For your reading pleasure, please enjoy this excerpt from our longer interview with co-writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster about A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood from Issue 39 of Backstory.
If you enjoy what you’ve read – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by buying Issue 39 as a single issue or subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
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Current Cinema
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
By David Somerset
There have been films and programs about children’s TV icon Fred Rogers, but cinema has been host to something of a Rogers-aissance of late. Last year saw the release of documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor, which educated audiences who didn’t grow up with the show just who Fred Rogers was and reconnected those who did with a touchstone of their childhoods. Between 1968 and 2001, via his beloved series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the soft-spoken host explored and explained tough topics such as death, divorce and depression for his young audience through the medium of song, sketches and puppetry. The man in the iconic red sweater would seem to be a difficult anchor point for a dramatic film, as he’s viewed as a near universally adored, sweet-natured person whose struggles were largely private. And this was the exact challenge faced by writers Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, who were piqued to the character back in 2009 by Mister Rogers videos Harpster would show his two-year-old daughter. “She was very stubborn, and I really struggled to find a way to communicate with her,” Harpster says. “I put on an episode of Mister Rogers just on a whim because I remembered it. And she listened in this profound way.” That inspired the writers to figure out a way to frame a story about the unusually captivating Rogers.
It has taken more than a decade for Harpster and Fitzerman-Blue’s screenplay to make it to screens. In 2013, it made the Black List—then titled I’m Proud of You—which calls out the year’s best unproduced scripts. Coincidentally, it was not the only screenplay on the list to feature Fred Rogers that year. The other, ironically called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, was written by Alexis C. Jolly and has yet to go before cameras. “That other script was a wildly fantastic, completely fictional version of Fred in New York in the ’50s, doing drugs and stuff,” says Harpster. “It was a wonderful, fantastical, surreal read that just wouldn’t ever be able to be made, because it was highly fictionalized and wonderfully weird.” Harpster and Fitzerman-Blue, on the other hand, had locked into an approach that sidestepped the usual biopic tropes. Their original drafts adapted Tim Madigan’s book I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers, which documented how an assignment to interview Rogers spawned a relationship that made an impact on Madigan’s life. Over the years the emphasis of the journalist’s role changed, even though the story that forms the basis for the final film, Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, “Can You Say…Hero?” represents a similar tale of the man touching the life of a journalist sent to write about him. How to explain the evolution? “The short answer is that you don’t make a movie in a vacuum,” says Fitzerman-Blue. “We were in contact with the Fred Rogers estate. They gave us access to their archive, and it was really at that point that the story began to evolve into what it ended up being. The movie is drawn from Tom Junod’s article. It’s also drawn from hundreds of documents, all the episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and the work we got to do when we were in the Fred Rogers Archive in Latrobe, Pennsylvania—it’s really the result of all of those things.”
Having tried to write early scripts in their career without an outline and finding themselves quickly, in their words, “in the weeds,” the pair has long been committed to a more formal structure, carefully crafting a detailed plan for their story while leaving room for surprises. And the writing starts long before anyone sits down at a keyboard. “For us, writing is a conversation,” Fitzerman-Blue says. “Normally, what we’re doing is talking through as much of the story as we possibly can, and that conversation gets recorded on the white board in our office. And then the white board becomes an outline.” Since both men have families, they don’t hold to the idea that writers have to lock themselves away all day and night until a script is complete. “The time that we actually have together in the office is precious, and the time outside the office is precious, so we try not to work on the weekends. We try not to work in the evenings. We wanna get the work done during the day, so we can go home and be with our families.” His partner jumps in sarcastically: “So we can steal their stories.”
If you enjoy what you’ve read – we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the article by buying Issue 39 as a single issue or subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
For a limited time you can use code: DOLEMITE at check-out to save $5 off a one-year Backstory subscription.
For more info about all the other amazing articles in issue 39, view our Table of Contents.