A Prairie Home Companion

[MacGuffin]

'A Prairie Home Companion'
Lindsay Lohan and other big names move into Lake Wobegon.
Source: Los Angeles Times

Robert Altman comes full circle with his latest film, "A Prairie Home Companion," which opens June 9. The ensemble comedy with music is based on Garrison Keillor's homespun 31-year-old radio show from American Public Media.

The veteran filmmaker, 81, began his career as a radio show writer. "This was in California," says Altman, who received an honorary Oscar this year. "I was experimenting and trying to write. I did one script for 'A Man Called X' — Herbert Marshall's series. I sold some other pieces. Then television raised its ugly head and wiped radio out. I went into industrial and documentary film."
 
The folksy Keillor and Altman happen to share the same attorney. "I was in Chicago shooting 'The Company,' a dance film, and our lawyer came to me and said, 'Garrison would love to talk to you. He'd like to make a movie.' We had dinner in Chicago."

Originally, Keillor wanted to make a film about Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota hometown he brings vividly to life on the radio show.

"He's just a genius, you know," says Altman of Keillor. "I got to thinking about why don't we do his show. And that is what we did."

Shot at the home of "A Prairie Home Companion" — the jewel-box Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., the film follows the fictional final broadcast of the series — the radio station has been bought up by a Texas company that is tearing down the theater to put up a parking lot.

Keillor's GK doesn't want to make a big deal about the show ending. But his cast is upset.

Besides Keillor, who comes across as a sort of hulking Jimmy Stewart, the movie features Kevin Kline as a dapper but klutzy Guy Noir, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as the singing sister duo Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, Lindsay Lohan as Yolanda's pessimistic daughter, John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, and Virginia Madsen as the angel of death.

Altman says it wasn't difficult to bring a radio show to life for the big screen. "His show is not just a radio show," says Altman. "There is always an audience, so it is played for an audience."

[MacGuffin]

A Little Synergy on the 'Prairie'
Garrison Keillor's voice fuses with Robert Altman's vision as the homey radio hit "A Prairie Home Companion" goes Hollywood.
Source: Los Angeles Times



For 30 years, Garrison Keillor has spent his Saturday nights putting on an old-fashioned radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," the live variety program heard nationwide by 4 million listeners. But while building an institution by raising Midwestern self-deprecation and subversively folksy tongue-in-cheek storytelling to an art form, he's been harboring celluloid dreams — which is how his base at the Fitzgerald Theater was transformed last summer into the set of Robert Altman's latest film, "A Prairie Home Companion," opening June 9.

"This has been my ambition for years, to write for a dramatic medium," Keillor said. "Because I'm no good at it, and one aspires to do what one cannot do. I still have a hard time writing dialogue, because I come from people who didn't talk. We sat and chewed our food, looked out the window."

Keillor originally approached Altman with the idea of making a movie based on the characters of Lake Wobegon, the mythical Minnesota town where much of his storytelling is based, after a development deal at Disney fell apart. But after Altman and his wife, Katherine, a longtime Keillor fan, attended a live taping of "A Prairie Home Companion" on one of its regular tours across the country (it'll be at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday), the 81-year-old Altman decided that he'd rather make a movie about the onstage drama and backstage dynamics surrounding the making of a radio show. As he did in his last film, "The Company" (2003), a faux documentary about a season in the life of a troupe modeled after Chicago's Joffrey Ballet, Altman wanted to immortalize an ephemeral art form on screen.

So Keillor, 63, imagined a last night in the life of a program much like his own, "turning the show inside out" by writing a scenario based on real and imagined "Prairie Home Companion" personalities. Writing a fictional documentary about himself was, Keillor said, "an odd assignment. But I was intrigued by the idea. And I was 60 years old. When you're 60, you kind of think to yourself, 'This chance may not come again.' "

Regulars Sue Scott and Tim Russell play a fictional makeup artist and a stage manager, respectively. Regular chanteuse Jearlyn Steele plays herself. Dusty and Lefty, the singing cowboys — character sketches incarnated on the radio by Keillor himself — are reborn in the hilarious duo of Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly. "Prairie Home Companion" icon Guy Noir is now the theater's hapless security guard, played by Kevin Kline in 1940s attire. And central to the story are country music sisters Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) and Yolanda's daughter, Lola (Lindsay Lohan). The show's live audiences were replaced here by local volunteers.

All but two scenes were shot inside the Fitzgerald, which had been only lightly art-directed for its screen debut.

"The whole movie is inside — this is all in Keillor's mind," Altman said on a shooting break, sitting in a golf cart on the sidewalk outside the stage door that served as his way station in the 97-degree heat. "This has gotta be his humor, his tempo. I can't make up my own jokes. This is really about Garrison Keillor and his sense of humanity and his sensibility and his politics. All I'm doing is coming in and interpreting it. This guy's been in charge for 30 years. He has never, ever not been fully in charge of everything, except this movie. I have to see that he is in charge."

"No, he's the master of this world," Keillor insisted later from a glass-encased VIP lounge at the back of the theater that had been built by the art department for a scene in which Tommy Lee Jones — playing a broadcasting executive — comes to shut down the show. "Bob has an amazing, specific vision. He's here painting his picture with some materials that I've provided. But he has the upper hand and so, you know, that's good to know, so we don't have to fight. We know who makes the final cut."

This was how two of America's most singular voices found a common language, each calling the other one boss and going about his work. "They're two great forces coexisting," said Richard Dworksy, the house music director, who improvises onstage while Keillor performs, and a local boy whose parents owned the theater until 1983. "There's very courteous diplomacy going on."

"Keillor and Altman are a real natural combination," said Reilly, still in cowboy get-up. "There's something similar in the fabric of 'Prairie Home Companion' and some of the more well-known Altman movies — where there's a group of people, one comes in, one comes out and there's humor in it that's based on the acceptance of humanity and all its flaws and eccentricities. There's a kind of guiding ethic to the way they do the show, but it's also sort of chaotic. And that's very much Bob's sense of 'What are we gonna do? We're gonna find what happens in that moment and I'm gonna capture it and it won't be pushed or forced until the life goes out of it.' "

Creator's license

KEILLOR is known for rewriting right up until airtime, and much of the shoot involved Altman allowing him to hold forth from his stage, loomingly tall, in red tie and sneakers, while the house band jammed behind him and he and a rotating crew sang songs and jingles, told jokes and stories from the American heartland.

"Let's come in here now with a word about catchup," Keillor said in his homespun voice, delivering a service announcement for the fictional Catchup Advisory Board. "Yes, catchup — made from tomatoes that contain natural sunshine, which we need in this part of the country.... We come from people who brought us up to believe that life is a struggle — and if you should ever feel really happy, be patient — this will pass."

Then Altman yelled "Cut!" from the back of the theater. "That was great, Garrison," he said. "Let's try that one more time." Keillor improvised another take.

"I'm a writer, and there are times when I'm very proprietary about what I have written," Keillor said. "But there are scenes which, although I did write them, I'm glad to see them kind of smudged. Bob's very good at smudging. So the dialogue is kind of overlapping and a lot of things are going on and your sentences are kind of set into a flow of things that is actually a good fate for them. Had they been spoken like lines from Shakespeare, everyone would have seen that it wasn't Shakespeare."

Keillor has spoofed himself in the bumbling alter ego of G.K. "I am not playing myself exactly," he said, adding that his Hollywood dreams did not include acting. "Well, I mean I went along with it, but I certainly tried to get out of it. My hope was to write words that other people could say, and then I could sit in the dark and watch them. I wanted somebody else to play me."

Who, exactly?

"Well, George Clooney, of course," he said. "I couldn't really give myself much to do in the screenplay, knowing what little I was capable of — I couldn't have myself fall down the stairs, or burst into tears. We shot a scene and Lindsay was weeping. She did something to herself that produced tears. I wouldn't know how to do it. I don't cry in real life so how would I do it in a movie?"

The local press had its knickers in a bit of a twist about the celebrity onslaught, reporting Streep sightings in the Marshall Field's and the restaurant habits of the cast. But not even the presence of tabloid staple Lohan did much to disturb life in the quiet city of F. Scott Fitzgerald's birth. Downtown, Starbucks opens at 5:30 in the morning and closes by 6 p.m. and solitary homeless people drift like tumbleweeds down empty sidewalks. On St. Peter Street one evening at twilight, the only other living creature on the sidewalk was a rabbit.

But Mickey's Diner at 7th and St. Peter is always open, and the filmmakers couldn't resist using the camera-ready 1930s greasy spoon as a location. "It was an Edward Hopper scene," Keillor said of one shot where Kline sits alone at the counter. "When I saw what a beautiful shot Bob made over at Mickey's, I started to think maybe I'd made a big mistake in locking him up in this building."

Keillor had finished shooting for the day and changed into jeans, which did little to lend him a casual air. For all the coziness of his on-air persona, there is an awkwardness about his person — his stature makes it hard for most people to look him in the eyes, and he seems never to slip out of character.

The extras had gone home and Altman's director's chair had been moved onto the stage for a scene in the wings with Kline and Virginia Madsen (here as a dark angel in a white trench coat, haunting the wings). "I can't remember what prompted this, but in an early stage of development, Bob said, 'The death of an old man is not a tragedy,' " Keillor remembered. "I don't think he was referring to himself. But that just stuck with me. I asked for permission to write an angel into the script, and he gave it on the condition that there be no aura."

"Look at that — that's a picture," Keillor continued in a confidential hush, deflecting attention to the white-haired Altman, a pale, distant figure in the Caravaggio-esque house light, surrounded by silhouettes of the crew. "He's in his own world up there — the world of moviemaking. To the extent that I'm responsible for giving him something to work on that he's really enthused about, I feel as if I've done a good deed in a dark world."

One night after shooting, Altman gathered a nonexclusive mob of cast, crew, family and friends for wine, beer, pizza and a glimpse of the work in progress — an Altman tradition. On-screen, Harrelson and Reilly did a musical bad joke routine, Streep and Tomlin sang sweetly, Kline became the flesh and blood of Guy Noir, and through Altman's lens Keillor was both his oddly charming self and a suddenly probable leading man.

Scenes from this meditation on little guys and big corporations, God and country, the passing of time and the end of an era — in which the angel of death is a femme fatale, dangerous and beautiful and never far — were rendered all the more poignant by the specter of Altman himself, looking finally mortal in his ninth decade on Earth.

Those assembled laughed and cheered and burst into spontaneous applause, and tears. The lights went up and Altman looked around with the stricken air of someone who wasn't taking anything for granted.

"I needed a story, and that seemed to me to be the most honest story," Keillor said, pointing out that his own show died once in 1987 before being resurrected a few years later.

"So there is some aspect of truth to this. Every show does come to an end."

[MacGuffin]

Altman and Keillor on Charlie Rose here.

[MacGuffin]

Altman admits to nerves ahead of "Prairie Home"

He is 81 years old, has an honorary Oscar and 50 years of television and classic movies like "MASH" behind him, but director Robert Altman admits he still gets a case of nerves ahead of a film debut.

His latest movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," hits theaters on Friday. Reviews are mostly good and the cast, which includes Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline and teen idol Lindsay Lohan, is stellar.

But the film, which is based on Garrison Keillor's long-running radio show of the same name, covers the difficult subject of death, and Altman noted the movie likely will not draw the young fans for whom Hollywood's studios hunger.

"I'm scared shitless. I get very sensitive about reviews and what people have said," Altman said. "As long as I've been doing this, I still take it personally. I don't know why. I guess that's just my nature."

The reaction to "Prairie Home Companion" is made even that much more personal for Altman, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, because he grew up listening to old radio dramas, and his first job in entertainment was writing for radio.

"Prairie Home Companion" laments the passing of radio and tells people to laugh a little in the face of death. One question audiences may have is whether Altman was contemplating his own life and death when making "Prairie Home Companion."

But the director of classic films such as "Nashville," "The Player" and "Short Cuts," laughs at that suggestion.

"You'll know which (movie) is the career capper for me when you read about my death," he said.

Altman plans to begin shooting this fall a new movie, a fictional story about 24 people competing to win a car.

RECREATING RADIO

"Prairie Home Companion" attempts to recreate Keillor's radio show, which draws some 4.3 million listeners weekly on U.S. public broadcasting stations.

The program takes place in front of a live audience from its home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and blends country music, folksy jokes, Depression-era advertising jingles and common sense wisdom about current issues and popular culture.

The movie's structure is fairly unique as it combines elements of Keillor's real show with a fictional tale taking place behind-the-scenes after a big company has purchased the radio station and plans to shut down the show.

On the radio program's final night, characters like the singing Johnson sisters, Yolanda and Rhonda (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin), and comic cowboys Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), are forced to contemplate their future. Lohan portrays Yolanda's daughter Lola, who represents a new generation of kids.

The veteran director lamented that fans of Lohan, 19, likely would not see her in "Prairie Home Companion" because the movie doesn't have the special effects and car crashes that today's kids seem to most enjoy in summer movies.

"Her audience is not going to understand our film," he said. But actor Reilly, 41, gave younger audiences more credit.

"The format of the show may pretend to be old, but it's very topical at the same time," he said. "Garrison doesn't steer away from the realities of modern life, and I think that's cool."

[SiliasRuby]

A Real Masterpiece. I loved every moment and I really wanted more. The songs that dusty and lefty are priceless, especially the bad jokes song. Man, really captured radio and what the rush of theatre is like.

[matt35mm]

Yes, this was pretty solid.  These characters, their interactions with each other, and their performances will linger in the mind--they all seem to exist for longer than the running time of the film.

It's warm and comforting, and involving.  You can see that one thing that Kellior and Altman most have in common is extremely sharp minds.  They each can juggle a million things at the same time with such grace and precision.  Kellior manages so many things in this film, and never makes a jerky or rushed movement; never loses his cool.  I'll bet Altman is the same way.  I have a strong respect for that ability.

And I normally don't make many comments on technical stuff, because I think that almost the worst thing you can say about a movie is that it looked nice or had neat camera angles, but the film's use of mirrors and other reflections were profoundly, profoundly impressive.  Perhaps I don't mind saying that because I feel like it is more than just technical show off, but a real extension of the... the character of the film, really.  The always moving camera, roaming around, picking up everything from every angle simultaneously through a series of beautiful reflections.

It's comfort food, and that's mm, mmm good.

[Pozer]

Anyone pick up the free promotional DVD from Best Buy?  It's got a little behind the scenes deal where PT shows up in like every other clip - Mouth twitching and all.

[modage]

no but they had a few scenes of that on the HBO First Look

[Reinhold]

i saw this today. it was a pleasure to watch.

[samsong]

as skillfully and beautifully crafted as any altman movie but i feel like this is Diet Altman, maybe because he's about to DIE, which in turn is what makes me want to like this movie more--its sense of mortality.  altman always struck me as anartist who stumbled upon fortune without aspiring for it, oblivious to his own talents.  here i think he recognizes that the road is coming to an end, and he sees no better way to meet it than by making fun of it with his friends.  garrison keillor, you should be my grandpa.  ed lachman's a great and underappreciated cinematographer.  it's a nice movie.

i end with this: lindsay lohan for best supporing actress.

[Sal]

ADMIN EDIT:  SPOILER!!!!!










I would have been perfectly content watching the radio show performed by a lot of different talented actors, but they went ahead and muddled it!  Actually the premise for a backstage murder is kind of cool, but it was too maudlin for my taste.  The whole guardian angel thing shoulda stayed on the cutting room floor.  Otherwise, this was an alright time.

[Reinhold]

SPOILER ^

[cine]

^^^^^^^^^ SPOILER UP THERE WATCH OUT GANG^^^^^^^^^^^




so i saw this yesterday and i laughed a lot. i really didnt even expect it to be that funny. but i think the bigger mainstream cast helped. tom waits and lyle lovett were slated to play the singing cowboys but it went to woody harrelson and john c. reilly.. now i don't know about you, but the dialogue and lyrics they got in that movie.. there is NO WAY waits and lovett would've made it funnier. so i'm glad this beefed up the cast, it did wonders for the movie.

this will be the best movie of the year for me.

so long altman. 

[Gold Trumpet]

Spoilers
A Prairie Home Companion is disappointing. I went into the film knowing nothing of the radio show and knowing everything about Robert Altman and the sad fact is I got what I expected. Half of the film is a performance film of the radio show (mostly entertaining) and the other half is the backstage jibe amongst the cast and crew. Altman has a few signatures to his style and one is rambling conversation that allows everyone on screen to talk at the same time. The technique is a signature of eliciting realism. The great thing with using it is that the realism can throw off conventional storytelling at the right time. When he first used this technique in M.A.S.H, he mainly used it during the operating scenes and a few other scenes like the mock Last Supper. It was great because it kept the movie off balance and while the characterization could have been bland the movie became memorable because some parts felt improvised. The main thing with this technique (which became known as Altman-esque) was that he was not basing the entire movie off it. Actually, for his other major films in the 70s like McCabe and Mrs Miller and California Split, he only used it sparingly. 

The problem with Altman is that he started to allow that technique to take over his films. It allowed a lot of his films to ramble on to little or no point. Or sometimes it rambled on to directly the wrong point. Case in point is Gosford Park. The film was an ode to Renoir's The Rules of the Game, but the problem with that film is that it had no sense of character that Renoir's film based itself on. The first hour of Gosford Park is a whirl wind of character introductions from the ruling class to the servants and just based on their menial conversations. Altman almost did that to show he could manage all those elements technically, but he was severing himself from the needed focus for the story. The focus of technical abilities over a character study was an elitist approach that was incapable of achieving the character insight needed. As the movie went on, it tried to illustrate similar ideas and insights that Renoir achieved but Atlman fails at. Robert Altman even referenced Renoir in every interview for the film as inspiration. I just can't believe he truly had Renoir in mind while making it.

With A Prairie Home Companion, Altman allows the camera to follow all the stories in the same way. Its just yet again the conversations are all so menial that they feel like they were picked randomly and are indicative of no larger themes. The performance is the last broadcast for the radio show but many of the actors reminiscence on small things as they would before any show. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin's conversations aren't very interesting and drift off into odd subjects of little point. The argument against this criticism is their conversations are real. Sorry, this is a film. A film is created and edited to be interesting. The only character who serves as a memorial to the memory and meaning of the radio show is a dubious character in the Angel who can be seen by some characters and not others for no reason. She has one scene where she remembers what the radio show meant to her and it barely scratches the surface of anything meaningful. Her character is an add in for a story that has no idea where it is going beyond the performance piece. She has too many questions about her and resolves too many problems in the story too easily. The main problem she resolves of Tommy Lee Jone's character of the big business man. His character is so one sided it is only indicative of how hollow this story is. He comes in as the true bad guy and says lines that are so canned and false and indicative of the cliche of the businessman type. Tommy Lee Jones had to just pose for that performance.

In the end, I came in knowing nothing about the radio show and I left feeling like I truly knew little more. It could be wrong of me to lay blame into Altman for the script and the direction of the story since he did not write this, but he has not written hardly any of his films ever. He has had input though in his stories. In 1994, Pauline Kael commented on Robert Altman in an interview that reveals the situation of his relationship with writers when he did The Player: "The book [The Player] is about how writers are mistreated, and Robert Altman is notoriously not interested in writers or fidelity to writers. He turned it into an amused satire of Hollywood." Not only did he turn it into a satire, but did so with the original author contributing to the screenplay as well. One has to imagine Garrison Keiller was also writing to the personality and interests of Robert Altman. Arthur C. Clarke was the author of the novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but only after Kubrick approved each chapter while making the movie.

Another sad fact is that Altman works with great actors here. They all do fine but they all have so very little to do. The major exception is Lindsay Lohan who was terrible. Her performance was nothing more than a contribution of poses and facial reactions to everyone else on screen. When she ever spoke, her pitch hardly radiated above her limited ranges. She even spent most of film slouched in a chair looking down as if she was playing the role of a stage hand to all the other actors who were really contributing.

[JG]

Its just yet again the conversations are all so menial that they feel like they were picked randomly and are indicative of no larger themes.

i haven't seen the film yet so i can't comment specifically on any particular scene or the movie as a whole, but i feel in general "altman-esque" dialogue is not so much used for thematic implications as it is to just create a general emotion or feeling.  I would even disagree with you when you say that his dialogue is primarily useful because it derails any sense of conventional storytelling.  yes, its a "signature of eliciting realism"  but i wouldn't say its much more than that.  i've always felt with altman that its not what they say, but how they're saying it; therefore, the conversations don't really need to be about anything more than meaningless conversation..