It’s looking like Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, based on a script by Garrison Keillor about various eccentrics taking part in the final broadcast of Keillor’s radio show, isn’t entirely a Robert Altman film. A 7.20 report by St.Paul Pioneer Press‘s Chris Hewitt suggests that the still-rolling production is some kind of collaboration between a somewhat weakened Altman and “ghost director” Paul Thomas Anderson. The director of Magnolia and Boogie Nights and a longtime Altman admirer and friend “has no official title, but he works mostly with Altman and the actors, and his director’s chair is labeled ‘Pinch Hitter,'” according to Hewitt’s story. Almost the entire movie is being photographed inside the Fitzgerald theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the word is that Altman, 80, isn’t feeling quite strong enough to run around like he used to, and so between takes he “belts directions over a microphone while Anderson runs up to stage and speaks with the actors directly.” There are other reports about this on Anderson’s own site and on a movie-news site called Cinema Eye. The cast includes Meryl Streep, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, L.Q. Jones, Kevin Kline, Keillor (playing himself), John C. Reilly and Lily Tomlin.