Tim Russell & Sue Scott’s Blog

The Prairie Home Companion Cruise to Alaska embarked on Friday July 14, 2006. Prairie Home Productions rented the Holland American Line MS Zaandam for PHC fans to be entertained by the Prairie Home regulars and some special guests, not to mention the amazing natural sights of our 49th state.
Sue Scott and Tim Russell performed on the 4 Prairie Home Companion Shows during the week, joined by sound effects genius and fellow cast member Fred Newman and actor Erica Rhodes. Erica has been an occasional guest actor since she was 10 years old. She’s now in her early 20’s and is finishing her classes at an acting conservatory in New York.

Sue, Tim, and Fred prepared a special show for the cruise, “A Conversation with Tim, Sue and Fred”. Janis Kaiser, who does some lighting design and stage managing for PHC gathered a bunch of photos from show performances and, with a little help from significant others, some photos from our early careers, the idea being we could talk about these in an informal way, learning more about each other at the same time as the audience. This was followed by question and answer session. Everyone had a great time, and after two of these presentations we still had a lot of undiscovered photos to discuss, so perhaps we’ll do this again next year.

We also conducted two actor’s workshops. This was an opportunity for cruise goers to be in an actual PHC script featuring 17 different characters. We picked two people to do the sound effects normally (or abnormally) done by Fred Newman, and others to do each different character (normally done by Sue and Tim). The participants had about the same time we have to do a quick read though, and Fred coached the SFX people, then we let them have at it. We even had piano underscoring by Charlie Barnett, a film score composer. A fun time was had by all and we discovered some very good actors in the midst of our fans on the ship
There were also several screenings of the “Prairie Home Companion” movie during the week. Sue and Tim and Jearlyn Steele were on hand to answer some wonderful questions about the making of the Altman/Keillor film.
The guests on the cruise were great, just what you’d expect from an intelligent, friendly group of PHC fans.

The scenery was magnificent. We look forward to next year’s Prairie Home Companion Cruise, planned for July 2007 to Norway.

After the ship disembarked on July 21, everyone prepared for that evening’s performance of “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery in Woodinville just north of Seattle. This was a logistical challenge for the PHC crew to say the least, made doubly difficult by the 95-degree temperature. Several thousand showed up in spite of the heat, and when the sun finally went down it was a beautiful evening. The show was taped for broadcast on July 29th.
Thus we conclude another broadcast season, the next PHC performance will be at the huge grandstand of The Minnesota State Fair on September 2nd.

Be sure to go to our movie premiere photos page for some more candid photos from the St. Paul premiere of Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor’s movie “A Prairie Home Companon” at The Fitzgerald Theater and the party that followed at the Landmark Center.

Saturday, May 13, we arrived at Kevlavik International Airport this morning after a 6 hour flight. On board Icelandair 665: Sue Scott, Tim Russell and his wife Judy, and several “A Prairie Home Companion” cast and crew members. John C. Reilly and his wife Allison are with us as well. Allison flew in from LA and John from Chicago, where he appeared on the Conan O’ Brien Show on Thursday night. John’s flight was cancelled but he was able to make another to get to Minneapolis in time, however, one of his bags is in limbo. Tony Judge and his wife Valentine have organized this trip which includes a premiere of the movie “A Prairie Home Companion.” Garrison Keillor will have us tape the Iceland radio show for broadcast on May 20th. The Icelandic landscape is very lunar by the airport near Reykjavik, in fact NASA used it to practice their moon maneuvers.

We arrived at the Nordica Hotel at 8 a.m. It’s quite beautiful in a minimalist, Scandinavian modern way.

Special Projects Producer Tony Judge had offered to take us around Reykjavik this afternoon and then the gang will be going on a “Whale Watch” this evening. The “Whale Watch” was really a misnomer for what was in effect a “Booze Cruise.”

This as a close to a whale as anyone got that night. Tim and Judy took one look at the 20-somethings on board and the tubs of beer at hand and decided to see the sights of town instead.

This was one of the partygoers roaming through downtown Reykjavik on a Saturday night. People here seem to do all their serious partying on the weekends. Sue Scott stayed with the rest and went “Whale Watching” and when they finally returned after much discomfort, they congratulated Tim and Judy on their prescience. If nothing else, it was lovely to see the harbor in the late night light.

The sun rises at 3 a.m. and sets at around 11 p.m. - so, there’s plenty of sunlight to see the sights. Sunday, May 14, Garrison Keillor , Rich Dworsky and Fred Newman arrived this morning. Garrison started to prepare for the show to be taped on Tuesday at the Iceland National Theater for broadcast on Saturday the 20th. Rich and Fred joined Tim Russell and Judy and several others for the “Circle Tour” of sights around the southwestern part of Iceland. Sue decided to see the sights in town. The weather is ideal: clear skys and relatively warm temps (50 degrees).

This is one of the Geysers that go off every 3-5 minutes.

This is the spectacular Golfoss waterfall.

The scenery on the tour is unbelievably gorgeous: geysers, waterfalls, glaciers, Icelandic horses - it was a lovely day. Tonight is the premiere of the “A Prairie Home Companion” movie at the University theater, a large cinema that holds 1000. The movie had been subtitled in Icelandic, so it was fun to connect this ancient Viking language to what was being said on screen. Some things were undoubtedly lost in translation, for example, “You can’t put the horse before Descartes” ended up referencing Plato.

After the film, we were escorted to the reception hosted by the Minister of Culture and Education. John C. Reilly and Garrison Keillor were in attendance along with many journalists from Denmark and Norway.

After the reception John C. Reilly organized a little jam session back at the hotel’s private business lounge. John and Pat Donohue were on guitar, Rich Dworsky on his mouth melodeon, and Fred Newman with his amazing mouth sounds. Judy and Sue and John’s wife made a grocery run. John C. Reilly is amazingly versatile; he sings and plays everything from Hank Williams to lrving Berlin. We made a little too much noise, so we were gently reminded to end the fun at 2 a.m., Monday, May 15. Everybody up late today. We have rehearsal this afternoon. Tim had a late breakfast, included with the room, and placed a call to “The Morning News with Dave Lee” on WCCO Radio to bring his co-workers up to date on the Iceland adventure.

Tuesday, May 16, tonight the show came from the National Theater of Iceland, taped for broadcast on the 20th. It’s a small but beautiful theater that seats about 500, built in the late 20’s in the Art Deco style. Things went smoothly but the audience seemed a little more reserved than we we’re used to. John C. Reilly joined us in the “Guy Noir” and “Lives of the Cowboys” scripts. After the show, he told us that when he gives up the life of a big time Hollywood star, he wants to be an actor on “A Prairie Home Companion.” He seemed to have a great time hamming it up with the rest of us. John also sang an Irish Sea Shanty and another tune. You can hear all this on the PHC Website archives. The show has been edited down to two hours from the 2:40 actual show time.

We were the guests of the US Ambassador to Iceland at the Embassy. We met several of the US Base Officers and had a delightful time.

Finally back to the hotel at 1a.m. where we debriefed in the lounge until about 3 a.m. The endless daylight really throws your body clock off. Most of the crew including Sue Scott left on Wednesday, May 17.

Tim and Judy stayed on to rent a car and explore Iceland on Thursday and Friday. This is a shot of Tim near Vik. To see some more pictures of the south shore of Iceland, go to Tim’s Blog.

Picturehouse Studios wanted to let folks know that they’ve launched a new Web site for the movie A Prairie Home Companion, directed by Robert Altman with a screenplay by Garrison Keillor. Please visit aprairiehomecompanionmovie.com.
The new posters for the film are on the site as well as lots of exciting new features. Look way down on the list of Oscar Superstars and you’ll see the names Tim Russell and Sue Scott.
To see the teaser trailer that features Tim as “Al” reacting to Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly singing their Risque song go to the new website, click on “Trailers”, then click “on Teaser”.

On March 10, the film had it’s North American Premiere at The South by Southwest film festival in Austin, TX. Here is one of lthe reviews from a great movie blog site, Cinematical:

SXSW Review: Prairie Home Companion
Posted Mar 10th 2006 7:30PM by Karina Longworth
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Music & Musicals, SXSW

A Prairie Home Companion is not a masterpiece in the grand, historical sense, but on its own terms, it’s pretty much a perfect film. Scripted by Garrison Keillor, directed by the legendary Robert Altman, and starring a dream cast that manages to include everyone from the most nominated actress in Oscar history to the most gossiped about young starlet of today, the film’s consummate professionalism oozes off the screen. This – to see professional entertainers, not breaking a sweat whilst entertaining – should not be surprising, but the simple, classical ease of the thing feels like a revelation.

The bulk of the action takes place over the course of a single night. A local radio station has been bought by a greasy Texas oilman, and their homegrown, long-running, old-timey radio variety show is embarking on its last broadcast before the homebase is demolished. Keillor essentially plays himself, the host of the show and the somewhat foggy father figure to a cast of eccentrics. Kevin Kline plays an incarnation of Guy Noir (a character played on the radio by Keillor), a down-on-his-luck detective “working security” for the theater (read: hanging out backstage smoking hand-rolled cigarettes). Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly pop up as singing cowboys with a taste for cringe-worthy double entendre. Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin play the remains of a life-long sister act (the story of what happened to the other sisters gives the gals a chance to rock out on the finishing-each-other’s-sentences thing they demoed at the Oscars); the former has brought her sullen teenage daughter (Lindsay Lohan) to watch the last show (read: hang out backstage scrawling poetry about suicide). The film paints over the structure of the actual radio show (many of its regulars appear on stage behind the Hollywood types) with the small, unspoken joke that if any of the up-front regulars had any real talent, they’d probably be somewhere else. It’s not meant to be condescending, though – it’s actually endearing, and enables us to understand why the show means so much to them.

Altman’s greatest gift to filmmaking was his destruction of the fourth wall – actors in Altman films don’t act for the camera, they simply become their characters, and Altman’s camera swoops in and out, as if there are real lives on screen that are going on even when we’re not around to bear witness. Keillor’s script makes the most of Altman’s signature style, figuring the radio show as a slightly more performative slice of its participants’ lives. In some kind of irony that I don’t even know how to parse right now, the film knows it’s hokey and old-fashioned, and it plays on that fact throughout, to the point where it’s actually practicing some kind of post-modernism. That really shouldn’t be surprising – after all, Altman is the guy who wrote himself into the canon through obstinate narrative deconstruction. But Keillor has given him a script that constantly surprises in its self-referentiality. In its neatest trick of all, the script circumvents any criticism of its lack of timeliness by very literally casting the proceedings under a shadow of death.

But on to the real question of the hour: how does Miss Lohan stack up against some of the world’s greatest actors, under the tutelage of America’s best living director? She’s certainly not bad, but then, it’s an Altman film, so she’s cast perfectly. Her much-maligned bleached-blonde skinniness actually works well here; it gives the young Lola a fragility that sits nicely with her Goth bravado, and works especially well in her solo musical number. As for the duet she performs with the gospel powerhouse…well, let’s just say that Lohan benefits greatly from Keillor’s emphasis on the amateurism of the performers.