Robert Altman, Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion

When radio show host and author Garrison Keillor approached Altman about turning his radio show into a movie, A Prairie Home Companion was destined for the big screen. Throw in a star-studded ensemble and you've got a summer movie from two of America's most original personalities.

According to Time, the film is unique combination of both Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor, "A Prairie Home Companion is an unhappy blend of their essentially antithetical sensibilities, in which a radio show, rather like, but not quite like, the one Keillor has been presiding over since 1974, is giving its last broadcast, having been decreed irrelevant by the new owners of the radio station that has long carried it.

Starring Woody Harrelson, Lindsay Lohan, Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, John C. Reilly, and Virginia Madsen, A Pararie Home Companion is based on Garrison Keillor's successful radio show, with the host of that real world program playing a loose variation on himself. Originally a morning show on Minnesota Public Radio, A Prarie Home Companion takes its name from an actual cemetary in Moorehead, Minnesota and made its first live broadcast back in 1974. Renamed to Garrison Keillor's American Radio Company in 1989 after the show was off the air for two years and moved to New York City, the radio program returned to Minnesota and took its original name A Prarie Home Companion for weekly broadcasts in St. Paul.

As The Washington Post reveals, A Prarie Home Companion offers a down home glimpse into the mind of Garrison Keillor, "For its listeners, the weekly broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion" is a vicarious visit to the fantasy world of its host, Garrison Keillor, who entertains them with down-home music, tongue-in-cheek jingles and shaggy-dog stories all centered on the fictional small town of Lake Wobegon, whose residents regard life with good-natured stoicism."

A story close to Garrison Keillor's heart and career, A Prarie Home Companion is rooted in reality, but uses fiction as the vehicle to tap into the magic of the actual radio show. USA Today takes a look at the depths of A Pararie Home Companion, "The story centers on a fictional radio variety program that is airing its last show. (In real life, Keillor's is one of radio's longest-running shows.) John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson are a pair of singing cowboys. Kline plays Guy Noir, the narrator private eye who serves as a kind of security guard for the show. Streep and Tomlin play sisters and Lindsay Lohan is Streep's morose, poetry-writing teenage daughter. Her role in this adult-driven drama seems tacked on, a way for Lohan to get some actorly legitimacy."

Lily Tomlin, who also worked with Robert Altman on Nashville, recently revealed to About insight into the director's style and approach to A Prarie Home Companion and how it benefits the actors involved, "You’re never performing for the camera, or that the camera is looking right at you. You’re not stopping and starting…[Bob’s] so unflappable. He’s so even. He’s not uproarious about something. He’s not crestfallen about something. He accepts whatever is presented to him, yet he’s cast it so well and he’s involved with Garrison and it allows you to just be [you]."

When it comes to credit where credit is due, as the Spotlighting News reveals, Robert Altman is quick to give most to Garrison Keillor, "It's his script. It's his personality. It's his sensibility. They're his jokes, not my jokes. Mainly, what I brought to it is this cast. We built this cast around it and put it all together like that."

[Additional Sources: Time, The Washington Post, USA Today, About, Spotlighting News]