It’s not hard to figure out why Robert Altman was the center of attention with last summer’s A Prairie Home Companion — even though we didn’t know at the time of its release that it would be his final movie.
Long before his honorary Oscar in March 2006, Altman was cool — a stubborn, renegade filmmaker whose biggest head-scratcher (Popeye) has somehow been transformed into an indicator of his unconventional greatness. His death in November merely gave Altman permanent ownership of A Prairie Home Companion, concerned as it is with passing, and the proper way to commemorate something that is gone.
But another reason that Altman was the focus — beyond film culture’s oftentimes-ridiculous bias toward directors — was that the alternative would be to talk about quaint, old-fashioned, uncool-even-by-public-radio-standards Garrison Keillor, who wrote the script.
That's Just Nitpicking, Isn't It?