“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” a sort-of-but-not-really biopic, chronicles the time Mister Rogers formed an uncanny friendship with a cynical investigative journalist.
But did that really happen?
“A Beautiful Day” shakes up what could be a treacly story about an American icon by focusing on the culture clash that arose when Rogers (Tom Hanks) met a writer (Matthew Rhys) hunting for an edge for his magazine assignment.
That encounter really happened in 1998, but the film relies on a large dose of Hollywood panache. Here’s what’s real — and what’s been embellished — in “A Beautiful Day.”
Did Mister Rogers befriend a reporter?
Acclaimed journalist Tom Junod did meet Mister Rogers for an Esquire profile at a time when Junod had something to prove — only in real life, it was right after his profile of Kevin Spacey blew up in his face. Titled “Kevin Spacey Has a Secret,” the Esquire story earned Junod national ire for attempting to out the actor. (“I always thought of myself as a good guy, even though my stories were really dark. But the Kevin Spacey story was not properly motivated,” he says now.)
And like the fictional Lloyd Vogel (Junod requested the character’s name change), he chafed at being saddled with what he considered a soft assignment profiling Rogers.
Then 40, “I had sort of come out of nowhere to be successful as a journalist. ... I was happy about that, but that question when you have success — ‘What should I do and how do I keep this going?’ — was potent to me,” Junod says.
Still, many life events were condensed in the film. Unlike Lloyd, Junod did not have a newborn when he met Rogers. In fact, “my wife and I were trying to have a baby and couldn’t. ... I was mad at the universe,” he says. (Junod and his wife later adopted daughter Nia, spurred by Rogers’ “unshakable optimism.”)
He also never got into a fistfight with his dad at a family wedding, nor did his father abandon the family.
But the core of his surprising friendship with Rogers is depicted accurately, says the writer, who traded phone calls and 70 emails with Rogers before the star died of stomach cancer in 2003.
Did fans sing in the subway?
Audience members may find one scene, in which a subway car of strangers sing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” to Rogers, too saccharine to believe. But that really happened, as chronicled in Junod’s 1998 profile:
It was late in the day, and the train was crowded with children who were going home from school. 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. They just sang. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” and turned the clattering train into a single soft, runaway choir.
“It’s one of those moments where if you wrote it into a script, it would be too cheesy to keep in, but it was real,” says “Beautiful Day” director Marielle Heller.
Did Mister Rogers inspire forgiveness?
In the film, Rogers inspires Lloyd to consider repairing his relationship with his estranged father. In real life, “Fred was able to boil a very complicated and complex view of life into the simplest precepts and dictums,” Junod says. “One of those things — and it’s mentioned in the movie — is ‘everything mentionable is manageable.’ If he taught me anything, it was to be open to things. To be open to opportunities, people, reconciliation, forgiveness.”
Rogers ultimately help shift how Junod defined masculinity.
”A lot of men think holding on to your anger and holding grudges fortifies your own sense of machismo and is necessary to being a man in this world,” he says. “And Fred in so many ways says, ‘You don’t have to do that. Let it go.’ And to this day that is something that affects me and guides me.”
