Prairie Home Companion, A (movie tie-in)

I wanted the movie to be called Savage Love and have Palominos in it and the Mississippi and lilacs and a violinist named Lil. I hadn’t fleshed out all the details, just the basics—“She didn’t want to go to him. She knew how it would end. And yet she was intoxicated by his voice on the phone when he said ‘Why don’t you slide on over here and bring your fiddle?’—she repeated it to herself as she rode Beauty along the riverbank and galloped the last hundred yards and gracefully cleared the lilac bushes and landed in his front yard.”—but as you may know by now, I lost that argument. Mr. Altman wanted to make a movie about life backstage at a Saturday night radio show, so that is what I set out to do.

I’ve been doing a Saturday night radio show called A Prairie Home Companion since 1974, as it so happens. It began as a knock-off of The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville and since has transmogrified into a loose amalgam of the Opry, Fred Allen, Lux Mystery Theater, Let’s Pretend, and Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Gang. It started in April 1974, in Minneapolis, at the Walker Art Center, under the sponsorship of Suzanne Weil, and went on the air in August over Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. It’s been around ever since, except for a three-year sabbatical in the late eighties.

The name of the show comes from a cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota, established in 1875 by the Norwegians who had settled there in the Red River Valley. They had expected to stay for a few years, make some money, and then return to Norway, or go on to California, or Oregon, or any place other than this godforsaken, windswept, treeless plain, but then a young lawyer named John Elmer drowned in the Sheyenne River, and his brother Oscar decided not to ship the body back East to New York where the two of them had started out but to bury it in Moorhead. John had suffered from “nervous difficulty” and his brother suspected suicide. Somehow this tragedy made up Oscar ’s mind to stay—Norwegians can be contrary that way—and he founded Our Prairie Home Cemetery and put his brother in it.

This story appealed to me—Norwegians establishing a graveyard as a sign that they intended to stick around—so I took the name and stuck “Companion” on it as a dark joke. Radio was sort of my Moorhead. I hadn’t much respect for it. I thought radio people were pretty glib and shallow. I was a writer, not a performer, and radio announcing was a temporary day job until I could finish a novel. I had one in the works about a small town in Minnesota, but it languished and then I lost the manuscript in the train station in Portland, Oregon. And meanwhile I went to Nashville and sat in the balcony of Ryman Auditorium and watched the Opry, the ladies in sequins, the red-barn backdrop, the haze of cigarette smoke, the flashbulbs, the announcer in his funeral suit, and decided to steal the idea and transplant it up North. A haphazard career choice. I had no idea what I was getting into, and that was good because I had poor judgment: if I’d thought harder, I would’ve made the wrong decision. Only impulse could have saved me. And the impulse to start up a show as complicated as this, with musicians and an audience and all, was my way of telling myself that I intended to settle down in radio and not move on.

Of course there were Hollywood temptations along the way. In 1985, the book Lake Wobegon Days was published and director Sydney Pollack invited me to write a screenplay and we tramped around small towns in Stearns County for a few days, talking about moviemaking. (He talked and I listened.) It all seemed so easy. For a year afterward, I tried to write scenes based on the book and everything fizzled. Five years later, the director Patricia Birch asked me to write a screenplay based on a monologue from the radio show about a boy who loves a rock ’n’ roll band called Mammoth, and that project went into development at Disney for a couple years and then sank when a big executive left the company. He was our patron and we got dropped. Miss Birch then took the idea to Miramax and I got to sit in a tiny office in Tribeca and pitch the story to Mr. Harvey Weinstein, who did not crack a smile. The story was hilarious when I walked into the room and then became dramatically less so as I told it to him. A few years later, the director Michael Winterbotham invited me to write a screenplay version of my novel Wobegon Boy and I did and it was much less faithful to the book than he wanted it to be and that project faded to black. Three movie projects, zero movies.

And then Mr. Altman came along with his idea of writing a backstage drama. He came to see a few shows—one in New York, one at a big Methodist tabernacle in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and one at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul—and that, for some reason, convinced him that there absolutely was a movie here. He loved the band, the show’s actors, the sound-effects man, the semi-chaos onstage, the stagehands coming and going. All that was needed was a script. “And that,” he said grandly, “I leave to you.”

Life backstage at A Prairie Home Companion is hardly a maelstrom of bitter conflict and raw emotion. Minnesota is a state of low-maintenance people and everyone backstage has a job to do and there isn’t time for big scenes. We’ve had our share of big stars on the show—Taj Mahal, Renee Fleming, Randy Newman, Willie and Percy Humphries, Faith Prince, Doc Watson, Sam Bush, the Fairfield Four, Manhattan Transfer, the Juilliard String Quartet, Bryn Terfel, Spider John Koerner, Sarah Jessica Parker, Leo Kottke, the Everly Brothers, Yo-Yo Ma, Chet Atkins and Jethro Burns, Midori, Willie Nelson—but I don’t recall anybody stalking around and pitching a fit. One time the piano was locked and we had to find a janitor. A couple times, the power has gone out. There have been intoxicated musicians. There have been love affairs. There have been blizzards. One in Birming-ham, Alabama, as a matter of fact. Once a boy in the first row threw up during my monologue. He was sick, his mother explained to me later.

I wrote a first draft in which a radio show is being filmed by a documentary crew who brings in a truckload of gear and whose lights blow a fuse at the theater and meanwhile the radio show goes on in the dark. This appealed to me—a blackout in a movie—but not to Mr. Altman. I wrote another draft in which a singer who has gone on to become a big star writing cheesy patriotic anthems returns to the show and whom the stagehands consider a jerk and try to sabotage. And then I created a couple of singing sisters, the Johnson Girls, who are the remnant of a larger sister act and who have survived a series of mishaps in the music business. I sent the script to Mr. Altman who said, “I think you’ve got something there.” And before I’d written much more, he’d talked Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin into playing the roles. “Meryl is a terrific singer,” he said. “And Lily will learn.”

Mr. Altman was a very courtly collaborator. Writing was my business, he said, and he kept his comments to a minimum. His business was casting. I took the detective Guy Noir (whom I play on the real Prairie Home Companion) and made him a character in the screenplay, a security man, and Mr. Altman considered a number of actors, looking for a heavyset one, and suddenly the elegant Kevin Kline walked into the picture. I brought in the radio cowboys Dusty and Lefty and Mr. Altman chewed on that for a while. And then Lindsay Lohan lobbied him for a role and he said yes, though I hadn’t written one for her yet—I guess it’s called pre-casting—and one day I read in the paper that she’d said in an interview that she’d be playing Meryl Streep’s daughter. So I created a daughter, named Lola (after the character in Damn Yankees who sings, “What Lola Wants, Lola Gets”). I am the sort of writer who thrives on assignments. A blank slate makes me crazy, but if you tell me what you want and give me a deadline, I’m happy.

The script kept changing through the fall of 2004 and the winter—I added a singer named Chuck Akers, which was a name Chet Atkins used on the road to register under at hotels, and I had him die backstage. (I remembered our old drummer Red Maddock telling me backstage, with a big grin on his face, that he hoped he would die while he was playing, and I remembered my horror at the thought.) I had a character called Dangerous Woman who started out a crazy listener who thought the announcer was in love with her and turned into an addled songwriter auditioning for a spot on the show and then—lightbulb lights!—the angel of death, a beautiful woman who is sometimes visible to other characters, sometimes not. “Okay to put a supernatural being in?” I e-mailed Mr. Altman. “Okay, but no special lighting effects,” he replied.

Over the winter, the script got to where Mr. Altman felt he was ready to shoot it, and then his production company set out to look for investors. He is an independent who has worked in big studios and outside of them, plowing forward no matter what, surviving his successes, weathering the exigencies of the trade, defying movie business trends, and now the real job began—finding people who wanted to invest five or six million dollars in a script written by an amateur for an eighty-year-old director. Meanwhile, I kept revising. I put in more songs, more radio commercials. I put in the announcer, pulling his pants on, trying to tell a story about how he got into radio and being interrupted by others. (I wrote the part for George Clooney who I thought was interested and who moviegoers would have enjoyed watching put his pants on, but Mr. Altman let me know that he had cast me in the role. “People will be disappointed if you’re not in it,” he explained. I explained that other people might be disappointed if I was in it. He prevailed.)

Mr. Altman kept casting the parts from New York as the characters popped up—and late in the game, I figured out how I could get my pals into the movie. I wrote them in by name. (Duh.) For example:

ROBIN and LINDA join GK onstage.

I was still rewriting the screenplay when Mr. Altman and his crew moved into the St. Paul Hotel in June 2005 and truckloads of camera and lighting gear started unloading in the alley behind the Fitzgerald Theater. I had done a wheelchair version of the script a couple weeks before when it appeared that Meryl Streep, after recent knee surgery, might not be ambulatory, and then she called to say she was fit and ready to dance, so I dehandicapped the screenplay, and then Mr. Altman decided to add a noirish opening scene at Mickey’s Diner with Kevin Kline doing a voice-over, so that needed to be written, and meanwhile the crew was turning our old theater into a studio, laying down tracks for the cameras and setting up a big camera boom and getting ready to start shooting. Mr. Altman did not flinch when I told him that I still had some changes to make, though one of the producers blanched. I’d never made a movie before so I had no idea that you couldn’t keep on changing things right up to the last minute. But Mr. Altman, who had made a lot of movies, didn’t know you couldn’t do that either.

I met Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin at the Fitzgerald the Sunday night before shooting started. They had been rehearsing songs and they wanted me to hear them. Meryl wore a red skirt and poofy white blouse and Lily was in jeans and denim jacket. They claimed to be nervous and flounced around and got all girlish and then launched in. Meryl sang lead, Lily alto, and the harmonies were the duet harmonies I remember from church. It was stunning to watch them do this and to think that actors were going to bring to life all of this stuff I’d written. It made me want to go back and rewrite the whole thing.

I left town for a week’s tour out East with the radio show and got daily reports on how well the first scenes with Meryl and Lily and Lindsay Lohan had gone, which I distrusted. People in show business are always telling you how great something was when you yourself know it was only marvelously adequate.

When I got back to St. Paul, a makeup trailer was parked on Exchange Street and a commissary wagon where you could walk up to a window and order an omelet and pour yourself a cup of coffee. And there, sitting on the steps, eating breakfast, were a dozen old pals of mine from early radio days who had been signed up as extras in the movie. Old veterans of the Powdermilk Biscuit Band and the Brandy Snifters and Peter Ostroushko and Butch Thompson. I walked into the theater and the lobby was a warehouse of lighting gear and camera tracks and the prop master had set up shop in the atrium. Production assistants were buzzing around, and one of them led me upstairs to a dressing room and there was my black suit and white shirt and red tie and red socks and shoes. She handed me three pages of script, the day’s shoot, and there was my name. As an actor. My debut (gulp). And a sort of chasm opened at my feet. You could (I thought to myself) become a synonym in the movie business for One Who Makes a Fool of Himself.

The next four weeks went quickly. I got to sing a duet with Meryl, which I foolishly looked at on video playback—she is luminous, beautiful, bursting with cinematic feeling, and I look like a guy brought in off the street as a stand-in—and while I was recovering from that, she grabbed me by the hand and danced me around and planted a smacker on my lips. I did a scene with Lindsay in which she rose from a chair and walked over, her eyes brimming with tears, and accused me of being a jerk. I had written her lines but nonetheless she made them sting. We did the scene six times and each time her eyes brimmed and the lines stung me to the quick. I did a nice scene with Virginia Madsen in which I chewed an apple. Kevin Kline admired my chewing and felt it was evocative and, in its own way, brilliant. And almost every day I reported to the Fitzgerald with rewritten scenes in hand. “Are those for today?” the producer said, turning white. “Bob asked me to do it,” I said, which was a lie, but I’m good at that, having had years of practice. So the changes got put in.

One day Lindsay handed me the shooting script for the next day and said, “You aren’t going to make me say all that, are you?” She was right: I’d stuck her with a whole page of exposition, a big lump of essay. So I went home and rewrote it into a scene. She was happy. They shot it. It went well.

It’s unprofessional for the screenwriter to lurk around a movie shoot and snatch scripts out of people’s hands and scratch out lines and write in new ones. A movie shoot is like an invasion and requires vast detailed planning in order to get the work done on time and stay on budget. The last thing a director needs is a screenplay that keeps changing. But who said I’m professional? Not me. And once you get on a set and see how the actors move and what a scene looks like on film, you learn things about your story you couldn’t have figured out sitting in a dim room with your laptop. And so I kept revising. A scene disappeared, in which Meryl and Lily and Kevin and I are walking down the street in the dark after the show, looking at the Fitzgerald over our shoulders, the back doors open, light flooding out, Lindsay inside onstage dancing. It would’ve taken hours to set up, hours to shoot, and it added nothing to the story. Out it went. In between scenes, Kevin sometimes sat and played the piano, which he does rather well, so I wrote him a scene in which Guy Noir sits and noodles and sings a few lines from Robert Herrick, with a bust of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the piano. Why not?

The last thing to get written was the title. The working title through the end of the shoot was The Last Broadcast and then, months later, Mr. Altman told me that he would prefer to call it A Prairie Home Companion. But that’s the name of my radio show, I said. In the movie the show dies. In real life it continues, Lord willing. I wouldn’t want the show’s audience to be confused about that. The show ended once, back in 1987, and once is enough. “I just like the title,” said Mr. Altman. We were sitting in his office in New York with all of his movie posters on the walls—Nashville; M*A*S*H.; McCabe & Mrs. Miller; The Player; Gosford Park; Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; Popeye; Cookie’s Fortune; Kansas City—and midtown Manhattan out the window and he was halfway done with editing the thing and feeling pleased with it so far and apologetic about some good stuff he had had to cut. That was a new experience for me, being apologized to by a famous movie director for snipping out some dialogue of mine. I was touched. “Okay by me,” I said. And that was the end of it. And now it’s in print and this really is the end of it.

People ask me if I like the movie and of course I say yes. There are so many fine acting turns in it, wonderful stuff to look at, and Mr. Altman knows how to make a movie move. But I would love to rewrite the whole thing. Sometimes I imagine it’s 3 AM on a Sunday morning in July, the crew is shooting at Mickey’s on St. Peter and 7th Street in downtown St. Paul, a stagehand is hosing down the street, Bobby is working the big boom camera, Vebe is marshaling everybody for the next take, Mr. Altman and his wife Kathryn are watching a video monitor, Meryl Streep has just kissed everybody good-bye (“I don’t want you to have any fun without me!” she cries), and now Kevin is rehearsing a Hopperesque scene, sitting at the counter of the diner, walking to the cash register, putting on his hat, coming out the door, striking a match, lighting a cigarette, and walking across the rain-streaked pavement toward the camera. No dialogue. But I imagine him saying to me, “Write me a line.” And I do. I’d be happy too. Let me sit down here for a minute with a pencil and paper and I’ll come up with something.