Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion Heads To the Big Screen

By Linda Orlando

Garrison Keillor’s name is almost iconic around the offices of the Minnesota Public Radio, not to mention in millions of homes across America. The creative force behind classic entertainment that includes two popular radio shows, a children’s book and CD, several humor anthologies and CDs, and ongoing performances, both recorded and live, is about to add to his already hectic schedule. Keillor is launching a weekly newspaper column for Tribune Media Services, and about a dozen newspapers throughout the country have already signed up. "Big mistake," Keillor jokes. "Why do I need another weekly deadline?" In addition to all of these commitments, Keillor has two more books in the works and has recently invested in a restaurant in Avon, Minnesota. But he insists that his schedule is manageable. "I’m not busy," Keillor notes. "A woman with three children under the age of 10 wouldn't think my schedule looked so busy."

As a young man, Garrison Keillor worked for Minnesota Public Radio in 1969, helping out with a morning program that ran from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. The program was called A Prairie Home Companion, named after the Prairie Home cemetery in Moorhead, Minnesota. In between his work on the radio program, he wrote on an article for the New Yorker magazine about the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. While developing the article, he came up with the idea for an old-fashioned radio show with musical guests, nostalgic, stories, and commercials for imaginary products. He pitched the idea to the folks at Minnesota Public Radio, and on July 6, 1974, Keillor hosted the first live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion. The show was presented at the Janet Wallace Auditorium at Macalester College, Saint Paul, with tickets selling for $1 for adults and 50 cents for children. According to the show’s producer, Margaret Moos, the audience of 12 people produced total sales of something less than $8.

Nonetheless, the show continued and quickly attracted a huge following. During its first 10 years, A Prairie Home Companion produced 477 live shows and moved shop to a boarded-up venue in Saint Paul that was scheduled to be torn down. Instead, The World Theater in Saint Paul was renovated to become The Fitzgerald Theater, and it has been host to A Prairie Home Companion ever since. The show ended briefly in 1987, after a 13-year run in Minnesota, but Keillor was back two years later after spending some time abroad. He set up shop in Brooklyn in 1989, as The American Radio Company, performing a similar type of broadcast that gradually gathered another huge fan base with over 200 public radio stations carrying the program. In 1992 Keillor announced that he would be taking the program back home to his Minnesota roots, and the following year the show itself returned to its roots and resumed the name A Prairie Home Companion.

Garrison Keillor is an American icon in the making, and many of his listeners consider him a member of the family, but he remains humble in spite of his success. "I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent," Keillor muses. "But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver." Today, A Prairie Home Companion is heard by over 4 million listeners each week on over 558 public radio stations. It is also broadcast overseas on America One and the Armed Forces Networks in Europe and the Far East. And now the show will be finding yet another group of fans when it makes its way to the big screen. An upcoming film version of A Prairie Home Companion will bring together the talents of director Robert Altman and a star-studded cast that includes Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Lindsay Lohan. As Keillor remembers, "When the show started, it was something funny to do with my friends, and then it became an achievement that I hoped would be successful, and now it's a good way of life."