Though it just hit the big screen in December 2019, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood has been a decade in the making. Conceived and written by Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, the film takes a look at the beloved children’s program host Fred Rogers from the perspective of a journalist assigned to do a story on him. “We realized pretty quickly that Fred Rogers was not a good subject for a traditional biopic,” said Harpster in an interview with the Independent. “He was kind of unwaveringly amazing for all of his life and doesn’t have these big, sort of glacial turns that you want in a character. So, from the very first conversations about [the script], we were thinking about who was next to him, who was around him, that had been affected by him.”
Inspired by magazine stories written about Rogers — particularly Tom Junod’s piece that ran in Esquire in 1998 — Harpster and Fitzerman-Blue created a script in which the jaded journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) interviews Rogers (Tom Hanks) to uncover what makes him tick. During their many meetings, however, rather than discover ugly truths about Rogers, Vogel begins to confront his own demons. “That was Fred’s superpower,” said Harpster, a UCSB drama graduate. “He was so just so disarming. He was like an emotional archeologist.”
Harpster returns to his alma mater January 11 for the Pollock Theater’s Script to Screen series. I recently spoke with the screenwriter/executive producer/actor about hiring Tom Hanks, patience, and upcoming projects.