A Prairie Home Companion by Garrison Keillor

Author:Garrison Keillor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

ROBIN and LINDA join GK onstage.

GK

Hey.

ROBIN & LINDA

Hey yourself.

Or words to that effect. And New York asked, “Who they?” “Robin and Linda Williams,” I said. “Are those characters or are those real people?” New York asked. “Both,” I said. I did the same with Jearlyn Steele.

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

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