Peter Rosen recommends three books for:
American Masters: Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes
Watch on July 1 on PBS stations nationwide (check local listings)
Peter Rosen has produced and directed over 100 full-length films and television programs which have been distributed worldwide and have won awards at the major film festivals. His latest film for American Masters is Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes.
The film takes a candid look at the private man in the public spotlight of A Prairie Home Companion and trails this yarn-smith and his crew of actors and musicians as they spin stories and song into American gold. Peter’s next project will be about the 20 year old blind pianist from Japan, Nobuyuki Tsujii, who won the Gold Medal at the Van Cliburn Piano Competition.
Our film could have been about a radio show host, a comedian, a really good singer, a screenwriter, a journalist – but I made the decision that Garrison Keillor should be portrayed above all else as an author. He has written more than a dozen books, not counting various collections of short stories, anthologies and collections of poems.
He says in the film, “All I can do, is write.”
My favorites:
Happy to Be Here is a collection of short stories written between 1970 and 1983.
Most are hilarious, because they are ludicrous. As the title says, reading this book will make you happy. They are Keillor’s take on the human condition – he is down to earth, nostalgic, and reminds us who we are as Americans.
Leaving Home is a collection of monologues about the "fictional" town, Lake Wobegon. Each of the 33 tales start with the familiar, “It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…”
But I’m not so sure Keillor thinks these are fiction. He says in the film, “I used to think this was a fictitious town, but now I’m not so sure”.
We tried to use that same ambiguity in our documentary, to make it a quasi-biography, so you are not sure what’s true and what isn’t.
One Wednesday (the Lake Wobegon monologues have to be written by air time every Saturday night) I heard him say to himself, “It’s Wednesday already, I better see what has been happening in Lake Wobegon”. This made me realize the town exists as a real place in his mind, and he simply visits there in his imagination each week and reports to us what has happened.
In my opinion, Keillor’s best and most sophisticated novel is Love Me, written in 2003. I read it right before we started production, and it revealed an aspect of him I didn’t know existed. A romantic side. Obviously autobiographical, it’s about a young writer named Larry Wyler who gets a job at the New Yorker, meets some very interesting New York women, and ends up finding happiness in his own backyard. Reading between the lines in Keillor’s work, I always felt there was an underlying sexual view of life in the Lake Wobegon stories. In this love story it’s out in the open.