Creative Person; Fred Rogers

WQED (Television station : Pittsburgh, Pa.) · October 8, 1967

Fred Rogers is a television phenomenon. He is a 39-year-old ordained minister, an educator, graduate musician, and a quiet, gentle, unselfconscious young man who possesses a mysterious and quite remarkable attraction for pre-school children. When his daily half-hour program, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," was threatened with cancellation for lack of funds last spring in Boston, station WGBH-TV was deluged with protests. When Rogers himself made a personal appearance there, 6,000 pint-sized fans turned out to see him. Since then, Rogers' program (a composite of songs, conversation, puppet neighbors, and people neighbors, palatable lessons and ideas) has attracted a Sears-Roebuck Foundation grant and will be a regular five-day-a-week children's feature on NET stations across the country this season. This Creative Person film shows the man behind "Mister Rogers'," the television personality. Rogers is visited at his home, is seen at the studio rehearsing his television program and observed working with study groups. He talks about his feelings towards his own two children and explains his intense desire to find a means of communicating with children honestly on their own terms. Creative Person: Fred Rogers was produced for National Educational Television by its Pittsburgh affiliate, WQED-TV. (Description adapted from documents in the NET Microfiche) This series focuses on the private vision of the creative person. Each program is devoted to a 20th century artist whose special qualities of imagination, taste, originality, intelligence, craftsmanship, and individuality have marked him as a pace-setter in his field. These artists --- whose fields span the entire gamut of the art world --- include filmmaker Jean Renoir, poet John Ciardi, industrial designer Raymond Loewy, Hollywood producer-director King Vidor, noted Broadway couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, artist Leonard Baskin, humorist James Thurber, satirist Robert Osborn, Indian musician Ravi Shankar, poet P. G. Wodehouse, painter Georges Braque, former ballet star Olga Spessivtzeva, Rudolf Bing, and Marni Nixon. The format for each program has been geared to the individual featured; Performance, interview, and documentary technique are employed interchangeably. The Creative Person is a 1965 production of National Educational Television. The N.E.T. producers are Jack Sameth, Jac Venza, Lane Slate, Thomas Slevin, Brice Howard, Craig Gilbert, and Jim Perrin. (Description adapted from documents in the NET Microfiche)