Lloyd has been tasked with profiling Fred Rogers for Esquire, an unusual assignment that he approaches with great reluctance and even resentment. ", "I know that," Mister Rogers said, "and that's why the prayer I'm going to teach you has only three words. Maybe it was something he needed to hear. 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. He allowed me to choose between two visions of manhood, a choice I suspect Ill have to continue making for the rest of my life, which is why Im writing my book and which is why I asked the producers of the movie to change the names.". While Junod wrote that he learned the concepts of forgiveness and . TJ: I mean, the tents great, but the tents intentional. ", "Did your special friend have a name, Tom? "I imagine they're blue.". He would grow up to become a great prayer, this little boy, but only intermittently, only fitfully, praying only when fear and desperation drove him to it, and the night he threw Old Rabbit into the darkness was the night that set the pattern, the night that taught him how. By Rachel E. Greenspan. ESQUIRE: In your Atlantic piece, you talk about how theres no true successor to Mister Rogers. 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! ESQ: Thats where Im at right now. "I don't know if I want to put on a performance.". In fact, when the little boy grew up to be a teenager, he would get so mad at himself that he would hit himself, hard, with his own fists and tell his mother, on the computer he used for a mouth, that he didn't want to live anymore, for he was sure that God didn't like what was inside him any more than he did. No, Mister Rogers was not a saint. But theres a lot of different ways to do it. 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. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. 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. And so that's what I told him. We may earn a commission from these links. His name was Fred Rogers. As Joanne Rogers tells Lloyd Vogel in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, he was loathe to hurt even animals. "Hmmm," Mister Rogers said, "that's a strange ad. Im just wondering on your end, where has your relationship with prayer landed now, and do you think it will continue to change? 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. However, on insistence to keep an open mind, he came to realize that the . I dont like it. 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 story and have no baring on . LloydRead More Based on the 1998 Esquire article, "Can You SayHero?" by award-winning journalist Tom Junod, the movie illustrates how, during the process of interviewing Mr. Rogers for a "puff piece," the writer (re-named in the movie as Lloyd Vogel, and played by Matthew Rhys) undergoes a personal transformation. We swung up to the fashion show venue, where I watched Junod practice his strut to untz-untz-untz beats and avoid a janky step at the start of the runway. And so I wrote that. 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. In the film, actor Matthew Rhys plays central character Lloyd Vogel, a journalist who's writing a profile on the legendary creator of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." Get instant access to 85+ years of Esquire. And it just goes on and on in much the same way from there. In fact, it's an honorific. ESQ: And the tent scene [where Mister Rogers struggles to put together a camping tent for a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood segment], was kind of. A Beautiful Day in the . He was a child, once, too, and so one day I asked him if I could go with him back to Latrobe. And so what I try to pray really is that I represent his message accurately and wholeheartedly. I mean, to be honest with you, Ive been going and going in front of a crowd [suddenly, a lightbulb in Junods eyeview explodes in flames] Woah! . He can't define it. "Thank you for calling, my dear," he said, in a voice whose . In 2011 Michelle . Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, "there were people throwing pies at one another." After I watched the walkthroughand was somehow briefly enlisted in fashion-show-planning service as the only idle body in sightwe sat down on a couch in the middle of all the swirling fashion-show-planners, and talked about Fred Rogers, what he left behind, and what we do now. Lloyd is married, has . 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. Welcome, Tom, he said with a slight bow, and bade me follow him inside, where he lay downno, stretched out, as though he had known me all his lifeon a couch upholstered with gold velveteen. "Can I take your picture, Tom?" He was a kind man who made it a point to practice kindness to a vast audience, person by person. It's not a good word. That was on fire, right? Your prayers are just wonderful." TJ: Well, I think its always changed, just like yours that way. In your eyes, whats the reason for the lack of action? He finds me, of course, at Penn Station. Would you lead us in prayer? Junod and Rogers exchanged dozens of emails that would . It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy's brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as "Young Rabbit," or even "Rabbit"; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be. If somebody had said five years ago, that I was going to be spending the months in October and November 2019 sort of speaking for Fred Rogersyeah, right. Can I take your picture, Tom? he asked. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?. He was sitting on a couch, under a framed rendering of the Greek word for grace and a biblical phrase written in Hebrew that means "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine." And he had a relationship with a lot of people." It's interesting because the journalist, named Lloyd Vogel in the movie, is introduced as a harsh cynic who's notorious for shredding the character of the people he writes about. I wanted to be him." ", Deb stiffened for a second, and she let out a breath, and her color got deeper. 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. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electrocultureand yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I idolized him. . I am ashamed to say it, but I was too cool at the time for Mr. Rogers. and turned the clattering train into a single soft, runaway choir. 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. I said, 'Do you know that you're strong on the inside, too?' Three died, and they were still children, almost. And when I read that, I realized that what I was looking for was really unavoidable and obvious. 'Ted Lasso' Season 3 Dropped Its First Trailer, 'Outer Banks' Season 4 Is Already In the Works. "Will you be with me when I die?" 'I love you.' Rogers as a peasant to explaining the world to remove son. 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. A death ray! Neighborhood," about the TV star Fred Rogers. That's cool. She worked very hard at writing the chapter, until one day she showed what she had written to Mister Rogers, who read it and crossed it all out and wrote a sentence addressed directly to the doctors who would be reading it: "You were a child once, too.". Mister Rogers spots him first, naturally, amidst the swarm of New Yorkers, about the five-hundredth happy coincidence in a life full of them. She had curls in her hair and stars at the centers of her eyes. I mean, I find prayer somewhat problematic. 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. Yeah, he would. 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. 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. Thats as far as I want to go, you know? "Roy Rogers is done. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. 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 . That was a challenge. 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. You know that they shot it with like the original cameras. "Bunny Wunny," she says. Mister Rogers didn't leave, though. Does it mean anything? And so we went to the graveyard. The Real-Life Lloyd Vogel: Tom Junod is the real-life reporter on whom the character of Lloyd Vogel is based. "It's not a performance. This boy had a very bad case of cerebral palsy, and when he was still a little boy, some of the people entrusted to take care of him took advantage of him instead and did things to him that made him think that he was a very bad little boy, because only a bad little boy would have to live with the things he had to live with. 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. Here are 20 of my favorites. It wasnt like Fred was just a kind man who worked at the local food bank. 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. 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." Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), an Esquire journalist known for his jarring exposs but is secretive about his childhood, is the film's protagonist. 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. And a lot of times conversations go to places that I dont expect them to go. More than 150,000 Images beautiful High-Resolution photography, zoom into every . The character of the writer in the movie, Lloyd Vogel, is not amused. The spirit of Mister Rogers counseled her to forgive the insults, and after she told me her story in the morning, I called Fred. Hes obviously having trouble zipping up his sweater, its not easy for him, and I know that it took like many, many takes to do that. Now he was stepping in front of the camera as Mister Rogers, and he wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat. There are many people who follow the legacy of kindness, but I dont know of anybody who follows his legacy of kindness in media. He was born with cerebral palsy. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?". This is a man who loves the simplifying force of definitions, and yet all he knows of grace is how he gets it; all he knows is that he gets it from God, through man. 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. Lloyd decides to treat the profile as an investigation to find out if Mr. Rogers is just a character for the . It is inspired by a 1998 Esquire article about Rogers by Tom . I like to take pictures of all my new friends, so that I can show them to Joanne." And then, in the dark room, there was a wallop of white light, and Mister Rogers disappeared behind it. When he reaches the street, he looks right at the lens, as he always does, and says, speaking of the Neighborhood, "Let's go back to my place," and then makes a right turn toward Seventh Avenue, except that this time he just keeps going, and suddenly Margy Whitmer is saying, "Where is Fred? I said sure, hung up, and realized I didnt exactly catch where in Bryant Parkanother New York capital of constant, nightmarish pedestrian overflow. 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]. I grew up Roman Catholic. Isn't that wonderful?". They are boxers, egg-colored, and to rid himself of them he bends at the waist, and stands on one leg, and hops, and lifts one knee toward his chest and then the other and then Mister Rogers has no clothes on. This content is imported from youTube. ESQ: And then by Mister Rogers. He knowing what only Fred could do. He looked very little in the backseat of the car. Fred Rogers, whose gentle . Will you pray for me?" 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. The old navy-blue sport jacket comes off first, then the dress shoes, except that now there is not the famous sweater or the famous sneakers to replace them, and so after the shoes he's on to the dark socks, peeling them off and showing the blanched skin of his narrow feet. Junod also appeared in the critically acclaimed documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? What is grace? She was 92. 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. In trying to strip away Mr. Rogers . Junod is personally present . Her name was Deb. His hand was warm, hers was cool, and we bowed our heads, and closed our eyes, and I heard Deb's voice calling out for the grace of God. Hero?" is about Mr. Rogers as much as it is . Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. The little boy with the big sword did not watch Mister Rogers. [Junod gets up, alerts others to the now-smoking lightbulb, and returns with potato chips to share.]. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. An ophthalmologist is a doctor who takes care of the eyes. Junod had hoped the changes would bring protection, as he wrote, "I had counted on the plots many departures from my life to insulate me from the emotional effect of seeing some version of myself up there." Ive had people say, I know a lot of people who are really kind, but theyre just not media people, so no one knows about their kindness. I mean, the point is that Fred was a media person, and he did have a platform, and he spoke to an extremely large audience that he made into an even larger audience. Fred" But Mister Rogers was out of the car, with his camera in his hand and his legs moving so fast that the material of his gray suit pants furled and unfurled around both of his skinny legs, like flags exploding in a breeze. TJ: You can get into all sorts of weird head-trips about prayer and its purpose. February 14, 2014. ESQ: So my relationship with prayer has ebbed and flowed my entire life. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a . 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. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Tom Junod / Lloyd Vogel experiences this first hand as he tries to get Mr. Rogers to come "out of character". "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. Exclusive & Unlimited access to Esquire Classic - The Official Esquire Archive. Then he looked at me and smiled. "Do you think we can go in?" This article was originally published in the November 1998 issue. 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