Word: altmans
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...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...
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...
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...
...warned: this is not the Altman of M * A * S * H and Nashville, the funky satirist with an ear for low-life Americana. It is the European Altman, who in Images and 3 Women and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean threw sensitive women into the nightmare zone between past and present, reality and fantasy. In Fool for Love, he situates May's sad childhood literally next door to her fated present and sets Eddie's monologue memories colliding with the flashback images that accompany them. You can have some cerebral fun with this game...