He has spent thirty-one years imagining and reimagining those wallsthe walls that have both penned him in and set him free. Appearance, presentation, looks. Tom Hanks-starring Mister Rogers movie 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood' is loosely based off of the 'Esquire' profile Tom Junod, known as Lloyd Vogel in the film, wrote about Fred Rogers, and . A member of Family Communications and the creator of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood , Rogers was known to young children as Mister Rogers and adored nationally for his gentle demeanor. Today marks the 10th anniversary of his death. "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. No, Mister Rogers was not a saint. I n early 1998, Tom Junod received an assignment that was outside his wheelhouse. He was born with cerebral palsy. Junod's on-screen identity, Lloyd Vogel, is also a major player in connecting the audience to Mister Rogers and the film. 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. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (opens Nov. 22) tells the story of one writer's experience profiling Fred Rogers . But at the same time, we dont know what to do with the lessons that Mister Rogers gave us. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. Here's what readers learned about Mister Rogers when the piece debuted. "Would you like to speak to him?" 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! Would you like to speak to him? he asked, and then handed me the phone. If we wanted to go into the house, we should have called first. 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." Her name was Deb. First mook: "Looks like you're gonna have to break down and buy a dictionary." 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. Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. He wanted us to pray. It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.'. I said sure, hung up, and realized I didnt exactly catch where in Bryant Parkanother New York capital of constant, nightmarish pedestrian overflow. Per his piece in The Atlantic, Junod asked the writers for some changes after reading an early draft of the script in April 2016. Koko watches television. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood fact check reveals that Lloyd's wife Andrea is mostly fictional as well. Except for people who are on the new-age end of it. If . "Bunny Wunny," she says. But it might mean something to me, so thats why Ive been doing it. During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . "This man's name is Tom. The film is adapted from a real life 1998 Esquire feature penned by Tom Junod, long one of the nation's premier magazine writers. As he gets to know the children's TV show host . But theres a lot of different ways to do it. I closed the door and sat back down. 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. TJ: I think you try to put it together in one person. LloydRead More I bring up the Pam Bondi thing in the The Atlantic piecewhere they actually use Fred to hound somebody. Junod and Rogers exchanged dozens of emails that would . "Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet . What's more, it's based on a true story, with a few of the names changed. He was a music major at a small school in Florida and planning to go to seminary upon graduation. "No, you're not," she says. cynical writer Lloyd Vogel (based on Junod, but with a fictional estranged dad figure, played by Chris Cooper, so that Rogers can . Once upon a time, a little boy with a big sword went into battle against Mister Rogers. I didn't ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. (2018). 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." He doesn't even know. He was in college. 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. Yeah, Mister Rogers is more amazing than you ever knew. Where is Fred?" Twelve years in a Catholic school. TJ: I mean, the tents great, but the tents intentional. Here are 20 of my favorites. Theres a moment in .css-umdwtv{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-decoration-thickness:.0625rem;text-decoration-color:#FF3A30;text-underline-offset:0.25rem;color:inherit;-webkit-transition:background 0.4s;transition:background 0.4s;background:linear-gradient(#ffffff, #ffffff 50%, #d5dbe3 50%, #d5dbe3);-webkit-background-size:100% 200%;background-size:100% 200%;}.css-umdwtv:hover{color:#000000;text-decoration-color:border-link-body-hover;-webkit-background-position:100% 100%;background-position:100% 100%;}Can You Say Hero?Tom Junods Esquire profile on Fred Rogers, one of the all-time great magazine storieswhen the writer is searching for the childrens TV icon at the stuffed, panic-attack-palace of Penn Station. 85+ Years of outstanding fiction from world-renowned authors. It's more about the impact of Mister Rogers on others, particularly a jaded and cynical journalist named Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) and how his interactions with the TV host chill his sometimes . 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 . The Real-Life Lloyd Vogel: Tom Junod is the real-life reporter on whom the character of Lloyd Vogel is based. Fred never stopped looking at her or let go of her hand. . Photo: Courtesy of Sony Pictures. ", "I know that," Mister Rogers said, "and that's why the prayer I'm going to teach you has only three words. "No!" He is not speaking of the little girl. I grew up Roman Catholic. And then he was on the move again, happily, quickly, for he would not leave until he showed me all the places of all those who'd loved him into being. We hate that.' First mook: "He says it's the Greek word for grace." 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. I mean, he was in favor of thatmedia should be human. "Hmmm," Mister Rogers said, "that's a strange ad. "Oh, Mister Rogers, would you please just hug me?" The answer to: What did Fred want? Meaning that there should be mistakes, there should be accidents, and if that was filmed, then it should stay filmed. Tom Junod / Lloyd Vogel experiences this first hand as he tries to get Mr. Rogers to come "out of character". TJ: I dont think he watched a lot of TV, but I think he was also against quick cuts. I mean, if that was Tom Junod with bunny ears, I dont know how I would have responded. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children's Corner. In 1998, Rogers strikes a friendship with Lloyd Vogel, a self-absorbed, embittered journalist who is assigned to interview him for the magazine Esquire. And it just goes on and on in much the same way from there. It depicts Lloyd Vogel (Rhys), a troubled journalist for Esquire who is assigned to profile television icon Fred Rogers (Hanks). He was starting a television program, aimed at children, called Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. 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. 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. I mean, one of the great surprises of my life is doing this. "Thank you for calling, my dear," he said, in a voice whose . The two remained close until Rogers's death, in early 2003. On this afternoon, the end of a hot, yellow day in New York City, he was very tired, and when I asked if I could go to his apartment and see him, he paused for a moment and said shyly, "Well, Tom, I'm in my bathrobe, if you don't mind." And all the people who made this house special to me are not here, anyway. As for Mister Rogers himselfwell, he doesn't look at the story in the same way that the boy did or that I did. And so the next morning, we swam together, and then he put on his boxer shorts and the dark socks, and the T-shirt, and the gray trousers, and the belt, and then the white dress shirt and the black bow tie and the gray suit jacket, and about two hours later we were pulling up to the big brick house on Weldon Street in Latrobe, and Mister Rogers was thinking about going inside. 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. 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. And yet, here I am. .css-gk9meg{display:block;font-family:Lausanne,Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:normal;margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0;padding-top:0.25rem;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}@media (any-hover: hover){.css-gk9meg:hover{color:link-hover;}}@media(max-width: 48rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.15;margin-bottom:0.25rem;}}@media(min-width: 40.625rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1rem;line-height:1.2;margin-bottom:0.625rem;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}}@media(min-width: 73.75rem){.css-gk9meg{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.2;}}Chris Pine Thinks 'Star Trek' is Cursed, The Hilarious Reason Why Chris Pine Cut His Hair, Chris Pine Tells All About Harry Styles SpitGate, Movie Sequels That Are Better Than the Original, 40 Photos That Prove Sly Stallone Was a Style Icon, 32 Photos of Michael B. Jordans Style Evolution. 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. The movie is loosely based on Tom Junod's life around 1998 when he wrote an article on Mr. Rogers for Esquire magazine. He had makeup on his face and a dollop of black dye combed into his silver hair. I was sitting in a small chair by the door, and he said, "Tom, would you close the door, please?" ESQ: You wrote in the original piece that he didnt even watch TV. 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.". ", The walls of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood are light blue and fleeced with clouds. 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. Mr. Rogers, fully aware of this, still invites . And Ive tried to do it so that Im not just repeating the same line, trying to kind of live in the moment. She spent much of her time tending to the sick and the dying. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" That light just burned out and there was I mean, that was on fire. Ive had people take issue with that. 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? Three died, and they were still children, almost. 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. In your eyes, whats the reason for the lack of action? Will you pray for me?" His personal story is changed too. The movie is about Lloyd Vogel, (Matthew Rhys), an investigative journalist who receives an assignment to profile noted children's television host Fred Rogers, . 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. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom? 'I love you.' Explaining why he wanted the changes, he wrote that it wasn't because he disliked it or disagreed with its premise. She weighed 280 pounds, and Mister Rogers weighed 143. esquire article. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk. With the film adaptation of Junod's legendary Esquire story out today, we talked to the writer about the man who changed his life. 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. This content is imported from youTube. 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. 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 . Considering his popularity, those episodes cannot be that difficult to find. It had more to do with his relationship to his own father, which was a focal point for the film. It's Lloyd Vogel, a fictionalized character based on Atlanta writer Tom Junod. If this brutal, extended winter has you feeling down and cranky I suggest you give it a read. 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? The journalist-Lloyd . Greek philosophy called for esquire magazine article about mr rogers? 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. And he had a relationship with a lot of people." Once upon a time, Mister Rogers went to New York City and got caught in the rain. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a . Thats as far as I want to go, you know? 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. Mister Rogers spots him first, naturally, amidst the swarm of New Yorkers, about the five-hundredth happy coincidence in a life full of them. Once upon a time, there was a little boy born blind, and so, defenseless in the world, he suffered the abuses of the defenseless, and when he grew up and became a man, he looked back and realized that he'd had no childhood at all, and that if he were ever to have a childhood, he would have to start having it now, in his forties. And I dont know which take they use, but it was hard for Tom to do that. The little boy with the big sword did not watch Mister Rogers. 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. 'Ted Lasso' Season 3 Dropped Its First Trailer, 'Outer Banks' Season 4 Is Already In the Works. ESQ: Another interesting thing in your piece is how you talk about how theres still a hunger for spreading goodness in the world. Esquire magazine article about mr Rogers had more to do with the lessons that Mister Rogers is more amazing you. 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