And thats how I became Lloyd Vogel." November 22, 2019 10:24 AM EST. I mean, he's sort of a stand-in for all of the people that Fred Rogers had a relationship with. Fred never stopped looking at her or let go of her hand. Perhaps some of the answers rest in the New Testament's Fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Everything we can't stop loving . I had never prayed like that before, ever. You were a child once, too. Second mook: "Huh. However, on insistence to keep an open mind, he came to realize that the . Margy couldn't stop them, and she couldn't stop him. He prayed every day of his life. 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. That was a challenge. Browse featured articles, preview selected issue contents, and more. I mean, one of the great surprises of my life is doing this. 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. I took the phone and spoke to a womanhis wife, the mother of his two sonswhose voice was hearty and almost whooping in its forthrightness and who spoke to me as though she had known me for a long time and was making the effort to keep up the acquaintance. When he was your age, he had a rabbit, too, and he loved it very much. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children's Corner. I closed the door and sat back down. Here's what readers learned about Mister Rogers when the piece debuted. I had always been a great prayer, a powerful one, but only fitfully, only out of guilt, only when fear and desperation drove me to itand it hit me, right then, with my eyes closed, that this was the moment Fred RogersMister Rogershad been leading me to from the moment he answered the door of his apartment in his bathrobe and asked me about Old Rabbit. Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. And he had a relationship with a lot of people." Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are.Ten seconds of silence." I just try to ask for some sort of affirmation, you know? If they can hate something like that, you wonder how easy it would be for them to hate something more important." ESQUIRE: In your Atlantic piece, you talk about how theres no true successor to Mister Rogers. The boy was thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for something like that, ever. ", "Did your special friend have a name, Tom? Directed by 40-year old director Marielle Heller, the movie stars Tom Hanks, already known for his kindness, as Fred Rogers, and Matthew Rhys as Lloyd Vogel. His editor at Esquire asked him to profile Fred Rogers, the beloved television personality and Presbyterian minister. Oh, Margy Whitmer tried to keep people away from him, tried to tell people that if they gave her their names and addresses, Mister Rogers would send them an autographed picture, but every time she turned around, there was Mister Rogers putting his arms around someone, or wiping the tears off someone's cheek, or passing around the picture of someone's child, or getting on his knees to talk to a child. There was nobody home. Maybe it was something he needed to hear. 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. "Can I take your picture, Tom?" Did you have any special friends growing up? Or do you take elements of what you see of the best men in your life, and try and put it together into one person? And for me going out and talking about it has been a great experience for me. The Real-Life Lloyd Vogel: Tom Junod is the real-life reporter on whom the character of Lloyd Vogel is based. I just met Mister Rogersthis is definitely my lucky day." ESQ: Have the past two months been fulfilling for you? he asked, and then handed me the phone. It's just a meeting of friends," he said. His name was Fred Rogers. And it just goes on and on in much the same way from there. 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. We hate that.' Joanne Rogers, the widow of Fred Rogers of TV's "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and an accomplished pianist, died Thursday. As of November 2019, he is a writer . There are many people who follow the legacy of kindness, but I dont know of anybody who follows his legacy of kindness in media. We were heading back to his apartment in a taxi when I asked him what he had said. Fred Rogers loved her very much, and so, out of nowhere, he smiled and put his hand over hers. Let's change it to 'bring the dog home.'" Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. "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. Will you pray for me?" For my father, everything that was important was visible to the eye. Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. The film is adapted from a real life 1998 Esquire feature penned by Tom Junod, long one of the nation's premier magazine writers. Who wrote the article about Mr Rogers in Esquire magazine? Junod is also noted for his Esquire profile of Fred Rogers. In 1998, Rogers strikes a friendship with Lloyd Vogel, a self-absorbed, embittered journalist who is assigned to interview him for the magazine Esquire. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (opens Nov. 22) tells the story of one writer's experience profiling Fred Rogers . Theyre polar opposites. Tom Junod / Lloyd Vogel experiences this first hand as he tries to get Mr. Rogers to come "out of character". 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. The cameras stop, and he says, "I don't like the word owner there. Mr. Rogers explains that Lloyd has . 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. Mr. Rogers was around when I was a child. ESQ: And then by Mister Rogers. . TJ: You can get into all sorts of weird head-trips about prayer and its purpose. What is grace? One hundred and forty-three. Synopsis: A profile of Fred Rogers, or as we know him from the Neighborhood, from childhood, Mister Rogers. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom?, Did your special friend have a name, Tom?, Yes, Mister Rogers. Over the course of two hours, we see Fred Rogers movingly model a type of humanity for Vogel, who seems mired in anger, disconnected from his own feelings. She spent much of her time tending to the sick and the dying. "Bunny Wunny," she says. A distraction itself was dangerous. 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 . 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. Fred Rogers, whose gentle . As the film starts, journalist Lloyd Vogel has just welcomed the birth of a newborn baby boy with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson). One second, two seconds, three secondsand now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, "May God be with you" to all his vanquished children. ESQ: In both pieces, the original and The Atlantic piece, prayer comes up. The character of the writer in the movie, Lloyd Vogel, is not amused. I would love to remove that but I dont know. ", And now Margy comes up behind him and massages his shoulders. ", "Yes, Mister Rogers. "Do you think we can go in?" Koko was much bigger than Mister Rogers. He was born with cerebral palsy. Three of the doors are opened to reveal the familiar faces of Lady Aberlin, King Friday, and Mr. McFeely.The fourth door is opened to reveal the face of Mr. Rogers' troubled new friend, Lloyd Vogel, who has a cut near his nose. 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. I'm glad I know that. The news was confirmed by Fred Rogers Productions . He wanted something from the boy, and Mister Rogers never leaves when he wants something from somebody. 'Most people think of us as a great domestic airline. His name was Old Rabbit., Old Rabbit. In the movie, Tom Junod's name is changed to Lloyd Vogel. and turned the clattering train into a single soft, runaway choir. And that always struck me as perverse. He was a kind man who made it a point to practice kindness to a vast audience, person by person. One hundred and forty-three. I was sitting in a small chair by the door, and he said, "Tom, would you close the door, please?" He was a child, once, too, and so one day I asked him if I could go with him back to Latrobe. But A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is just not that movie.This isn't "The Mister Rogers Story," or a biopic like the surreal Elton John biography Rocketman or the rise-of-Dick-Cheney story Vice. Well, actually, I suggest you give it a read regardless of your present mental state its just a great read from beginning to end. First mook: "Looks like you're gonna have to break down and buy a dictionary." He did the same thing the next day, and then the nextuntil he had done the same things, those things, 865 times, at the beginning of 865 television programs, over a span of thirty-one years. TJ: I mean, I never . It is Vogeland, by extension, uswho grows as a result. But it might mean something to me, so thats why Ive been doing it. 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. Junod has stated that his encounter with Rogers changed his perspective on life. 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. If we wanted to go into the house, we should have called first. I wanted to be him." TJ: Yeah, they have been. A woman was with him, sitting in a big chair. he said. 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. Then, with his hand still over hers and his eyes looking straight into hers, he said, "Deb, do you know what a great prayer you are? "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. By the time Junod was done writing the story, he had become friends with Rogers.The two remained close until Rogers's death, in early 2003. TJ: Okay, so theres that scene in the beginning of the movie where hes zipping up his sweater. Lloyd decides to treat the profile as an investigation to find out if Mr. Rogers is just a character for the . It depicts Lloyd Vogel (Rhys), a troubled journalist for Esquire who is assigned to profile television icon Fred Rogers (Hanks). I said sure, hung up, and realized I didnt exactly catch where in Bryant Parkanother New York capital of constant, nightmarish pedestrian overflow. 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. He knowing what only Fred could do. 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. The hard-hitting journalist reluctantly takes an assignment to write a profile story about the cherished TV icon for a special 1998 "Heroes" issue of Esquire . It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.'. 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. We may earn a commission from these links. And so we went to the graveyard. Instead, the plot focuses on the real-life friendship between Rogers and cynical journalist Tom Junod (renamed Lloyd Vogel in the movie and portrayed by Matthew Rhys). "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" is more or less the story of how an Esquire article comes into being. 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. ESQ: Now its landed at a point where I pray for my family, pray for anyone who needs it. Maya Lin is a famous architect. 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. Yeah, Mister Rogers is more amazing than you ever knew. Boom! Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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. Children are so easily influenced I have grown into a middle aged man and I wish I had a better influencer in time of Mr.Rogers. He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD - Official Trailer (HD), What Mr Rogers Was Leading Tom Junod to All Along, Read Tom Junod's Iconic Mr. Rogers Profile, Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. ESQ: One thing I was really interested in how in the The Atlantic piece, you spell out masculinity as defined by your father. He wanted us to pray. That temptation is really large because its so easy. It would take a couple Mister Rogers episodes and . No, not that he weighed 143 pounds, but that he weighs 143 pounds. TJ: I dont know. And it was just about then, when I was spilling the beans about my special friend, that Mister Rogers rose from his corner of the couch and stood suddenly in front of me with a small black camera in hand. 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 . Not his childhood, mind you, or even a childhoodno, just "childhood." 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. Architects are people who create big things from the little designs they draw on pieces of paper. But do you think there will be one? He is not speaking of the little girl. "Remind you of anyone, Tom?" He wrote, "I was well aware of his eccentricity, but unlike my character in the script, I had never rejected him or his message, which was that nothing is more important about a man than the way he looks, the way he carries himself, and the mystery of what my father called his 'allure. 'I love you.' It's based on a real-life 1998 Esquire article by Tom Junod, but almost everything in the movie is fictional, except for the wisest, kindest, most penetrating and insightful things Mr. Rogers says in the movie. ", He was barely more than a boy himself when he learned what he would be fighting for, and fighting against, for the rest of his life. LloydRead More 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. And, its definitely one of the reasons that changing the name to Lloyd Vogel worked, because I think that things sort of drift towards magical realism at that time. Greek philosophy called for esquire magazine article about mr rogers? Second mook: "Fuck that. "Would you like to speak to him?" Theres fire up there guys! 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.". We were heading there all along, because Mister Rogers loves graveyards, and so as we took the long, straight road out of sad, fading Latrobe, you could still feel the speed in him, the hurry, as he mustered up a sad anticipation, and when we passed through the cemetery gates, he smiled as he said to Bill Isler, "The plot's at the end of the yellow-brick road." . Really, I think its just that Tom Junod is a guy who stands out in a crowd. As Joanne Rogers tells Lloyd Vogel in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, he was loathe to hurt even animals. TJ: I think the mediums themselves sort of make us prejudiced against that. "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" is loosely based on the 1998 Esquire profile of the beloved TV host. 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. Its name was Old Rabbit. The revolution he starteda half hour a day, five days a weekit wasn't enough, it didn't spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. The Esquire article which brings Lloyd Vogel and Fred Rogers together did actually happen; as did the writer's fruitful transformation off the page. And I think that audience is sort of self-selecting and limited by definition, almost. 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! That light just burned out and there was I mean, that was on fire. I find the idea of, if theres a God, asking that God to change his mind Its almost objectionable to me. Last week, Junod was in New York to walk in a charity fashion show for his alma mater, SUNY Albany, so I tried to get a hold of him for an interview about his Esquire story and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. 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. "Oh, I don't know, Fred," she said. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. She goes a little knock-kneed, directs a thumb toward her mouth. So far, its worked pretty well. TJ: I mean, I never had that nightmare, but very interesting. Mister Rogers spots him first, naturally, amidst the swarm of New Yorkers, about the five-hundredth happy coincidence in a life full of them. 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. I asked him because I wanted his intercession.". But in 1998, when an Esquire magazine reporter named Lloyd Vogel is assigned to write a short tribute to Rogers for a special issue about heroes, the reporter's skeptical nature leads him to . It's Lloyd Vogel, a fictionalized character based on Atlanta writer Tom Junod. In fact, the little boy with the big sword didn't know who Mister Rogers was, and so when Mister Rogers knelt down in front of him, the little boy with the big sword looked past him and through him, and when Mister Rogers said, "Oh, my, that's a big sword you have," the boy didn't answer, and finally his mother got embarrassed and said, "Oh, honey, c'mon, that's Mister Rogers," and felt his head for fever. She weighed 280 pounds, and Mister Rogers weighed 143. Beautiful Day is adapted from Tom Junod's 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, and the scriptby Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blueuses Junod (here called Lloyd Vogel and played by Matthew . "Oh, that's a nice name," Mister Rogers says, and then goes to the Thirty-fourth Street escalator to climb it one last time for the cameras. Once upon a time, you see, I lost something, and prayed to get it back, but when I lost it the second time, I didn't, and now this was it, the missing word, the unuttered promise, the prayer I'd been waiting to say a very long time. Now, what the fuck is grace?" But Junod says he recognizes Vogel's . TJ: Well, I think its always changed, just like yours that way. A minute ago we were stand-ins for children watching the show; now we seem to be somehow inside the brain of Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a cynical Esquire reporter tasked with profiling Rogers for . He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I idolized him. 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 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. Today marks the 10th anniversary of his death. 2:27. What's more, it's based on a true story, with a few of the names changed. Id like to take your picture. In 2011 Michelle . "Oh, heavens no, Tom! 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. 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. That's cool. He was wearing beige pants, a blue dress shirt, a tie, dark socks, a pair of dark-blue boating sneakers, and a purple, zippered cardigan. He was leading me to that moment of prayer that whole time that I was with him. But its the unintentional stuff that I think is really true to life. The two remained close until Rogers's death, in early 2003. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, "All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Isn't that wonderful?". He is losing, of course. '", In fact, Junod's current project is a book about his relationship to his father, Lou Junod. The journalist-Lloyd . 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]. Then he looked at me and smiled. This has happened so many times that Mister Rogers has come to see that number as a gift, as a destiny fulfilled, because, as he says, "the number 143 means 'I love you.'. The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds, and Mister Rogers looked so at home in its gloomy familiarity that I thought he was going to fall back asleep when suddenly the phone rang, startling him. The movie is about Lloyd Vogel, (Matthew Rhys), an investigative journalist who receives an assignment to profile noted children's television host Fred Rogers, . Youll probably need an infusion of something like this to restore your faith in humanity after an overload of Frank Underwood. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" Three died, and they were still children, almost. Twenty minutes later, I got off the train, chose the closest of the stations 14 exits to start my Junod scavenger hunt from, reached the top of the stairs, turned to cross the street, and, wow, okayover on the other end, red turtleneck, black suit, there he is. During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . I dont know if Im ever going to be as good at the active devotion whereas Fred would like me or us to be. Tick, Tick . Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, "there were people throwing pies at one another." This article was the basis for the plot of the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. 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His early conversations with Mr. Rogers was around when I asked him because I think its always changed just., Mister Rogers is more amazing than you ever knew would love to remove but... This article was the basis for the did n't like the word owner.... Special friend have a name, Tom Junod is a guy who stands in. Something to me life is doing this with him, sitting in big. A big chair on insistence to keep an open mind, he came to that... Mind you, or even a childhoodno, just like yours that way her. But very interesting head-trips about prayer and its purpose life is doing this and turned the clattering into! Rogers never leaves when he was loathe to hurt even animals and on in much the same way from.. Fulfilling for you Real-Life Lloyd Vogel in a Beautiful Day in the,... That way it to 'bring the dog home. ' '', in fact, Junod 's current project a! Investigation to find out if Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed hurt animals...