Statue of Mister Rogers Will Adorn the North Shore

I sincerely hope Chris and I are done with our documentary by next March. Recent events give me some hope to that end, but we have a long, long way to go. Besides, I always imagined the end of the story would find me doing something different than working for MTV (the literal crux of Fred and my initial conversation), and given that I'm knee deep in a new life with Abbigail, and wedding planning, I'm not sure that's going to happen. Either way, Chris and I will be there for the dedication next spring.

Plans call for a $3 million sculpture of children's television legend Fred Rogers to be placed on an observation deck bored into an old bridge pier on the North Shore. The 10-foot-tall sculpture shows Mr. Rogers tying his shoes, as he did at the beginning and end of every episode of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

A keyhole shape will be bored into the Manchester Bridge Pier, close to the south entrance to Heinz Field, framing a new view of the Point and giving an entrance to the childhood icon's "living room."

Children will be encouraged to scramble onto the statue -- by the same sculptor who did Mayor Richard S. Caliguiri's on Grant Street -- and construction materials will mimic the "Neighborhood" studio set.

Officials hope the privately funded parklet will become a major sight-seeing destination in the city and the setting for generations of snapshots with Mr. Rogers or the city's keyhole-framed skyline as a backdrop.

The site "creates a distinctive sense of place, a place that fosters civic pride, creates fun and ... recognizes our children and the importance of our children to the future of this community," said William H. Isler, the president of Mr. Rogers' production company, Family Communications.

The project is funded by Colcom Foundation, the $500 million charitable foundation of the late Cordelia S. May, a longtime Rogers family friend. The foundation paid $1.3 million for the sculpture and $1.7 million for developing the parklet plans, and promised to pay for the site's future maintenance.

Supporters stressed the site is not a Fred Rogers memorial. Rather, they are calling it "A Tribute to Children," with hopes it can be a gathering place for children and families.

The old bridge abutment currently sits unadorned along the Allegheny riverfront trail. The city-county Sports & Exhibition Authority once proposed turning it into an observation deck, much like the designers of the Rogers project -- Pittsburgh-based Astorino -- are now planning.

Plans are to circle the statue and elevated observation deck with a railing, creating a 4,100-square-foot visiting space.

Over the past four years, designers looked throughout the city at locations that would make the most of the statue, which Mrs. May commissioned in 2003. Colcom Foundation leaders wanted it near the Point, but with Point State Park being redeveloped, instead focused on the pier, Mr. Isler said, for its high visibility and accessibility to transportation and visitors.

"The site is highly visible -- from Mount Washington, Fort Duquesne Boulevard, the Golden Triangle, Point State Park -- and each time the three rivers are photographed or filmed, it's seen," lead architect Louis Astorino said. "It's seen on 'Monday Night Football.' It's seen nationally when you look at Pittsburgh."

The city's Art Commission has given preliminary, conceptual approval to the plans, which will go to the city planning commission next month.

Plans call for the statue's site to be completed by March 20, which would have been Mr. Rogers' 80th birthday. Construction is also tied to Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary next year.

Mr. Rogers was born in Latrobe in 1928. He wrote and starred in "Neighborhood" at WQED for 33 years, won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, two Peabody Awards and four Emmys, and was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. He died at his Squirrel Hill home in February 2003 at age 74.

The sculptor, Robert Berks, has done many portrait busts and similiar statues of Mr. Caliguiri and Albert Einstein, for the National Academy of Sciences. The Rogers statue will be similar to a child-friendly Hans Christian Anderson statue in New York's Central Park, supporters said, by Georg Lober.

The Rogers statue will be sitting on steps, allowing children access to it, but it will still be oversized. The sculptor, Mr. Astorino said, wanted to convey "the overwhelming awe of seeing this person for the first time as a child."

- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Trailer, Take Two

I've been puzzling for weeks how to boil down the premise of our film into just a few sentences. It's kind of a complicated conceit; it's not a biopic, but instead some sort of inspirational road trip movie. So here's the script:

Mister Rogers summered in modest gray clapboard house on the edge of Nantucked Island.  My family rented a tiny cottage next door. 

On the afternoon of my thirtieth birthday, Mister Rogers asked me about my job as an MTV News producer.

Moments later, the man who singlehandedly saved public television from the congressional chopping block delicately said to me, "I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex."

The conversation still haunts me.  And though he's not around to tell me in his own words, I wonder, who was Mister Rogers?  And what did he mean by "deep and simple?"

And so I left my Times Square office, and sought out the neighbors that knew him best.

Tim Russert: "Mister Rogers was a unique human being; forever giving, forever teaching, forever nurturing, forever taking advantage of every moment to tell people that it's important that we respect one another and that we love one another."

Susan Stamberg: "He would walk into a room where there were children -- but not only children because adults reacted this way as well -- and the elctricity and the molecules changed in the air. You felt that you were in the presense of this figure."

Marc Brown: "He used his life so well and so wisely. And he used his time on earth to do so much good! It's just what he was here to do, and he did it so effortlessly."

Linda Ellerbee: "He assumed that everyone watching him had inside themselves a wonderful person that was just dying to get out. And he was going to open the door for them. And the help you open the door for others. That's pretty simple. And that's pretty deep."

Mister Rogers touched millions of lives.

This is the story of Mister Rogers and me.

A Question For You

Though my postings here may have petered off a little bit, it doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about depth and simplicity in general, and this documentary project in specific, every day.

I have a few magnetic postcards that Mister Rogers gave me for my 31st birthday on my refrigerator. Every morning when I'm grabbing half and half for my coffee, I look Mister Rogers in the eyes and he smiles and says, "You Are Special!"

But that's just the beginning. Nothing I do in or out of the office fails to pass through the lens that Mister Rogers helped me to shape.

Right now, I still owe Chris a new musical bed and voice over for the second iteration of our trailer. We want to show it to FCI's Bill Isler to further demonstrate our capabilities, and give him a sense of where the film is going. I have to constantly reinforce to people that we're not trying to make a biopic, we're trying to show that affects of meeting the man, and being inspired by him.

To that end, and with specific inspiration from depth and simplicty-free media conference I attended this week, I've been asking people where they think the good work is being done these days. I asked my buddy James -- a Hollywood agent with the rare distinction of understanding deep and simple -- thusly:

In the era of the blockbuster, the longtail, and internet democracy, who do you think is doing good, substantive, meaningful work? What people? What companies? What studios, labels, or networks? Where's the justice and righteousness coming from? I just know it's not here [at MTV]. And I wanna be at -- or start up -- a place that can be both good business, and good for the world.

So... you tell me. Who's doing the good stuff? Individuals? Organizations?

Please leave your answer in comments.

Three Simple Ideas

I was discussing the installation of lipstick, keyhole, and robotic cameras at yet another entertainment awards show when a colleague looked down at his Blackberry and said, "I think the fact that the number of dead just rose from two to twenty-two warrants our coverage."

Barely twenty-four hours later, we have a crew of ten on site, a live show in edit, and a slew of online reportage. And while I have told my colleagues more than once that it is in these difficult moments that our efforts to demonstrate empathy and build community make me most proud, I can't help but feel conflicted. Why is it that networks pull most of their advertising at times like these? Because most of their advertising messages the very action inflicted upon unwitting Virginia Tech students yesterday.

Moreover, I feel a deep sense of deja vu. Last June, Chris and I interviewed author and mystic Bo Lozoff who put it thusly:

We're a society who, rather than sitting down with some Walter Cronkite or Mister Rogers figure and saying "We gotta take stock of the fact that our children are the angriest, most violent children who have ever been born, we’re the most depressed adults, and our life goes so fast every day and everything is so rushed and hurried that we're labeling a lot of people as ADD and ADHD and maybe, maybe it's not them..."

What do we need to do instead of that? We throw our children into that system. We drug them. We sacrifice our children at this alter of consumerism.

I was sitting with my wife in Fred Rodger's office talking with the staff of Mister Roger's Neighborhood about children and violence on a Tuesday -- the very moment that the shootings at Columbine were happening. We went out to our car, we turned on the radio, and we heard about this thing that had just happened in Columbine, Colorado. And it's exactly what we were just talking about: children seem to be losing all hope. And what I had said was, "You know, there’s three simple ideas that you could apply to a rich life: there's something beautiful, something noble, and something sacred."

Something beautiful: the sun set, if we allow it to touch us. Do you and I take time in our daily lives -- I'm talking about seconds, to consciously be moved or touched by something we consider beautiful?

All I have to do is pick up my guitar and I'm in beauty. The Arts, to me, are a link between the temporal, the mundane world, and the eternal, the mystical. The arts get us a little bit out of our mind, whether that's music or performing arts or visual art. Something beautiful is something that touches us. Something you say, "Oh, my. Oh, my."

Something noble. By that I mean, like that second principle of all the great spiritual traditions, something we believe in is larger than us, something we look up to. A cause, an idea, a person, an elder, a bird nature. But something that we consider is worth sacrificing for, or worth taking a risk for, worth getting something out for.

Something sacred. Do we have those moments when our heads are truly bowed in humility at the grandeur, the greatness and the vastness, the incompressibility of what this human life is everyday.

And when I said it on that Tuesday, the day of Columbine was, "If either of those two kids thought there was a single thing in the world -- a word, an idea, a song, a rock group, a movie, a bird, a person, a religion -- if there was a single thing in the world that either of those kids thought was beautiful, noble or sacred, they never could have done what they did."

And then I just realized with a shudder, "Oh my God. Not everybody is out killing their schoolmates, but is it possible that tens of millions of Americans don't feel they have any time for beautiful, noble or sacred?"

I the vicious crushing pace of this life about wanting stuff and getting stuff and having stuff and using stuff and buying stuff and then of course replacing stuff, repairing stuff, protecting stuff defending stuff, you know? It's so vicious. It's anti-life.

I think that's what Mister Rogers meant when he told me, "I feel so strongly that deep and simple are far, far more essential than shallow and complex." I think that's what Mister Rogers was talking about when he talked with Amy Hollingsworth about Madaket sunsets.

The whole thing makes me feel sad, and makes me miss him.

One Of Us

I've listened to Joan Osborne's "One Of Us" nine times in the last hour. I'm not sure I can completely explain why.

I called Chris this morning.

"I didn't make any progress this weekend," I said.

"Me neither!" he laughed. "Don't worry about it!"

I do, of course, worry about it. We cut a three minute trailer last week, but it needs new VO (voice over), and a new audio edit (we're transitioning from acoustic to electric versions of "Summer's Gone"). But I've been "merging," building a new life here with Abbi. So I haven't writtern a new script, and my guitar's remained in the closet.
I worry about the film. I worry that, at this pace, I'll be forty before it's done. But, on days like today, I settle into the realization that it will work out as it should, when it should.

Because Fred may be gone, but his spirit is here. He's still bringing people together. Like cab driver Antoine Ilione and me.

I was at wits end by the time I hailed a cab at the corner of 80th & Columbus.

Moving has been death by a million paper cuts. Merging thirty plus years of material acquisition and two diverse aesthetics into one 750 square foot apartment requires some sacrifice. Whole bunches of stuff's been left behind: chairs, desks, futon frames, air conditioners. The five flights between my old apartment and the street haven't done much by way of motivating the move, but time is running out; the lease ends on Friday. And so tonight found me riding the Broadway line back to the Upper West one last time.

I stepped onto the deck just as the sun fell behind the hills of New Jersey. I paused to take it in one last time: the broad, blue sky brushed with wisps of cloud, the burnt red brick buildings glowing in the evening light. Intellectually, it struck me as an important moment, something meaningful and nostalgic. Emotionally, though, I was scarcely present. There was work to be done.

I have been hauling boxes up and down those five flights -- seventy stairs per trip -- for weeks now. Each time I drag a chair, or crate full of dishes, I wonder, 'Just how many times have you endured this torture?' Today I calculated. I lived at West 80th from November, 2004, through March, 2007. Twenty-eight months. Thirty days a month. At least 140 steps a day...

117,600 steps.

Let's imagine that each step is good for one foot (or twelve inches). That's roughly 24 miles. That's almost a marathon. That's nearly 1/3 of the way to outer space.

Couple the sad sight of my big, empty, dusty living room -- the place where I hosted parties, played shows, and spent at least a few of the last 720 days of my bachelorhood -- add in a fair shake of day job exhaustion, and the general melancholy that dusk brings, and, well...

I was at wits end by the time I hailed a cab at the corner of 80th & Columbus.

I've grabbed a hundred cabs there before. And tonight was no different. I strode out into the street just as the signal changed, waved down the nearest white light, and opened the door even as the vehicle came to a stop.

"56th & Ninth, please."

"Straight down, huh?"

"Yessir. Thank you."

I paused to decide whether to engage...

"How are you tonight, sir?" I asked.

My cabby --a gray haired, dark skinned, sixty-year-old man -- paused.

"Eh," he said. "So-so."

"Fair enough," I replied. "That's how you distinguish the good days."

"That's right," he said, laughing.

We could have left it there. Some days, a few minutes of quiet in the back of a cab is all you get. Other days, you need more.

"So how was you Easter?" he asked.

"Pizza and beer," I said callously leaving my melancholy to linger in the silence between us.

I looked out the window at Lincoln Center. Juliard was under construction. Well above it, the North Star shone like a beacon.

"Are you listening to WNYC?" I asked.

Cab driver Antoine Ilione and I spent just twenty-four blocks together. In that time -- seven or eight minutes, tops -- we transitioned from WNYC to NPR to Fred Rogers.

"He was good man," Antoine said in his thick, Senegalese accent. "No more like him now," he said earnestly.

In that seven or eight minutes, I felt deep inside of me the difference a random act of kindness can make.

On a day when everything seemed heavy, when the distance between things seemed greater than ever before, Antoine somehow reminded me the value of simple, human connection.

Stepping onto 56th and Ninth as I'd done so many times so many years before, I felt tears pooling in my eyes. Was it the cold wind blowing off the river? Or something else?

I've been listening to Joan Osborne's "One Of Us" a ton lately. I'm not sure why. It seems to fit my mood as I walk through the city, and as I ride the subways. Tonight, though, as I passed my old apartment and stepped towards the new, I wondered...

What if God is all of us?

And what if it takes 117,600 steps to even begin to reach the atmosphere, and Beyond?

Just like that, I begin to believe again.

The Call

Family Communications CEO Bill Isler just called.

We talked for about ten minutes. He was patient, warm, and candid.

In short (because we agreed to keep the conversation off the record, and I don't want to do anything to jeapordize the possibility of this documentary actually happening), he said neither yes nor no.

We hung up about five minutes ago. I'm still a little bit shaken. I have a ton of my heart invested in this project, so I'm worried about how well (or poorly) I represented our best intentions.

I called Chris right away, and re-capped the conversation.

"I'm not sure we moved much at all," I said. "I think he just has a better sense of the color of things."

Chris could tell I was rattled.

"Think about those guys who made 'Hoop Dreams,'" he said. "They spent eight years with those kids, and didn't even shoot any film until the third year. So don't worry about it, dude. You spoke your truth. That's all you can do."

So Chris and I are going to finish the second trailer early next week, and send it off to Bill and FCI along with a more fleshed-out "pitch." We'll go meet Davy Rothbart. And we'll continue to seek interviews. Next up: Katie Couric, Yo Yo Ma, and Michael Keaton.

The journey continues...

Lost & Found, Vol. II

Sometime after my mother's first summer as Fred and Joanne Rogers' neighbor, I sent him a copy of my debut CD, "Bloom." (Very) shortly thereafter, he sent me the following note (which I found as I prepare for this week's move).The note (which you can click to enlarge) reads:

Dear Benjamin Wagner,

What a treat you've given me! Thank you for your thoughtful letter and "Bloom." You describe the music well: "earnest," "sincere." Bravo Benjamin.

We loved our visits with your Mom in Nantucket. As you know, she is a mighty special lady. It's good to be her Real neighbor some of the year! Looking forward to meeting you in ACK some day soon!

Again my thanks.

Kindest personal regards.

Fred Rogers

Well, that pretty much sealed the deal. The following summer, I spent the weekend of my 30th birthday in Madaket, met Mister Rogers, and...

And here we are.

Lost & Found, Vol. I

Spring has broken outside. My windows are flung wide for the first time in months. The sun is streaming through the dust, unsettled by having hauled all of my belongings out in the open. In just a few days, I'll leave this apartment on the Upper West Side, and move in with Abbi at 56th and Tenth.

Today, then, I am sifting through old notebooks, tapes, and photos. Which is how I came across this one. I am sitting in Westwind, the small cottage my mother rented on Madaket, just a few minutes before walking across the dune to meet Mister Rogers.

Actual Email, Vol. 2

Benjamin:

The current issue of Vanity Fair features pictorials of past
presidential staffs...

"Several current-day TV-news personalities sent us their regrets: Bill
Moyers (Johnson's press secretary) and Diane Sawyer and Roger Ailes
(both of whom had worked for Nixon). ABC's George Stephanopoulos, a
senior adviser to Bill Clinton, agreed to pose but had a last-minute
travel glitch. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, a White House fellow and
aide to Johnson, withdrew from two planned photo sessions."

If Moyers is turning down VF, I certainly wouldn't be offended by his
reticence regarding your project.

Keep plowing ahead!

All the best,

Magnus

Editor's note: Thanks Magnus!

Coming Soon: Trailer Two

Life really does happen in fits and starts, doesn't it? It often feels like Chris and I are crawling along with this project, and then all of a sudden we take a few big steps forwards.

I just screaned (and sent notes) on the first pass at our second trailer. And it looks fantastic. It looks like an actual documentary film.

Chris has a colleague at Sony, Paul Rachman, who's shot and edited a few docs, including the recent Slamdance premiere, "American Hardcore". Paul's given us a few tips, namely to a) hit the September Sundance deadline and b) show as little footage as possible prior to the premiere. Both have been guiding tenants.

But I still have some selling to do. Specifically, I need to get more than Mrs. Rogers' verbal blessing. I need to get Mr. Rogers' foundation, Family Communications', written approval. And as you'll recall, getting them -- specifically, FCI President Bill Isler -- on the phone (excepting Fred's former assistant, Elain Lynch, who is always quick with a conversation), is no easy task. (After a few months repite, I commenced my phone campaign yesterday.)

So I wanted to give them (and, by extension, you) something to demonstrate our progress (not to mention the reverence and committment with which we're approaching the project). And while I can't show youo that something quite yet, I can tell you that it features appearences from Tim Russert, Susan Stamberg, Marc Brown and Linda Ellerbee intercut with beautiful footage of Nantucket (much of which I'd never seen, as Chris spent an afternoon last summer shooting on his own). The tone is great, the commentary warm and insightful, and the conclusion... well, stay tuned.