character in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe]. His name was Fred Rogers. And so that's what I told him. But when I did my first draft for the The Atlantic, I wrote that I still dont know what Fred wants from me, or wants from us. By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. Reading This 1998 Esquire Profile Of Mr. Rogers Will Feed Your Hungry Soul, GloRilla, Ice Spice, And The Carefree Black Girl Backlash, Karol G Tells Us About Her Most Personal Album Yet, Maana Ser Bonito, And Collaborating With Shakira, The Rundown: Between Cocaine Bears And Maple Syrup Heists, Margo Martindale Is Absolutely Thriving In 2023. By the time Junod was done writing the story, he had become friends with Rogers. He was born with cerebral palsy. Do you see masculinity as different endslike you could be this person or this person? "Roy Rogers is done. If this brutal, extended winter has you feeling down and cranky I suggest you give it a read. TJ: Yeah, they have been. It was one of those swords that really isn't a sword at all; it was a big plastic contraption with lights and sound effects, and it was the kind of sword used in defense of the universe by the heroes of the television shows that the little boy liked to watch. 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. esquire article. He was in college. 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. He wanted us to pray. Yeah. Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) probes the state-of-mind of his interviewer, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) Somehow, the loss of Mr. Rogers, a thoroughly decent man who preached a gospel of kindness to generations of children, aches much more in a social and political landscape awash in anger and pain (and "leadership" that sets that tone). ", The walls of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood are light blue and fleeced with clouds. Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. My personal favorite piece of the story: Junod describes meeting Mr. Rogers in person for the first time, THE FIRST TIME I CALLED MISTER ROGERS on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. His grandfather, his grandmother, his uncles, his aunts, his father-in-law and mother-in-law, even his family's servantshe went to each grave, and spoke their names, and told their stories, until finally I headed back down to the Jeep and turned back around to see Mister Rogers standing high on a green dell, smiling among the stones. He was with his producer, Margy Whitmer. He notes, "I think that my character is not just me. "he turned into Mister Fucking Rogers. He is not speaking of the little girl. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" he asked, and then handed me the phone. So far, its worked pretty well. We were heading back to his apartment in a taxi when I asked him what he had said. ", "Oh, please, sister," Mister Rogers says. he asked. The shootings took place in West Paducah, Kentucky, and when Mister Rogers heard about them, he said, "Oh, wouldn't the world be a different place if he had said, 'I'm going to do something really little tomorrow,'" and he decided to dedicate a week of the Neighborhood to the theme "Little and Big." 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. ESQ: One thing I was really interested in how in the The Atlantic piece, you spell out masculinity as defined by your father. Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures. "Fred, they're not home. He was so nervous, in fact, that when Mister Rogers did visit, he got mad at himself and began hating himself and hitting himself, and his mother had to take him to another room and talk to him. Oh, and I'll bet the two of you were together since he was a very young rabbit. In actuality, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood's Vogel is journalist Tom Junod, who profiled Rogers for Esquire in his 1998 piece "Can You SayHero?" 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. 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. 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? He was a child, once, too, and so one day I asked him if I could go with him back to Latrobe. During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . Lloyd decides to treat the profile as an investigation to find out if Mr. Rogers is just a character for the . Every timeless feature, profile, interview, novella - even the ads! He was leading me to that moment of prayer that whole time that I was with him. Did you have any special friends growing up? I had never prayed like that before, ever. he says when I approach the two of them. 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. I'll let y'all know. Mister Rogers still has a ways to go.". And so when he threw Old Rabbit out the car window the next time, it was gone for good. Mr. Rogers explains that Lloyd has . She had curls in her hair and stars at the centers of her eyes. Everything You Need To Know About 'Mean Girls: The Musical', Amanda Seyfried Has Made Her Pick For Sophies Biological Dad In 'Mamma Mia', Shakira & Karol G's "TQG" Music Video Uses A Classic '90s Movie To Make A Point, 'Art Attack' Neil Buchanan's Latest Gig Is A Far Cry From The CITV Show, Get Even More From Bustle Sign Up For The Newsletter. Hero?" is about Mr. Rogers as much as it is . 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. . And so it was; the asphalt ended, and then we began bouncing over a road of old blond bricks, until even that road ended, and we were parked in front of the place where Mister Rogers is to be buried. We make so many connections here on earth. "Oh, Mister Rogers, would you please just hug me?" After a while, Margy just rolled her eyes and gave up, because it's always like this with Mister Rogers, because the thing that people don't understand about him is that he's greedy for thisgreedy for the grace that people offer him. 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.While the film does look at the burgeoning friendship between Rogers (Tom Hanks) and writer Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), it focuses primarily on Vogel's personal life and how much it has been . Energy, but now I have a legit answer Joanne [ Rogers ] after and... 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