Foreword

A Prairie Home Companion is the product of Garrison Keillor ’s genius. He created it and nurtured it for thirty-some years before I got lucky enough to join him, along with our remarkable cast.

What a great chance this was. It was particularly dear to me because A Prairie Home Companion is radio, a medium I grew up on and plain adore. And because Garrison was such a generous host. (This is evident on his show: one of the program’s great charms is that, every week, Garrison makes you feel entirely at home.) The film crew and I moved into the Fitzgerald Theater, from which the show has been broadcast for years, met Garrison’s two stalwart actors of a thousand voices, Sue Scott and Tim Russell, his St. Paul sound-effects man, Tom Keith, and the musicians with whom he works every week, the formidable Guys’ All-Star Shoe Band, and we went to work.

This script was the blueprint that guided us; its tone, its voice, is Garrison’s. On the page you’ll find characters that fans of the radio show have known for years (Dusty, Lefty, Guy Noir) and characters that Garrison created out of whole cloth for the picture (the Johnson Girls and Lola; the Dangerous Woman; the Axeman; and the very pregnant assistant stage manager, Molly). Garrison loves to tinker, and he retooled scenes as we shot, endlessly responding to our progress (or lack of same), to what happened the day before, to our cast. But what he did first—and it’s evident here from page one—is cast a spell. A script is a kind of incantation that summons up a world and that suggests a way to proceed. We were so fortunate in making this picture, most notably in our spectacular cast, and in the almost unreasonable amount of fun we had working together. Our luck started here.

 

—Robert Altman