mr rogers esquire article lloyd vogel

He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. 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. "I'm done. His name was Fred Rogers. "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. Its name was Old Rabbit. And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children's Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoeswell, he was Mister Rogers for good. Junod and Rogers exchanged dozens of emails that would . Would you like to speak to him? he asked, and then handed me the phone. I just met Mister Rogersthis is definitely my lucky day." 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. 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 . Is Lloyd Vogel a real person? He was with his producer, Margy Whitmer. ESQUIRE: In your Atlantic piece, you talk about how theres no true successor to Mister Rogers. There was nobody home. A distraction itself was dangerous. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" 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 . "Rephrase in a positive manner," as in It is good to play where it is safe. Where is Fred?" 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. 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. Mr. Rogers explains that Lloyd has . The Real-Life Lloyd Vogel: Tom Junod is the real-life reporter on whom the character of Lloyd Vogel is based. I closed the door and sat back down. "Would you lead us? And a lot of times conversations go to places that I dont expect them to go. 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. TJ: Yeah, they have been. He is losing, of course. 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. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of navy-blue canvas boating sneakers. "Oh, Mister Rogers, thank you for my childhood." He doesn't even know. 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 . We were heading back to his apartment in a taxi when I asked him what he had said. The event is the premise of the 2019 feature film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I have actually tried, since that moment, Ive tried to pray. 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." Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. he asked. 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. "I imagine they're blue.". The film deals with Vogel, who is plagued by his own hate of his dying father, being assigned to write a short, 400-word profile on Rogers. When he was your age, he had a rabbit, too, and he loved it very much. 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. On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, "I would like you to pray for me. More than 150,000 Images beautiful High-Resolution photography, zoom into every . cynical writer Lloyd Vogel (based on Junod, but with a fictional estranged dad figure, played by Chris Cooper, so that Rogers can . he asked her, and when she said yes, he said, "Oh, thank you, my dear." By subscribing to this BDG newsletter, you agree to our. She was a minister at Fred Rogers's church. "Oh, I don't know, Fred," she said. 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. This article was the basis for the plot of the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. 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. 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.". 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. "Now, Deb, I'd like to ask you a favor," he said. 'I love you.' New Friends.". No, not that he weighed 143 pounds, but that he weighs 143 pounds. Its Joanne, he said. Did you have any special friends growing up? He notes, "I think that my character is not just me. The spirit of Mister Rogers counseled her to forgive the insults, and after she told me her story in the morning, I called Fred. There are many people who follow the legacy of kindness, but I dont know of anybody who follows his legacy of kindness in media. TJ: Well, I think its always changed, just like yours that way. "But Mister Rogers, I can't pray," Joybubbles said, "because every time I try to pray, I forget the words. He prayed every day of his life. They just sang. ESQ: You wrote in the original piece that he didnt even watch TV. "Do you think we can go in?" He was born with cerebral palsy. Youll probably need an infusion of something like this to restore your faith in humanity after an overload of Frank Underwood. 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. "Oh, Mister Rogers, would you please just hug me?" LloydRead More He didn't have an umbrella, and he couldn't find a taxi, either, so he ducked with a friend into the subway and got on one of the trains. It is Vogeland, by extension, uswho grows as a result. Hero?" is about Mr. Rogers as much as it is . Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven. 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 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. 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. And in a lot of ways, things that couldnt happen on a person by person level could happen on media, because its mob versus invisible person. Your Privacy Choices: Opt Out of Sale/Targeted Ads. We hate that.' The Esquire article which brings Lloyd Vogel and Fred Rogers together did actually happen; as did the writer's fruitful transformation off the page. What's more, it's based on a true story, with a few of the names changed. Does it mean anything? 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. His editor at Esquire asked him to profile Fred Rogers, the beloved television personality and Presbyterian minister. On December 1, 1997oh, heck, once upon a timea boy, no longer little, told his friends to watch out, that he was going to do something "really big" the next day at school, and the next day at school he took his gun and his ammo and his earplugs and shot eight classmates who had clustered for a prayer meeting. 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. Fred Rogers, whose gentle . 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. She was 92. That light just burned out and there was I mean, that was on fire. If . 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. "he turned into Mister Fucking Rogers. 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. Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) probes the state-of-mind of his interviewer, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) Somehow, the loss of Mr. Rogers, a thoroughly decent man who preached a gospel of kindness to generations of children, aches much more in a social and political landscape awash in anger and pain (and "leadership" that sets that tone). And Ive tried to do it so that Im not just repeating the same line, trying to kind of live in the moment. She had a long face and a dark blush to her skin. 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. He finds me, of course, at Penn Station. He had just come back from visiting Koko, the gorilla who has learnedor who has been taughtAmerican Sign Language. Lloyd has been tasked with profiling Fred Rogers for Esquire, an unusual assignment that he approaches with great reluctance and even resentment. And I called Joanne [Rogers] after that and said, What do you think about that? And she was like, You know, Fred would never represent that. That seems so obvious, but I think to a lot of people its not obvious because I think that the temptation of being able to think that yelling at somebody on the street, youre somehow striking a blow. 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. I just try to ask for some sort of affirmation, you know? The character of the writer in the movie, Lloyd Vogel, is not amused. He was leading me to that moment of prayer that whole time that I was with him. 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.". 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