Carl Kurlander's "My Tale of Two Cities" will open its theatrical run at the SouthSide Works Cinema today and have a special screening for "Won't You Be My Neighbor? Day" celebrating volunteerism and the late Fred Rogers.

David Newell, Mr. McFeely on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," will be among the guests participating in the event tonight at 7:30 along with Mr. Kurlander, Cyril Wecht, former mayoral candidate Franco Dok Harris, Holy Family Institute employees and others in the film.

Patrons can watch the movie (regular ticket price applies) and stay for a chat afterward.

"We want to talk about what individuals can do to give back to their community," Mr. Kurlander said. "To really say to people, look, tomorrow's Fred's birthday, put on your sweater and let's talk about what everybody can do."

On what would have been Mr. Rogers' 82nd birthday, the United Way of Allegheny County and Family Communications Inc. are encouraging people to go beyond a single day of volunteering and weave service into the fabric of their lives. FCI is the nonprofit company founded by Mr. Rogers in 1971 to produce "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

"What we really want to do is have every United Way volunteer stand up and say what did you do," Mr. Kurlander says. "This whole movie has been about people giving back to their community."

Mr. Kurlander, now teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the founders of the Steeltown Entertainment Project, is known as the writer of "St. Elmo's Fire" and a TV writer-producer of such hits as "Saved by the Bell."

Mr. Kurlander, who once lived above the Sunset Strip in Hollywood with his wife and their young daughter, moved the family to Pittsburgh, only to find his hometown was struggling to reinvent itself just as he was. The movie's tagline, which does double duty, proclaims, "It's never too late to come back."

"My Tale," which found a distributor since its one-time showing in late 2008 at the Byham Theater, recently played in Milwaukee, Windsor, Ontario, and Santa Fe. Its bookings straddle the entertainment and business-civic pride worlds.

On Tuesday, it will screen at the new U.S. Capitol Visitor Center and it is booked for the Del Ray Beach Film Festival this month. It will play a Tempe, Ariz., commercial theater in late April and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in July.

Like anyone in the entertainment industry who studies box-office figures the way Steeler fans size up draft prospects, Mr. Kurlander (and his distributor) want the movie to attract patrons. "I hate to say it, if people don't show up to support the movie in Pittsburgh this next week, I don't know how we can go to Boston and say, bet on this movie."

But he also sees it as part of a larger cinematic call to arms for Pittsburgh to make entertainment the way it once made steel and to launch a discussion on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border.

During the Winter Olympics, the Windsor Star newspaper had a photo of Sidney Crosby above the masthead and one of Mr. Kurlander in the lower right plugging his appearance and movie "with a message Windsor can learn from."

The story, headlined "Believing in Ourselves," was stripped across five columns of the movie page and noted: "Pittsburgh two decades ago was where Windsor finds itself now, reeling from the collapse of its economic mainstay -- there and then, it was Big Steel, here and now, it's Big Three Auto."

Mr. Kurlander says, "Why do 400 people show up on the Canadian Olympic hockey night, on a wet night, and sit there for two hours, half the audience afterward asking me questions about Pittsburgh?"

Many believe in the power of Pittsburgh more than Pittsburghers do.

"It's all about changing the mentality. Without sounding like you're a grump, the hard thing is I love Pittsburgh but it's called 'My Tale of Two Cities' because it's the greatest city in the world and sometimes its own worst enemy."

But he says, "The underlying mission of the movie was to say, look, Mr. McFeely showed us what we make in this world and we're not going to make steel like we used to ... we have to find new things to make."

And that could be movies, TV shows, video games, Web-based entertainment and other forms of media. As Mr. Kurlander says, "You need to make something in Pittsburgh that goes around the world. Mister Rogers did that, George Romero did that."

Tickets will be available at the door or can be ordered from www.movietickets.com. Mr. Kurlander also will appear before the 9:30 p.m. show today and at the 7:30 and 9:30 shows Saturday night at the SouthSide Works Cinema. For more information, see www. mytaleoftwocities.com.

• Actor Edi Gathegi will be in Pittsburgh (location not being disclosed in advance) today for the DVD release of "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," in which he plays the nomadic vampire Laurent.

His appearance is in connection with DVD release parties being held at select stores featuring contests, giveaways, limited edition merchandise and the chance to buy the movie at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. Among the retailers participating are Best Buy stores on McKnight Road in Ross, on Alicia Drive in Bethel Park and in Cranberry. For other party locations, go to www.twilightthemovie.com/ and plug in your ZIP code.

• Dormont's Hollywood Theater will show "The Red Baron," about the crack pilot of the German aerial combat forces during World War I, three times this weekend.

The movie stars Matthias Schweighofer, Joseph Fiennes, Lena Headey and Til Schweiger. It will play at 7 p.m. today and Saturday, along with 4:30 p.m. Sunday.

• This week's Indies on Indies series at the Hollywood Theater will have a Pittsburgh flavor. "Prometheus Triumphant," from Mad Monkey Productions, will screen at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, 7 p.m. Monday and 9:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Filmmakers Mike McKown and Jim Towns started out making a modest short in spring 2003 in Pittsburgh and completed shooting six years and $4,000 later. Creators, cast and crew "suffered through interminable delays, rugged and sometimes dangerous shooting locations, brutal weather and last-minute casting and script changes," the filmmakers say.

"Prometheus Triumphant," set against the backdrop of a plague in Bezirksstadt, is about a disfigured young doctor who loses the woman he loves to illness. He exhumes her body and tries to use a device capable of reanimating dead tissue to bring her back.

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