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.
—Garrison Keillor
A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION
The Screenplay
OPENING TITLES
A still picture of Minnesota countryside with a radio tower, its beacon flashing.
RADIO VOICES (OFF CAMERA—O.C.)
Market reports today: barrows and gilts 220
to 260 pounds are lower at 40 dollars. Sows
are steady 300 to 500 pounds, 34 to 37 dollars.
Going over to the feeder cattle . . . beef steers
120 to 150 dollars are 200 to 300 . . .
(FADES)
The way I like to do it is I take one can of
cream of mushroom soup and then one
package of egg noodles. I like the egg
noodles better than the Italian ones. I like to
put . . .
(FADES)
If we look at what the Lord said in the Book
of Revelation . . . you can be sure that there’s
a price to pay for the way of the flesh . . . and
that price will be paid . . .
(FADES)
And here’s the windup and the pitch. And
it’s . . . two and two, two and two . . .
(FADES)
Before you just say, Honey, I think we have to
have some couple’s counseling, I mean . . .
we have problems, I can’t leave a cup there
for . . .
(FADES)
RADIO VOICES (O.C.) (CONT’D)
All right, it’s time for traffic on the fives and
let’s find out what’s going on with your
drive. Let’s go to Chopper. Chopper, what’s
happening?
(SEGUES TO)
Alright, we got a fifteen-minute wait at 494:
there’s an accident working at the spaghetti
junction. 694/Silverlake Road a very slow go.
Back to you . . .
1 EXTERIOR (EXT.) DOWNTOWN ST. PAUL—NIGHT
The Cathedral of St. Paul, lit, on a high hill over the city, a grand Romanesque dome with cupola beacon. The camera pulls back from the dome to a rain-slicked sidewalk on a downtown street, traffic passing, and cranks around to show Mickey’s Diner, a railroad-car diner with bright marquee, windows lit, and a lone patron at the counter, GUY NOIR, in profile, drinking coffee, a counterman scraping the grill, back to the camera.
GUY NOIR (VOICE-OVER—V.O.)
A quiet night in a city that knows how to
keep its secrets, but one man is still looking
for the answers to life’s persistent questions.
That’s me. Or it used to be.
GUY NOIR stands and picks up the check, fishes in his pockets for money to pay.
GUY NOIR (V.O.)
It was a rainy Saturday night in St. Paul and I
had just finished off a grilled cheese
sandwich with beans for a chaser and it was
time to head for work across the street.
2 EXT. DOWNTOWN ST. PAUL—NIGHT
GUY NOIR emerges from Mickey’s Diner and crosses the wet pavement toward the camera.
GUY NOIR (V.O.)
I’m a private eye. Noir ’s the name. Guy Noir.
But I had taken temporary employment
about six years before doing security
for a radio show called A Prairie Home
Companion—on account of a serious cash-flow
problem due to a lack of missing
heiresses and dead tycoons lying in the
solarium
with lipstick stains on their
smoking jackets. In other words, I was
broke.
CUT TO:
3 EXT. DOWNTOWN ST. PAUL—NIGHT
GUY NOIR walking north on Wabasha, turns right at the corner and we see the marquee of the Fitzgerald Theater. He stops.
GUY NOIR (V.O.)
This radio show was done out of an old
theater called the Fitzgerald and it’d been on
the air since Jesus was in the third grade but
it was still pulling in a few hundred people
on Saturday nights. It was a live radio variety
show, the kind that died fifty years ago, but
somebody forgot to tell them. Until this
night. A big corporation down in Texas
had bought up the radio station and their
axeman, a guy named Cruett, was on his way
to St. Paul to shut the thing down and turn
the theater into a parking lot. It was curtains
and everybody knew it but nobody said so.
GUY NOIR (V.O.) (CONT’D)
They were Midwesterners. They felt like, if
you ignore bad news, it might go away. Not
my philosophy, but I’m not from here. Stay
on the edge of the crowd, keep your eyes
open, that’s my motto. It was my last night of
gainful employment for a while and I had a
feeling it was maybe going to be interesting.
4 EXT. FITZGERALD THEATER—NIGHT
A lively four-hand piano piece, “Dr. Wang,” FADES IN:
As GUY NOIR wends his way through the crowd in front of the Fitzgerald, standing, talking, smoking, waiting for friends.
WOMAN (V.O.)
I thought she was older than that.
2ND WOMAN (V.O.)
She is older. Those pictures are retouched.
Airbrushed. All of them.
The camera pans picture posters on the front of the theater, of Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, Chuck Akers, Dusty and Lefty, Garrison Keillor, and Jearlyn Steele.
WOMAN (V.O.)
I didn’t know they did that.
2ND WOMAN (V.O.)
Yeah, they all do that. They always did.
5 INTERIOR (INT.) FITZGERALD WINGS—SAME TIME
The stage, viewed from above. The front curtain is down. A row of six microphones downstage, and an announcer’s lectern with a microphone hung over it. A stagehand is taping down the microphone cords. At the piano sit two pianists, one in tuxedo and one in jumpsuit, playing “Dr. Wang”—the show’s pianist and a stagehand. Musicians are assembling, arranging sheet music on stands, standing in little groups, talking. Four stagehands wheel the large Prairie Home house set into place as a Powdermilk Biscuit drop is lowered into position over the piano. A production assistant is setting out music on the music stands of the bandstand. A guitarist is tuning. A woman comes out with an armload of music and sets it on the piano as the musicians play.
6 INT. FITZGERALD WINGS—SAME TIME
CHUCK AKERS stands in the wings, in jeans and a cowboy shirt, holding a guitar by the neck, facing us.
CHUCK AKERS
Would you mind taking my picture?
He hands a small digital camera past the camera and poses for a moment.
CHUCK AKERS
—It’s the button on the front.
He poses, smiles. There is a flash.
CHUCK AKERS
Thanks. Take another one.—Hey, Evie! Come
over here. Come on, angel. Don’t fuss about
your hair.
The camera pans quickly to the LUNCH LADY standing nearby, who ducks, covers her face. She is short, plump, fiftyish, in jeans and an apron. A STAGEHAND standing next to her takes her by the shoulders, preventing escape.
CHUCK AKERS (V.O.)
Come here and take a picture with me and
make my wife jealous.
CHUCK AKERS and the LUNCH LADY stand side by side, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist, smiling, in the flash of a camera.
STAGEHAND 1 (V.O.)
I’ve told these people a hundred times not to
yank on the microphone—if you want to take
it off the stand, you squeeze the clip, the
microphone comes right out—and what do
they do? Yank on it.
7 INT. FITZGERALD THEATER—SAME TIME
STAGEHAND is replacing the clip on a microphone stand.
STAGEHAND 1 (CONT’D)
The clip works fine if you squeeze it. How
hard is that? You yank on it, you’re gonna
bust it.
He finishes his repair and walks away.
STAGE MANAGER (ON P.A.)
Ladies and gentlemen, the house is open and
this is your fifteen-minute call. Fifteen
minutes to showtime. Fifteen minutes.
The STAGE MANAGER, a tall man in an ill-fitting suit, clicks off the intercom mic. He stands at a large illuminated lectern, just behind the proscenium. It is almost as big as a drafting table. This is the command post for the broadcast. A large black leather-bound script book lies open on it. Phone numbers are scrawled on it, Post-it notes are attached, a wiring schematic. Two black telephones are attached to the side of it and an outline of the show, written out in Magic Marker, is taped to the wall above it. A gooseneck lamp extends down from the wall, too, and a big studio clock, analog, with a bright red second hand, and a digital countdown clock. His assistant, MOLLY, stands next to him. She is young and pregnant.
STAGE MANAGER
How many duct tapes I got?
MOLLY
Two duct tapes, one Powdermilk Biscuit,
a coffee, a ketchup, and the Federated
Association of Organizations. That’s the first
half hour.
STAGE MANAGER
Where’s the announcer?
MOLLY
He’s in makeup.
STAGE MANAGER
About fifteen years too late. Where’s my
pencil? I just put it down here.—Don’t stand
up close to me, okay? Sorry. I don’t like to be
crowded. I’m like a rat in a coffee can as it is.
(TO SOMEONE IN THE DISTANCE)
Don’t leave that there!!! Get it out of
there!!!—Jesus.
MOLLY
It’ll be just fine, Al.
STAGE MANAGER
I spend my life looking for a pencil I had in
my hand ten seconds ago—
MOLLY
It’s in your pocket. Right here.
STAGE MANAGER
Don’t crowd me. Okay?—Could we get a
band onstage? What do we have to do—send
out engraved invitations or what?
He reaches into a drawer for a bottle of antacid tablets, shakes out a handful, chews them. CHUCK AKERS looks over his shoulder, in a cowboy shirt and hat, jeans, boots, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip.
CHUCK AKERS
What segment you got me in, Al?
STAGE MANAGER
Got you in the first ten minutes, Chuck. No
smoking, okay?
Beyond his desk, a little group of musicians laugh out loud, someone having just told a joke.
STAGE MANAGER
Keep it down, wouldja!!
STAGEHAND 2 crosses the stage in front of the bandstand, a ragged semicircle of music stands, microphones, and stools around the piano. The drummer climbs into his nest of drums, runs through some drum warm-up riffs, as a mandolinist with a fiddle under his arm walks onstage. MOLLY crosses the stage, wearing a headset, an armload of papers in hand, some under one arm, some held in her mouth, passing out sheets to members of the band, stagehands, collating as she goes. Musicians circulate in the wings, tuning, talking, primping in a mirror, playing.
The audience can be heard as it arrives in the house.
STAGE M
ANAGER (O.C.)
Molly? Get Dusty and Lefty up here.—Would
you mind carrying on your love life
somewhere else? Huh?
STAGEHAND 2 (O.C.)
Al, can we do something about people
yanking the microphones out of the clips?
STAGE MANAGER (O.C.)
Don’t talk to me, okay?
CUT TO:
8 STAGE—CONTINUOUS
STAGEHAND opens the curtain slightly and we see through the crack the audience filing in, milling, moving to and fro, the seats about half full.
LEFTY (O.C.)
How long you been doing this?
GARRISON KEILLOR (GK) (O.C.)
Doing what? Taking off my pants?
LEFTY (O.C.)
How long you been doing radio?
GK (O.C.)
Oh. Well—
CUT TO:
9 INT. MAKEUP ROOM—SAME TIME
Prairie Home Companion, A (movie tie-in) Page 2