A Prairie Film Companion

By By Christopher Porterfield

Robert Altman is getting ready to shoot the climactic production number of his new movie, tentatively titled The Last Broadcast. On the stage of the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., technicians and musicians jostle with actors decked out for such roles as a radio host, a country-music singer, a rope-twirling cowboy, a 1940s-era private eye and the Angel of Death. "O.K.," Altman booms, "let's see what we can do with this ... this mess. I'm just going to sit here and watch." Before the cameras roll, he adds, not entirely jokingly, "Everybody fend for themselves!"

Making a Robert Altman movie is a leap into the unknown for everyone involved, including Altman. Oh, sure, there's a script--in this case by Garrison Keillor, who based it closely on A Prairie Home Companion, the public-radio hit he has presided over since 1974. But Altman is notorious for treating a script as merely a series of signposts. In films from M*A*S*H to Nashville to Gosford Park, he has thrived on improvisation, spontaneity, happy accidents. "What I'm looking for is occurrence, truthful human behavior," he says. "We've got a kind of road map, and we're making it up as we travel along."

Actors thrive on this approach too. The production attracted such names as Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin (who play a country-music sister act and really sing), teen tabloid queen Lindsay Lohan (Streep's daughter), Kevin Kline (Guy Noir, the private-eye character on Companion) and Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly (Companion's singing cowboys, Dusty and Lefty).

Keillor, who plays himself, originally intended to focus on Lake Wobegon, the imaginary small town that forms the backdrop to Companion. But Altman wanted a fictional documentary about the show itself, with nearly all the action confined to the theater and its backstage environs where the characters' raffish private lives unfold. So goodbye, Lake Wobegon.

In an early draft, Keillor sketched a fizzled romance between his character and Streep's, then later cut it. But when Streep arrived on the set, she said she had based her whole character on the earlier version. Fine--the romance was back in. Keillor planned to make Lohan's character a failed songwriter on the fringes of the show. But before shooting began, he read a newspaper interview in which Lohan said she was going to play Streep's daughter. "I thought, Well, sure. Of course. Gives it a new wrinkle," Keillor recalls. Enter Lohan the daughter.

Expectations were that Altman would take Companion's mixture of sentiment and gentle satire and make it moodier and darker. Not so, says Keillor. "I made it darker, by introducing the conceit of the last show." In the movie, the show has been sold to a conglomerate, whose axman (Tommy Lee Jones) arrives at the end of the broadcast to shut it down. No wonder the Angel of Death (Virginia Madsen) is gliding through the theater's wings.

Altman films busy scenes in unusually long, fluid takes of five or six minutes with three, sometimes four, cameras running simultaneously. His cinematographer, Ed Lachman, says it's "like performing free-form jazz." At Altman's elbow during last month's shooting was his friend and fellow director Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia), standing by at the insurance company's behest in case anything happened to Altman, 80.

The actors play what Streep calls "the truth of the scene" rather than Keillor's exact lines. Streep says that Tomlin "wrestled lines to the ground, strangled them to death, then picked up the pieces and made something different." To which Tomlin replies, "Meryl's pretty free-mouthed herself. We fell into a pattern of finishing each other's thoughts. It's like tennis--we were in the game together."

To Lohan, 19, the game was "scary but really cool." She found that Streep was so deeply in character that she treated Lohan maternally even off camera. "Lindsay, my baby!" was her greeting when they met. In Lohan's first scene with Streep and Tomlin, she says, "I just went with it, and soon I was crying and they were crying. You can bring out so many emotions when you're interacting spontaneously."

Whether audiences will go with it when the movie is released early next year, no one knows, least of all Altman. "When I go home at night, I know we've got something, but I don't know what," he says. "It's going to be a very weird movie." Keillor is content, praising the improv-minded actors for raising his script "from the limp pasta that it was." Besides, he's already looking ahead to his next project. He has a great idea for a screenplay about a town called Lake Wobegon.