he asked her, and when she said yes, he said, "Oh, thank you, my dear." They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" TJ: I think the mediums themselves sort of make us prejudiced against that. She and the boy lived together in a city in California, and although she wanted very much for her son to meet Mister Rogers, she knew that he was far too disabled to travel all the way to Pittsburgh, so she figured he would never meet his hero, until one day she learned through a special foundation designed to help children like her son that Mister Rogers was coming to California and that after he visited the gorilla named Koko, he was coming to meet her son. . 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. He wanted us to pray. 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 took it and then put my hand around her free hand. She was very pretty. If You Loved The New Mr. Rogers Movie, Wait Until You Read What It's Based On. What I'm buying is a ticket to the fucking Lotto. "Oh, Mister Rogers, thank you for my childhood." Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. Lloyd is married, has . Advertisement His editor at Esquire asked him to profile Fred Rogers, the beloved television personality and Presbyterian minister. It's not a good word. Would you like to speak to him? he asked, and then handed me the phone. Hero?" is about Mr. Rogers as much as it is . An ophthalmologist is a doctor who takes care of the eyes. They just sang. 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. I find the idea of, if theres a God, asking that God to change his mind Its almost objectionable to me. ESQ: So my relationship with prayer has ebbed and flowed my entire life. TJ: Okay, so theres that scene in the beginning of the movie where hes zipping up his sweater. And a lot of times conversations go to places that I dont expect them to go. In the film, Lloyd is searching for something, anything to unveil about Rogers' true character (the closest he gets is a discussion about his relationship with . 85+ Years of outstanding fiction from world-renowned authors. The movie, which opens November 22, casts Rogers as an agent of change . Notes. He explained how his friendship with Rogers contrasted that image, writing, "Fred gave me what I needed then and still need now: a choice. For example, much of Mister Rogers' investment in Lloyd rests upon his tumultuous relationship with his father (Chris Cooper). At first, the boy was made very nervous by the thought that Mister Rogers was visiting him. 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. The little girl eyes me suspiciously, and then Mister Rogers. Yeah, Mister Rogers is more amazing than you ever knew. And when I read that, I realized that what I was looking for was really unavoidable and obvious. A woman was with him, sitting in a big chair. By the time Junod was done writing the story, he had become friends with Rogers. That light just burned out and there was I mean, that was on fire. He clearly wanted me to pray. 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. What's more, it's based on a true story, with a few of the names changed. Lloyd Vogel (based loosely on the real life journalist Tom Junod) is the anti-heroic protagonist of the 2019 drama film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.An embittered, self-absorbed, antisocial Esquire journalist who holds a grudge towards his philanderous father Jerry for abandoning his family, Lloyd is assigned to profile children's television host Fred Rogers for a magazine issue about . He was a child, once, too, and so one day I asked him if I could go with him back to Latrobe. 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. 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.' He was starting a television program, aimed at children, called Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Will you pray for me?" During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . Heres Our Review Of Cocaine Bear: Oh Hell Yes! If we wanted to go into the house, we should have called first. 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. As he gets to know the children's TV show host . And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, "I'll watch the time," and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he askedand so they did. That's what Mister Rogers said, that's what he wrote down, once upon a time, for the doctors. In 1998, Junod wrote a piece profiling Rogers for Esquire , which . Everything we can't stop loving . His name was Fred Rogers. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children's Corner. It had more to do with his relationship to his own father, which was a focal point for the film. 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." 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. 2:27. TJ: I dont know. So far, its worked pretty well. There's a real Tom Junod, 61, of Marietta, whose 1998 profile of Rogers became the basis for the Tom Hanks movie that had audiences weeping and cheering at a preview last week . Then he looked at me. Well, actually, I suggest you give it a read regardless of your present mental state its just a great read from beginning to end. 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. She weighed 280 pounds, and Mister Rogers weighed 143. Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Im not sure why perhaps as a Valentines 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 night Esquire made one of the best profiles it (or anyone else) has ever published, Tom Junods 1998 profile of Mr. Rogers, available online. ", "Old Rabbit. 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. 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. Junod's on-screen identity, Lloyd Vogel, is also a major player in connecting the audience to Mister Rogers and the film. But that is rather missing the point. Its name was Old Rabbit. 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 . I'm glad I know that. The first time I called Mister Rogers on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. He moved his hand from her wrist to her palm and extended his other hand to me. 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. Look at usI've just met you, but I'm investing in who you are and who you will be, and I can't help it. And he had a relationship with a lot of people." "Roy Rogers is done. Id like to take your picture. 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. 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. Rogers as a peasant to explaining the world to remove son. ", "Yes, Mister Rogers. 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. She goes a little knock-kneed, directs a thumb toward her mouth. 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. 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. 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. Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. 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. Or maybe, if the truth be told, Mister Rogers went into battle against a little boy with a big sword, for Mister Rogers didn't like the big sword. 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. Maybe it was something he needed to hear. Koko was much bigger than Mister Rogers. But at the same time, we dont know what to do with the lessons that Mister Rogers gave us. We may earn a commission from these links. "Oh, Mister Rogers, you're the father I never had." He wanted something from the boy, and Mister Rogers never leaves when he wants something from somebody. I sat in an old armchair and looked around. The two remained close until Rogers's death, in early 2003. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. The boy had always been the object of prayer, and now he was being asked to pray for Mister Rogers, and although at first he didn't know if he could do it, he said he would, he said he'd try, and ever since then he keeps Mister Rogers in his prayers and doesn't talk about wanting to die anymore, because he figures Mister Rogers is close to God, and if Mister Rogers likes him, that must mean God likes him, too. 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. ", "What prayer is that, Mister Rogers? 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. 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. 'I love you.' 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. We were heading back to his apartment in a taxi when I asked him what he had said. 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. 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 . Thunderstruck means that you can't talk, because something has happened that's as sudden and as miraculous and maybe as scary as a bolt of lightning, and all you can do is listen to the rumble. One hundred and forty-three. He prayed every day of his life. 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. Thats as far as I want to go, you know? Theyre polar opposites. 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. (2018). 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