Altman's fortune

The South shown in "Cookie's Fortune" is the opposite of that portrayed in movies like "Ghosts of Mississippi" and "Mississippi Burning," in which the divisions between blacks and whites -- and between poor whites and puffed-up gentry -- are static and menacing.

In this movie, a self-styled grande dame like Close's Camille may look down her patrician nose at everyone. But the rest of the village bases its relationships on practical and instinctive grounds -- like who would be fun to go fishing with. Neither Camille nor Cora is close to their aunt Cookie; her nearest and dearest are Tyler's Emma, her wild grandniece, and Willis, who lives in Cookie's guest room and hangs out at the local juke joint/blues bar.

Filming in Holly Springs helped give Altman and Rapp the feeling that they had gotten things right. Says Altman: "The chief of police and the mayor are both black, and though the population is split down the middle, black and white, there isn't any racial turmoil that one can see. I'm not saying there's no separation down there, but people do mix freely." The specifics of the script proved to be spot on. Delta bluesman Junior Kimbrough's legendary juke joint was a mere eight miles out of town. (The film's composer, David A. Stewart, had gone there for the shooting of Robert Mugge's "Deep Blues" documentary eight years before.) And if Rapp worried that the catfish industry had grown too massive for small businesses like the one she'd envisioned, Altman's team discovered a one-man operator from 20 miles away, who taught Lovett how to clean his catch as the head of Manny's Wholesale Catfish.

For all the film's documentary veracity, Holly Springs was foremost a fictional town in Rapp's mind -- a compound of a portion of the Texas Panhandle and the Mississippi hamlet where she went to fulfill an adult dream. Rapp's family had a cotton farm near the minuscule West Texas town of Estelline, and she attended Wayland Baptist College in Plainview, Texas, on a basketball scholarship (although, she says, she's "what people in the South would call 'a chicken-eating Methodist'"). Her ex-husband, another onetime athlete named Ned Dowd, entered Hollywood's ranks as a bit player (a hockey player, he appeared as one in "Slap Shot," written by his sister Nancy) before becoming an assistant director (twice for Altman) and finally a producer. Rapp and Altman knew each other vaguely when she was married to Dowd and working as a script supervisor for directors like Sydney Pollack, which she did for 15 years.

During the shooting of Pollack's "The Firm" (mostly in Memphis), she fell in love with William Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Miss. It had a great bookstore (Square Books) and a university where one of her favorite authors, Barry Hannah, taught creative writing. She wrote Hannah a note; he let her into his class. She ended up turning out short stories and staying in Oxford for two and a half years. In that time, a film editor of Altman's read a story she had published in Gordon Lish's Quarterly and gave it to the director. He called her up and asked if she ever thought of writing movies. "I only moved back to L.A. when he hired me; I thought if I was going to do this, I'd have to do it right and be in Bob's face."

The solidity of Rapp's scripts may stem from her love of the short story. "You can't make any mistakes when you work in that form," she says. Indeed, her best-loved writers are still short story writers. They include Lee K. Abbott ("His stories touch me so much, when I pick up a new collection and read one, I don't want to taint it with something else; I read a story a night, and stop") and Larry Brown (a former Oxford firefighter who took up fiction and by example "gave me the courage to do it myself," she says; "he made me see that if you write with your heart, with honesty and with a keen eye for observing the absurd details of life, you'd don't have to have a huge literary background").

Rapp's intuitive mastery allows a movie like "Cookie's Fortune" to skitter through a full social cross-section without seeming show-offy or arbitrary. There is purposefulness beneath the sprawl. In Rapp's words, "You can trace every element in it to the good and bad results of family pride."

She and Altman take an enormous risk when they begin the film with a lovely, leisurely ode to Cookie and Willis' friendship -- as full an expression of family bonds in the face of mortality as anything I've seen since John Huston's "The Dead." They knew they'd get reactions like "The film started off slow and then got good," Rapp says, but they were convinced that before Cookie commits suicide and Willis is thrown in the clink, "You needed to know who she was so you could understand how her suicide affects him and her nieces. Anyhow," Rapp continues, "the rhythm of the film fits the way I see life. You know: the day starts slow, then something happens and it builds and snowballs. Everything was worth it when Paul Newman went to a screening and told Bob, 'I love the patience of the movie.' When you have Paul Newman on your side, who needs MTV?"

According to Rapp, the patience Newman loves comes most of all from the man beside the camera. "Bob wants us to go out on a limb -- we know he'll catch us if we fall, and that only if you go to the end of the limb do you get to where the berries are."

She relishes the berries the actors pick, too. She came up with a killer line for Beatty as the deputy who says he knows that Willis is innocent "because I've fished with him." But it has even greater impact because Beatty and Sheriff Darst have been ad-libbing fishermen's talk from the opening minutes of the movie. And when Willis is jailed, Beatty caps the scene by asking Willis if he's heard that a mutual friend "landed a 14-pounder." Rapp says, "You relax the moment you hear it: You know that Willis isn't going to fry."

• View blog reactions