Welcome mat at the door

ROBERT ALTMAN comes full circle with his latest film, “A Prairie Home Companion,” which opens June 9. The ensemble comedy with music is based on Garrison Keillor’s homespun 31-year-old radio show from American Public Media.

The veteran filmmaker, 81, began his career as a radio show writer. “This was in California,” says Altman, who received an honorary Oscar this year. “I was experimenting and trying to write. I did one script for ‘A Man Called X’ -- Herbert Marshall’s series. I sold some other pieces. Then television raised its ugly head and wiped radio out. I went into industrial and documentary film.”

The folksy Keillor and Altman happen to share the same attorney. “I was in Chicago shooting ‘The Company,’ a dance film, and our lawyer came to me and said, ‘Garrison would love to talk to you. He’d like to make a movie.’ We had dinner in Chicago.”

Originally, Keillor wanted to make a film about Lake Wobegon, the fictional Minnesota hometown he brings vividly to life on the radio show.

“He’s just a genius, you know,” says Altman of Keillor. “I got to thinking about why don’t we do his show. And that is what we did.”

Shot at the home of “A Prairie Home Companion” -- the jewel-box Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minn., the film follows the fictional final broadcast of the series -- the radio station has been bought up by a Texas company that is tearing down the theater to put up a parking lot.

Keillor’s GK doesn’t want to make a big deal about the show ending. But his cast is upset.

Besides Keillor, who comes across as a sort of hulking Jimmy Stewart, the movie features Kevin Kline as a dapper but klutzy Guy Noir, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin as the singing sister duo Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, Lindsay Lohan as Yolanda’s pessimistic daughter, John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson as singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty, and Virginia Madsen as the angel of death.

Altman says it wasn’t difficult to bring a radio show to life for the big screen. “His show is not just a radio show,” says Altman. “There is always an audience, so it is played for an audience.”

-- Susan King