Author: Peter Schilling

Tom Letness could cease his never-ending renovation of the Heights Theatre, in Columbia Heights, and it would remain the finest movie house in the Twin Cities, bar none. Yet he keeps fiddling with it. He knows its history inside and out—from a bombing back in the late twenties at the hands of a disgruntled former projectionist, to its dark days as an ugly second-run theater. As the theater’s current owner, operator, and sometimes beleaguered caretaker, he’s also familiar with all its quirks and charms in its present-day incarnation. Letness didn’t have to dig out the orchestra pit or hire an organist, but he did. He didn’t have to put 152 hand-painted reproduction Edison Mazda bulbs in the chandeliers, but he did. Bringing in the Wurlitzer organ and finding someone to play the thing wasn’t easy, but he did it.

Letness, who bears a striking resemblance to a young John Malkovich, is often fused to his cell phone, trying to set up appointments with inspectors or scheduling future events, sometimes involving vintage films and even, on occasion, an appearance by an aging star. Letness speaks of the Heights with the weary pride of someone who loves what he’s doing but has long since lost his naiveté. “This is a lot easier to talk about now that most of the renovation’s done and we’re headed in the right direction,” he said with a sigh. He shook his head. “Strangers often come up to me and say they have this dream to open a movie theater and what advice can I give them. I tell them the truth. And the truth is, it’s not easy.”

Letness typically works twelve-hour days, seven days a week. He lives in a tasteful, relatively sound-proof apartment above the theater that gives him a bird’s-eye view of his renovated Dairy Queen next door. He begins each morning with a quick walk with the dog, then coffee at a local café, often in the company of a publicist, a journalist, or someone else vital to spreading the gospel of the theater. Around 10:00 a.m., he’ll meet with Chuck Merrell, a maintenance man, to go over projects—the old theater requires a tremendous amount of upkeep. Letness also tinkers around the theater himself, climbing scaffolds for ceiling repairs, cleaning up from the previous night’s screenings, in addition to conducting all of the business work—and also scurrying next door to handle the occasional ice cream crisis. He also consolidates the multiple reels of a new film into one giant reel and threads it into the projector, which he maintains. “I handle the pictures with kid gloves, unlike other places,” he scoffed. “You get a quality print at the Heights.” Around 3:00 p.m., he’ll prep for the first show of the night, throw open the doors, sell tickets, and personally start the picture about 5:00 p.m.

“My employee,” Letness said, stressing the singular as if to drive home his lonely venture, “arrives around 6:00, and I help him get ready for the next show.”

At times, he can become irritable about some patrons. “Oh, I’ve thrown people out. I look at it like you’re in my house. Don’t talk during the movie. Turn your cell phone off. Pick up your garbage. We have this lovely little announcement beforehand, with a mother telling her kids to be polite, and yet people still are rude. Do I have to go up there myself and ask them to be quiet during the show?”

For the most part, though, Letness loves his audience and it loves him. “For me, it’s the little things—like when that curtain rises before a film, there’s a wonderful feeling. And I remember one kid before a Harry Potter film seeing those curtains and asking me, ‘Is this the play or the movie?’” Letness rolled his eyes, and despite his obvious pleasure at pleasing the kiddies, the skeptic momentarily displaced the romantic. “Yeah, kid,” he growled sarcastically, “it’s the play.”

The Heights could screen the typical Cineplex garbage, but instead, Letness insists on bringing in what he believes is quality Hollywood fare and, every now and then, classics like Oklahoma! or White Christmas (this year he has already lined up Bing Crosby’s widow to croon beforehand). And sometimes he’ll indulge his taste for films like It Started With Eve, an old and virtually forgotten Deanna Durbin flick from 1941. “One of my favorites,” he admitted. “That’s one of the joys of the Heights—I know that if I didn’t show that film, no one else would.” —Peter Schilling

Like any budding artisan, Omar Ansari spoke with great pride when he offered a visitor a taste of his creation. “Try that,” he said, pulling a shot of Furious Ale from one of the giant stainless steel tanks. “What do you think?”

I think the Surly Brewing Company, the Twin Cities’ newest producer of craft beer, is on to something. Its name derives from the notion that one becomes surly when offered a mediocre beer. Furious Ale is a beaut: With each sip your tongue is greeted with a sweet malt flavor that is almost immediately chased by an astringent hoppiness, which lingers like a pleasant daydream. When asked if he thinks there’s a market around here for yet another microbrew, Ansari answered without hesitation: “Oh, we can always use more beer!”

Thanks in part to his shoulder-length black hair, Ansari has the soft, friendly look of a surfer who’s finally settled down. He often said things like, “Let’s see, Sam was four months old when I had the idea, and two and a half when I bought this place … ”—one of many instances in which he used the age of his children as a timeline. Ansari’s story is essentially the same as many other specialty brewers: He received a homebrew kit as a gift one Christmas and over the next ten years saw his hobby turn into a roaring obsession, which eventually morphed into a business plan. “You know what they say,” Ansari said, “Give a man a beer, he’ll waste an hour. Teach him to brew, he’ll waste a lifetime.”

The Surly Brewing Company is located in a nondescript little concrete block building in Brooklyn Center. (It is unaffiliated with Surly Bikes, in Bloomington—though they are mutual admirers.) From the outside, the place looks like just another bunker in a beleaguered temp-worker wasteland. The Surly headquarters features a wall of multicolored graffiti, a potholed parking lot, and bland, fading signage for the Ansari family business, Sparky Abrasives, which shares the space with the new brewery. Once inside, however, you’re greeted with what will eventually be the bar and tasting area, where the glow of a neon Surly beer sign shines off the new linoleum tiles in gold and crimson, the brewery’s colors. Back in what used to be a large, long storage room are rows of stainless steel vats, copper piping and big yellow signs warning of the presence of acid. On one wall a shelf of five- and fifteen-gallon kegs rises to the ceiling. Toolboxes and welding equipment are scattered about, along with an old whiskey barrel (for future cask-aged ales) and, languishing in a corner, Ansari’s old homebrewing supplies, a pile of plastic pipes and tubs.

Ansari negotiated this mess like a seasoned pro as we spoke. As one might expect, starting a brewery wasn’t easy. “The biggest, and most surprising, difficulty was trying to find all this equipment,” Ansari explained, gesturing around the room. Apparently, given the prohibitive expense, few microbrewers can afford to buy their equipment new. Small breweries come and go, however, and when they go, upstarts like Surly can acquire pretty much everything they need—from brew kettles to fermenters—secondhand. One of Ansari’s associates eventually discovered a defunct brewery in the Dominican Republic. Apparently, the machinery was originally sold to the second-richest guy on the island, who tried to set up his son in business. This enterprise failed in short order, and Surly bought the works and hauled it all up to Brooklyn Center.

Before he could start brewing, Ansari also had to arrange a change in the city’s laws. Since the 1950s an ordinance had been on the books that prohibited brewery operations within the city limits. That made sense sixty years ago, when a brewery typically produced millions of barrels a year, sucked water by the trainload, and belched enough sewage to fill a small lake. In those days, of course, there was no such thing as a microbrewery. After a pleasant meeting with local commissioners—one of whom was a homebrewer himself—the law was changed to accommodate Surly.

Todd Haug is Ansari’s head brewer. He is a short, taciturn man, with more than a dozen years of brewing experience. When asked where his recipes came from, he shrugged and pointed at his noggin. “Made it up in my head,” he said. Not only is Haug responsible for making sure the beer is of the finest quality, he is also Surly’s mechanical man, and welded and assembled most of the brewery’s machinery. “My hobbies are welding and fabricating,” he mumbled before disappearing behind the pipes and giant silver barrels. Ansari rolled his eyes and said, “I was told that if you ever find a brewer who’s also into welding, never let him go. I’ll never let him go!”

For now, Surly will brew only two beers, and focus entirely on kegs (bottling would take up a tremendous amount of space). Ansari will use his big red truck to distribute the brew himself. A few restaurants and bars are already serving his beers, but he admits that it takes time to get tavern owners to agree to something they haven’t yet tasted. Without much of a staff besides himself and Haug, Ansari will hit the pavement, meeting tavern owners and plugging his product. “This is the best way to be a salesman,” he adds with a grin. “I’m not selling widgets, you know. I’m selling something people really care about, something I care about. It’s not like before. No one cares about abrasives. But people love beer!”—Peter Schilling

There’s usually no problem finding a good movie to see in the Twin Cities—between the imperiled Oak Street Cinema, the Heights, Walker Art Center, and Landmark Theatres, there’s plenty to choose from that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence or batter one with sound and C.G.I. Sometimes, though, you get the urge to shut down your brain and settle in with something genuinely awful. For the worst, most bizarre—and by their very nature obscure—movies in history, there is no better local source than Joel D. Stitzel’s Cinema Slop, the eccentric movie program that screens the second Tuesday of every month in the Dinkytowner Cafe.

“We present rare and unusual movies that aren’t commercially valuable,” Stitzel explains of his free program, now in its fourth year. “It’s questionable as to why people would release these in the first place.” The Cinema Slop curator’s taste for such ephemera was acquired at a young age, thanks largely to local pitchman Mel Jass’ Matinee Movie, a Channel 11 stalwart noteworthy for also forging the Coen brothers’ tastes. Jass was famous for wasting everyone’s Saturday afternoons with such fare as Project Moonbase and other sci-fi drivel. With the arrival of home video, Stitzel, like many film obsessives, began to build his own impressive library. Unlike other buffs, however, his collection is mostly made up of films that could not even properly be categorized as B-grade fare: This is the stuff that even remote gas-station video stores shy away from. Because of this, the pictures featured in Cinema Slop are often difficult to find. With the advent of eBay, the hunt has become somewhat easier but often more expensive, as collectors like Stitzel compete to acquire the strangest and most obscure titles.

It would be easy to look upon Cinema Slop as a sort of den of cinematic iniquity. Stitzel has, after all, shown such “masterpieces” as the Esperanto-language Incubus, starring William Shatner with his own hair (a novelty unto itself); Toomorrow, in which Olivia Newton-John is kidnapped by aliens because her rock band’s “vibrations” are needed to save their planet; and The Gong Show Movie, which needs no explanation at all. Before each feature (there are at least two each month), audiences are treated to odd shorts, cartoons, and sometimes bits of strange Japanese game shows.

Cinema Slop does manage to slip in some legitimate gems now and again. When this past year brought impressive DVD reissues of classic works by Robert Bresson and Jacques Demy, Stitzel screened films by the same directors that were left out of boxed sets and film festivals. Slop has also filled its nightly roster with works by Andy Warhol, had Joan-of-Arc themed nights (featuring Dreyer’s silent classic and Besson’s lackluster modern version), freaked out my own Zappa-loving brother with a screening of 200 Motels, and, at times, retreated into the comfort of Stitzel family favorites, like Wings of Desire and Séance for a Wet Afternoon. It is his program, after all.

But Cinema Slop’s usual fare is the film equivalent of a White Castle hamburger. Its clientele are often shaggy college students and backpack-wielding film fanatics looking for something out of the ordinary to pass the time or fuel their habit. The same rules apply in the Dinkytowner as in most theaters: Talk too loud and the surly crowd will bark its disapproval. Despite the “slop” in its title, you can’t watch a movie and have better food anywhere else in the Twin Cities. To my mind there’s not much more appealing than having a good BLT and a Newcastle Ale while enjoying Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr in Son of Dracula.

Primarily, though, there is a genuine pleasure in joining a like-minded crowd and seeing something like Night Train to Terror, a thoroughly misguided horror film that includes, sandwiched between the requisite nudity and gore, an earnest dialogue between God and Satan. The whole proposition leaves a little breathing room for your conscience—the production cost of these films is a tenth of what Jim Carrey makes in a more forgettable movie. Then there’s the pleasure of seeing something truly awful and knowing you couldn’t replicate it if you wanted to. It takes a certain genius to make one of the worst films ever—Ed Wood’s and Russ Meyer’s films, in my mind, are far more entertaining than anything Ron Howard has ever directed. Or consider the Oscar winners of the past. Wouldn’t you rather see the 1968 Japanese transvestite “classic” Black Lizard than Oliver! (the Best Picture winner from that same year)?

“This is sheer, stupid entertainment,” Stitzel claims with a wicked glee. “You can have the canonical works of Western culture, you can have the pap, but we show the stuff that falls through the cracks. If all you have is a top box office mentality, you aren’t going to get any spice in your life.”—Peter Schilling

If you need guidance in repairing the clutch in your ’57 Ford pickup, quieting your stuttering Edsel, or locating the lubrication specs for that turn-of-the-last-century Stanley Steamer in the garage, here’s a suggestion: Check out the Minneapolis Public Library. The Central Library downtown is the proud possessor of an automotive manual collection that is second in size only to Detroit’s. Considering that the libraries in that city are in dire financial straits, Minneapolis’ Automotive Manual Collection is probably the most accessible and well maintained on the planet.

Its provenance remains unknown. Suffice it to say, the collection was built slowly at first, in the early decades of the last century, when some librarian with an eye for modernizing decided to obtain both the glove-box manuals and the thicker, more technical repair tomes used by mechanics. The library’s holdings grew as the automobile exerted its presence throughout the country, and ultimately exploded in the car-crazy 1950s. Since then it has been vigilantly maintained. The most recent manuals are about two years old. There is obviously little use for a repair manual for a car under warranty.

On Saturday mornings an influx of patrons, almost exclusively men, queues up before the library opens in order to peruse volumes from the collection. “These guys are here to get answers for the questions that are taking up their weekends,” said Walt Johnson, a Patent and Trademark librarian who oversees the collection. These repair guides are not your typical Chilton manuals, but the same ones dealers and mechanics use. You could dismantle a car, literally from top to bottom, and rebuild it based on the information between the covers of these books. Because they’re expensive, often running more than a hundred dollars apiece, the library’s policy about adding to the collection is utilitarian: It acquires primers for popular models, such as Fords, GMs, and Hondas, while eschewing Maseratis or Hummers. “Those guys,” said Johnson, referring to owners of such exotic vehicles, “can hire people to fix their cars.” The collection also includes the fascinating Parts and Time Guide, which allows you to determine exactly how long it takes to remove and replace any automobile part, thus keeping time-padding mechanics honest.

Surprisingly, the manuals are in outstanding shape. They are crisp and clean—nothing like my dad’s old Chiltons, marred by greasy fingerprints, torn pages, and dog-eared corners. They’re also charming to look at, even for someone who can barely change a tire. The old owner’s manuals are delightfully earnest, thanking the buyer for his or her brilliant decision to purchase, say, the “Finer” DeSoto Six. “We have endeavored by illustration and diagram to make these instructions perfectly clear to everyone,” this manual boasts, and then proceeds to baffle with instructions for the simple act of locking the car door. The guide includes instructions for opening the front windshield with a crank, for cleaning the curtains (!) in the rear of the vehicle, and for using hand signals when turning or stopping, which must have been a joy in the winter. Some of the auto manuals are as small and sober as a Bible tract, with minimal information in an art-deco script. Included are advisements to refrain from driving your new automobile at more than forty miles per hour for the first hundred miles, fifty miles per hour over the next hundred, and no more than sixty miles per hour up to five hundred miles. After that, the sky’s the limit. And every manual before 1970 displays the automaker’s generous ninety-day, four-thousand-mile warranty.

Then there’s the whimsy of the cars themselves: the DeSoto; the Overland Whippet from Toledo; the Hudson Hornet, with its “Weather Eye” climate control system; the Flying Cloud, built by Reo in Lansing, Michigan; the Studebaker, manufactured in the “friendliest factory in the world!”; and my personal favorite, Hupp Motors’ Hupmobile, from the Motor City itself. Paint colors included Juneau gray, Bimini blue, and black. Not Nighthawk Black, like my 2004 Civic, but black. Just black.

Some of the collection’s most intriguing patrons come in to reference repair manuals for ancient tractors, from Fords to International Harvesters. Johnson has observed that the people who are working on old tractors aren’t just collectors, and they aren’t simply being frugal—they have an intense emotional attachment to these machines. He recalled riding an old Ford on his father’s Christmas tree farm. “This was back in the late sixties, when I was nine and ten years old, before all the land was developed up in the area around Big Lake and Zimmerman. I want to say it was a 1948 model, and we used that tractor nonstop from late spring until early winter. A few years ago I came across an old book in the collection that featured old Ford tractors and I got very nostalgic.”

The collection is amazing, really: a trip back in time, a tonic for those longing for the days of choke knobs and whitewall tires, a valuable reference tool for people who need more than Car Talk. For now, it is wintering in a basement at the temporary library, waiting for loving hands to shuttle it across the street to the new Central Library. Come May, when the library reopens, no doubt those Saturday-morning lines of do-it-yourself mechanics will be especially long.—Peter Schilling

Every year there’s a ritual in my house: My wife gathers all of her Jane Austen novels from the bookshelf and reads them in chronological order. Once that liturgy is complete, she devours all five hours of the landmark BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, or Bridget Jones’s Diary, the Laurence Olivier Pride, Bride and Prejudice, or one of the many other adaptations of her novels over the course of a long weekend. My wife is either devout or obsessed. I’m still not certain.

Then there’s my dentist. A real bookworm, she nonetheless loathes Jane Austen. In fact, while visiting London, she took a special trip with her eldest daughter—who shares this bitterness, especially after having to write a college essay on all six novels—to Winchester Cathedral, where Austen is buried. There, they both danced on her grave. And she was delighted to hear that had Mark Twain been alive to join them, he would have dug Austen up and, in his own words, “beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

Such passions are common when it comes to the bard of Hampshire and her works. While my wife and the legions of Janeites are in heaven, eagerly anticipating the newest film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, due in theaters this month, my dentist and her daughter (not to mention the spirit of Sam Clemens) must be particularly vexed. For this last decade has seen the cinematic market for Pride and Prejudice explode; with five variations released in the last five years alone, it’s a legitimate phenomenon and one that spans both space and time. If you’re reading an article on Pride then you’ve got to be as familiar with its plot as you are with your morning ablutions. Essentially the story of the mutual misunderstandings betwixt prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet and the prideful Mr. Darcy (or is it vice-versa?), Austen’s 1813 tale reigns as one of the hallmarks of British literature: Its humor and wit make it probably the greatest page-turner from England’s fluffy Regency period. But is that enough to justify so much devotion, and so many different interpretations?

The first major film production of Pride came at the suggestion of, of all people, Harpo Marx. Harpo—the silent one with the flowing blond curls—enjoyed a lively stage production of Pride in London and immediately wired MGM’s Irving Thalberg, urging him to produce it for the silver screen. Thalberg didn’t live long enough to see the film into reality, but MGM hired Aldous Huxley to write it (along with Jane Murfin), and cast Greer Garson and Lawrence Olivier in the starring roles. The Huxley Pride is my personal favorite: the plot, light and perfectly designed as a box kite, is compressed into a swell little production, with added bon mots that Austen herself could have written. It’s brilliantly scored by Herbert Stothart, whose leitmotif for Mr. Collins is delightful, and acted with verve by all parties involved, but containing two particularly impressive performances—of Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins—by two of the most underrated character actors, Edna Mae Oliver and Melville Cooper, respectively.

Watching this Pride, we can see exactly why Austen’s story works so well on the big screen and in modern times. Pride boasts some of the most memorable characters ever set to paper: the Bennet girls, from the intelligent older sisters Elizabeth and Jane to the flighty Lydia and Kitty to the brainy Mary, hovered over by the matrimony-mad mother, Mrs. Bennet; Mr. Darcy, the haughty rogue whom female readers (and viewers) hunger for; Mr. Collins, a cousin come to take his pick of one of the girls as his bride, and one of the finest comic creations I’ve ever read; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy’s aunt and the dowager who screams to be portrayed by a Dame like Judi Dench (and who does so in the new film); and Mr. Bennet, the father of the clan and the cynical soul of the book whom Martin Amis once called the “the dark backing behind the bright mirror” of Austen’s work. All of these people mill about the cozy confines of Meryton, an idyllic village so far removed from politics and strife it could be heaven itself. But in Pride Austen accomplished in three hundred featherweight pages what it took Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina, nearly a thousand somber ones to do: Pride is not simply about falling madly in love, but about what it means to be married. Her light tone allows the story to shine even in truncated forms. In the space of a two-hour movie, we see not one marriage begin, but four, each one simultaneously a prototype, a warning, and an example. And with Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, Pride and Prejudice captures, in the words of art critic and historian Robert Hughes, “the microcosm of marriage, an Ideal Republic of two.”

These Republics were on treacherous ground when Huxley set to work adapting the novel in 1940. With the Luftwaffe threatening London, he wrote Pride as a subtle summons to urge American involvement in the war, to show exactly what would be lost without our participation. The story was moved forward in time just a few years, in order to include a reference to the defeat of Napoleon—a victory that would not occur for another twenty years after Pride was written, but England’s last great military victory. Austen’s Meryton, olde England, and marriage itself would soon be lost under Hitler’s bootheel if we Americans did not act.

Pride fell out of favor for some time after that—there were a few television productions catering to England’s insatiable appetite for dry costume drama, unmemorable versions virtually unwatched today. But in 1995, the BBC took a chance on a Simon Langton and Andrew Davies production that once again reflected current tastes. Their first triumph: casting Colin Firth, who took what is arguably the strongest and most complex male character in all of Austen’s work and shaped him into a vibrant human being. Firth is outstanding: seething throughout most of the film, haughty, and then just right as his arrogance melts away and he falls for Elizabeth Bennet (Olivier’s Darcy is fine, but far from brilliant). Cinematically, Firth made Darcy just as Brando made Stanley Kowalski.

Langton and Davies’ second triumph: having the selfsame Mr. Firth’s Darcy take a dip in a pond. He emerged dripping wet and climbed into the fantasies of Janeites forever. This Pride was not explicitly sexual, but unabashedly erotic. Thus, it took only fifty-five years (in film time) for Pride to acknowledge that married couples have sex.

Austen’s examination of the complexities of marriage, weaved into a seemingly effortless plot, makes Pride a story that can be perfectly adapted throughout the ages, even in different countries. Since 1995 we’ve seen Pride in more than a half-dozen adaptations: Furst Impressions, a children’s television show starring Wishbone, a Jack Russell terrier; the two Bridget Jones movies, starring Firth again in the Darcy role, once again dampening his shirt but not his sexuality; a modern-day production by, of all people, the Mormons; an English-Indian Bollywood musical Pride set in latter-day Amristar, India, featuring the sexiest Bennet sisters yet; and, coming full circle, this newest Pride, which is supposedly a “muddier, cloudier” version, in contrast to the sunny ’95 vintage. Mormons embrace it, Indians dance to it, and even dogs wear the roles like gloves. That is quite a ride for an almost two-hundred-year-old novel, and it is unparalleled in movie history. I’m just waiting for the gay Pride.

Detractors hate Austen in part because of her focus on marriage and the mistaken belief that she is reinforcing the idea of a woman’s dependence on a man. There are also the silly manners and the sunshine and happy-ending world of Meryton. I’d like to think that Twain hated her for the same thing that bugs me the most: Austen’s is a world of the upper classes, where to be destitute is to have “only” a yearly income of a few hundred pounds and but one servant.

However, if you can cast your eye past these differences, you discover a story unlike any other, one that so richly reflects the possibilities of marriage. The Bennets are not dependent women: Lizzy rejects the wealthy Mr. Darcy because he seems to look down upon her family—though his sentiments match her own more than she would admit. She also refuses to consider his money as a source of happiness. If she fails to marry, we don’t doubt that this Elizabeth Bennet will nevertheless succeed in her life. In the end, it is her strength and intelligence that reunites them. Austen covers the other bases—the relationship between Mr. Collins and Charlotte is one of convenience and economy, and silly Lydia and Wickham’s elopement is an example of the perils of reckless love—but Jane’s and Lizzy’s pairings are the ideals of wedlock.

I imagine that I used to resemble Mr. Bennet, harrumphing behind my newspaper while my wife swooned over Colin Firth. But we’ve also sat and watched the various Prides together over the years, and I enjoy the story more and more as time goes on. When we’re through watching one of the movies, I like to reflect on our marriage—I can’t think of another story that challenges me on that sometimes delicate subject. My wife and I are older now, and though we like to be inflamed by the likes of Keira Knightly (Elizabeth in the newest adaptation) and Colin Firth, we also know there’s a lot more than just wet shirts and muddy stockings: Like Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, we’ve grown to have a profound respect for one another. Over the years, marriages are bound to lose some of the fire you’d find raging throughout Wuthering Heights, but a slow burn over time, a loving endurance—isn’t that what we all hope to find in this type of union?

Robert Altman didn’t see much of Minnesota. During his month-long stay in St. Paul this summer, he ventured beyond the Fitzgerald Theater and his hotel but once or twice. He came, though, and even if he didn’t see much, it seems as if he was out to conquer. He left for Hollywood with footage for a film in which, reportedly, the Fitzgerald Theater gets demolished, at least one character dies, and, most important, our beloved public radio program ceases to be. Who is this guy? And what does he want with A Prairie Home Companion?

For Prairie Home is not just the pride of Minnesota, but a refuge from the anxieties of television and a return to the relaxing pace of radio. For me, the show was a Midwestern haven when I was living in the San Francisco area, where people can’t afford lawns and the leaves never change. After work on Saturdays, I would collapse on my bed and listen to Garrison Keillor’s monologue, which was as soothing as a hot bath and a cold beer. So when I first discovered that Robert Altman was going to direct a movie based on Prairie Home—well, at first I didn’t know what to think.

“No one has ever made a good movie,” Altman has said. “Someday someone will make half a good one.” His own prolific career has certainly yielded some half-good films, such as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, and Gosford Park, but I find myself disappointed by most of the others. However, even the worst ones—and Popeye is as awful as anything ever committed to celluloid—trouble me for a long time afterward … and I like to be troubled. Altman has stated repeatedly that he tries to give his audience something to argue about afterward and that he frankly doesn’t care to appease everybody, or even anybody. He also considers his films to be like paintings, which partly explains the distinctively weak plots that irritate many filmgoers, myself included. After producing a litter of small, strange movies—thirty-one in all since 1970’s M.A.S.H.—it’s not as if Altman is suddenly going to change course now. Prairie Home is going to be distinctively a Robert Altman picture, not a Garrison Keillor film (despite his having written the screenplay), and certainly not a Minnesota Public Radio movie.

Curious fans of Keillor and the radio show can examine Altman’s plotless approach by starting with his last release, The Company (2003). The director threw together professional actors (Neve Campbell and Malcolm McDowell) and non-actors (dancers from Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet); filmed the dancing, the squabbling, the parties, the practices; and then draped all this over a story line that, after an hour, was still not entirely discernable. It had something to do with the stress of being in a dance troupe and Campbell finally becoming the star of the company. Fans of ballet loved it; considering its paltry box-office take, I doubt many others jumped on board. But there were moments in that film that lingered with me later on, like a pleasant aftertaste following a bite of bittersweet chocolate.

Such as the sound of feet slapping against a stage. This is but one of myriad sound effects in a single scene of The Company, and it was totally surprising—just some brief, sharp thwacks punctuating the music and the dance. In that same scene, which took place during a performance in a Chicago park during a storm, you hear the zip of hands over fabric as a dancer is lifted; the company’s director whispering to a colleague; the rustle of butts shifting on seats; and, of course, the sounds of wind and rain and umbrellas opening. As is often the case in an Altman film, The Company is aurally confounding; the director places microphones on numerous actors at once, whereas the usual practice is to have a boom mike overhead, or to later dub in dialogue, especially if there’s excess noise. But Altman digs excess noise the way Neil Young hungers for feedback. He likes capturing the background hubbub, forcing us to listen hard and try to figure out who (or what) we’re supposed to be listening to.

With that approach to sound, it’s easy to understand why Altman would be drawn to filming a popular radio show. PHC’s ensemble nature is another attraction. Altman adores the art of acting; he hovers over the shoulder of his performers by utilizing zoom lenses and multiple digital cameras to follow them into every nook and cranny on the set, even if he’s a dozen yards away. This forces actors to remain in character, and in this way Altman captures their spontaneous moments—the gaffes and frustrations and flashes of brilliance, whether accidental or deliberate. In 1992’s The Player, he takes us into a restaurant where Burt Reynolds (playing himself) and a friend chat in the foreground, while the “real” action takes place a good twenty feet behind, at a table with Tim Robbins (playing the fictional Griffin Mill). We can hear and see what’s going on in both places, not to mention the conversations elsewhere in the restaurant.

Almost all of Altman’s movies baffle with this kind of technical innovation. His painting metaphor—the film as picture—is apt: Watching his films, the feeling is not that this is documentary, or a typical Hollywood dynamic in which good guys and bad struggle toward the inevitable climax, but rather a moment in life, captured in sound and light in the way that a painting can capture a moment in oil and light. When we go to a restaurant or a ballet, we are inundated with sights and sounds, and naturally take away more than just the singular experience of food or dance. The moments Altman captures are often as ugly as they are beautiful, with performers opening up like a flower, singing or dancing before moving backstage and flipping someone off. His gallery is made up of these moments, as portrayed in the old West (McCabe), in seventies Nashville (Nashville), in a thirties jazz club (Kansas City), and, coming up, a contemporary weekly radio show.

Spatially, Altman’s films eschew large, open settings, retreating instead to the confines of dressing rooms, recording studios, domestic interiors. There are no expansive valleys in McCabe, but rather everything takes place in the cramped saloons, tents, and whorehouses in the town of Presbyterian Church, which is itself wedged into a high mountain gorge. Prairie will be no different, with its cozy set ensconced within the Fitzgerald Theater, both on and off stage.

In all, the nature and circumstances surrounding Prairie Home seem perfectly suited to Altman’s oeuvre. According to the film’s producer Joshua Astrachan, about three years ago Altman and Keillor met through a mutual lawyer friend, hit it off, and began to discuss the possibility of working together. Altman’s wife Kathryn was a fan of Prairie Home, and after he met the man behind it, the thought of filming this little subculture began to intrigue him. One can see why: As the last of the great radio shows, Prairie Home is a relic and a haven for dreamers, whether they’re performers or listeners. But its dark side suits Altman as well. Though I haven’t read Keillor’s novels (it’s been said that his listeners and his readers are two quite separate audiences), friends have been surprised by the edginess of their prose and the not-so-subtle desire of their author to shake things up in Lake Wobegon. The characters are looking back on wasted lives, dull marriages, probable affairs.

At first, Keillor was working on a screenplay about Lake Wobegon, but it was Altman who persuaded him to shift the focus from the fictional hamlet to the machinations behind the curtains at the radio show, thus drawing the story into the enclosed setting and focusing on the performers. And perhaps in Keillor’s case, this change—offering a glimpse of fictional characters playing fictional characters, mingling with the actual show’s regulars—allowed him to reveal to his fans the darker side of the show we love.

Robert Altman is eighty years old, a Midwesterner, and a World War II veteran who would probably cringe at being called one of the Greatest Generation. After a number of minor projects (a James Dean documentary, a sci-fi flick, a twelve-year stint directing TV shows, and a couple features that flopped), he was chosen—and this would be the last time he would ever be chosen—to direct M.A.S.H. The swinging sixties, the anti-war sentiment, and a hunger for things new made M.A.S.H. his most commercially successful film. It gave him the power and the confidence to demand complete control over the content of his work in ways that few other directors can.

Altman has since become known as one of the last of the Hollywood mavericks. At various times, he has talked openly about his penchants for booze, pot, and gambling; he can be cantankerous with screenwriters and anyone else involved in a film—except for actors, whom he indulges shamelessly; and he seems delighted when his esoteric, utterly personal films alienate audiences and studio heads alike. Actors flock to Altman because he is famous for giving them free rein to interpret their characters, while he watches with few comments or suggestions. This can be heaven for performers used to being treated as meat, but a pain to the viewer who has to watch Lily Tomlin’s brilliance mingle with Keith Carradine’s overcooked ham (in Nashville), Stephen Fry’s juvenile slapstick amongst a well-oiled ensemble machine (in Gosford Park); or Harry Belafonte’s jazzy screed to a vacuous Dermot Mulroney (in Kansas City).

Keillor, on the other hand, has never tasted such freedom. Usually he is, in his own words, handcuffed by “the restrictions of good taste.” Giving himself over to Altman, Keillor suddenly becomes both a limitless performer and a screenwriter who expects—working with this director—that spontaneity is the rule, damn the written word. Now that the film’s in the can, rumors abound that Keillor might soon draw the curtains permanently on his radio show; it is thirty years old, and the film concerns the last broadcast of a radio show after the same. Considering Keillor’s growing pessimism, as interviews and his own fiction can attest, this could be an ideal occasion. What better swan song than a collaboration with one of the greatest directors in American cinema?