For my father, everything that was important was visible to the eye. I dont know if Im ever going to be as good at the active devotion whereas Fred would like me or us to be. It was the first time I had read the story in a really long time. He was in college. He was leading me to that moment of prayer that whole time that I was with him. ESQ: Thats where Im at right now. Though of all races, the schoolchildren were mostly black and Latino, and they didn't even approach Mister Rogers and ask him for his autograph. Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures. During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . 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. You know that they shot it with like the original cameras. He put his hand on the knob; he cracked it open, but then, with Bill Isler calling caution from the car, he said, "Maybe we shouldn't go in. 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 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. "I don't know if I want to put on a performance.". The film is based on a true story, though Rhys plays fictional journalist Lloyd Vogel, who was created to help tell Rogers' story. 'Most people think of us as a great domestic airline. That's what Mister Rogers said, that's what he wrote down, once upon a time, for the doctors. Hero?" is about Mr. Rogers as much as it is . 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.". Well, not exactly. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" Im not sure about it. "It's not a performance. 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 came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a . 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. Junod also inspired Matthew Rhys' character, a fictional Esquire writer named Lloyd Vogel.. Also read: Where That Navy SEALs Rumor Started A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood shows how Fred Rogers used television to reach into the hearts . This content is imported from youTube. ESQ: In both pieces, the original and The Atlantic piece, prayer comes up. We may earn a commission from these links. 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. 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. Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, "there were people throwing pies at one another." Here are 20 of my favorites. 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 so when he threw Old Rabbit out the car window the next time, it was gone for good. "Oh, I don't know, Fred," she said. She was 92. He finds me, because that's what Mister Rogers doeshe looks, and then he finds. "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" is loosely based on the 1998 Esquire profile of the beloved TV host. 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. He moved his hand from her wrist to her palm and extended his other hand to me. 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. 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. The film's protagonist is journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a cynic who is assigned by his editors at Esquire to write a profile on Rogers. 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. 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. 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 writes all his own scripts, but on this day, when he receives a visit from Mrs. McFeely and a springer spaniel, she says that she has to bring the dog "back to his owner," and Mister Rogers makes a face. 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. 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. 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. 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. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk. 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 then my editor, Denise Wills said, Could you try to think of an answer to that question? And I thought about it, then I had to read the story again for the audiobook of this collection of Freds writings and sayings. Do you see masculinity as different endslike you could be this person or this person? He got out of the car, and, moving as quickly as he had moved to the door of his house, he stepped up a small hill to the door of a large gray mausoleum, a huge structure built for six, with a slightly peaked roof, and bronze doors, and angels living in the stained glass. TJ: I think the mediums themselves sort of make us prejudiced against that. And he had a relationship with a lot of people." Junod also appeared in the critically acclaimed documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? I sat in an old armchair and looked around. "Will you be with me when I die?" She weighed 280 pounds, and Mister Rogers weighed 143. And now the boy didn't know how to respond. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (opens Nov. 22) tells the story of one writer's experience profiling Fred Rogers . 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. Tom Junod / Lloyd Vogel experiences this first hand as he tries to get Mr. Rogers to come "out of character". A distraction itself was dangerous. But then Esquire, for a special edition on "heroes," asks Lloyd to write a profile piece on Fred "Mister Rogers" Rogers. Then he looked at me. "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. His name was Old Rabbit., Old Rabbit. Mister Rogers spots him first, naturally, amidst the swarm of New Yorkers, about the five-hundredth happy coincidence in a life full of them. 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. It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.'. As the film starts, journalist Lloyd Vogel has just welcomed the birth of a newborn baby boy with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson). ", "I know that," Mister Rogers said, "and that's why the prayer I'm going to teach you has only three words. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom?, Did your special friend have a name, Tom?, Yes, Mister Rogers. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. 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. I said sure, hung up, and realized I didnt exactly catch where in Bryant Parkanother New York capital of constant, nightmarish pedestrian overflow. He looked very little in the backseat of the car. They just sang. But the script insists, "it's not really about Mr. Rogers." It is, the viewer discovers, about Esquire staff reporter Lloyd Vogel, played here by Welshman Matthew Rhys. ", Deb stiffened for a second, and she let out a breath, and her color got deeper. 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! Mister Rogers recorded 20 episodes of a show aimed at adults titled "Old Friends . Lloyd Vogel Is Based On A Real Journalist Who Praises The Mr. Rogers Biopic. TJ: Thats a great question. . 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? Lloyd goes to interview Mr. Rogers and is shocked by his kindness, and the two form a bond. His personal story is changed too. When he was your age, he had a rabbit, too, and he loved it very much. I mean, one of the great surprises of my life is doing this. And for me going out and talking about it has been a great experience for me.
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