"Basically, Bob and I have a similar sense of humor and sensibility," says Rapp, "and we stay in the same arena of how to tell a story. But I get a lot sappier and he gets a lot more cynical; I need hardening and he needs softening." When it comes to form, I think the reverse is true. Altman conjures atmospheric breezes so redolent in color and in meaning that they waft off the screen; Rapp creates structures that focus and intensify them so they keep on whistling through your mind.

Rapp's script for "Cookie's Fortune" is a marvelous contraption -- both firm and porous. It plunks down a multiracial olio of characters (played by the likes of Courtney B. Vance and Liv Tyler and Lyle Lovett) in the middle of unique farcical situations, such as an Easter church production of "Salome" and a homicide investigation that plays like a Dixie division of the Keystone Kops.

What Rapp and others see as Altman's genius for improvisation, he simply views as common sense. "I've got to think of it this way," he says. "I want to see something I've never seen before. I try to keep the arc of possibilities as broad as I can for the actors; if I say something, it will narrow them down. I make the cast work. They became actors in the first place to create, and that's what I want to see them do."

Since Altman himself calls the film "a non-murder mystery," perhaps it doesn't give the plot away to say that it centers on the suicide of a long-grieving widow, Cookie (Patricia Neal), a fixture in the small town of Holly Springs, Miss. Cookie's niece, Camille (Glenn Close), ashamed of having a suicide in the family, tries to cover it up; Cookie's best friend, a black man named Willis (Charles S. Dutton), gets jailed on suspicion of murder. At first, Camille, the director of "Salome" (starring Cookie's other niece, Julianne Moore's hilariously cowed Cora), comes off as a pillar of the community. But it doesn't take long to see that Willis is a beloved figure and that the sheriff (Danny Darst) and his deputies (Ned Beatty, Chris O'Donnell) won't let the out-of-town investigator (Vance) lay a hand on him.

This contemporary but old-timey movie has some witty topical references: Easygoing Willis says he won't take a drink "before Tom Brokaw," for instance. But as Altman lays bare the crossed love connections in a quiet Southern hamlet, he restores the humanizing gentleness of a pre-media era. A lifetime of authority -- both in filmmaking and in actual experience -- has gone into making this bittersweet comedy hilarious and compelling. Three decades ago, Altman said that in his early years in Kansas City, Mo., he didn't regret mundane rituals like washing his car on Sundays. Even then, he was soaking up everyday details that would give his films vibrations at a time when studio-bred filmmakers routinely flushed real life away. He directed industrial films and dozens of TV shows before he broke through at age 44 with his second feature, "M*A*S*H" (1969). His attitude is as fresh and his technique as deft as ever in "Cookie's Fortune" -- a film that stands out just as vividly from the ruck of Hollywood (and off-Hollywood) "product" as "M*A*S*H" did in its day.

This movie has all the Altman trademarks. His performers feint, waltz and flop; their words echo and rebound. The director orchestrates musical moods and images to draw audiences in and activate, not coerce, their emotions. But rarely has each figure in an Altman film been this multidimensional and sharply drawn, with deeds so surprising yet inevitable. And that's partly a tribute to Rapp, whose talent Altman values so highly that he put her under contract two and a half years ago after reading her first published short story.

Throughout his career, Altman has oscillated between treating scripts as jumping-off points and probing them as respectfully as any stage director. (In the mid-'80s, he became the director of filmed plays, notably "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" and "Secret Honor.") Promoting "Prêt-à-Porter (Ready to Wear)" several years ago, he described the script solely as "a blueprint." But shortly after "Nashville" (1975) he told Playboy, "My work is not really as loose and frenetic and unorthodox as everyone seems to think."

These days he's in his "Nashville" mode. He told me that "Cookie's Fortune," still holding strong in theaters, will return at award season, precisely because he and his co-producers "hope the script gets recognized." Although Altman himself comes from the Bible Belt and made "Thieves Like Us" in small-town Mississippi, he gives Rapp credit for creating the film's organic community.

Of course, the movie's town didn't start out with the name Holly Springs, and the story didn't begin as an intricate ensemble piece. Rapp told me that the kernel of her script was the quizzical event that took hold of her mind: "a suicide, and covering up a suicide, and having the coverup backfiring."

Once the script evolved into a piece where the town became a character, Altman's production people (including his production-designer son Stephen) went looking for locations all through Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. They locked onto Holly Springs. "It fit everything," Altman says. "It has 7,000 people in it, half black, half white, and there must be 20 churches in it. We had very little money to make the picture [$8 million for 36 days]; normally you would shoot one little town for one section, another town for another. But not when we found Holly Springs. We rewrote the script, not to make any changes in the dramaturgy, but to be able to use the town as a set. We didn't even have to change the signs."

Funny he should say that. Altman turns the town's various memorial signs into a fond comic motif, capped when a liquor store desk plaque states, "On this site in 1897, nothing happened."

For Altman, the whole point of directing on location is not to predigest a milieu, but "to go to a place like Holly Springs, and move into it. That way, nothing slips by you in terms of any uniqueness." It also allows actors and technicians to relax and pool resources in a bracing new environment. Close loved the looseness of biking to work, gaily waving back at fans on the way. Altman would host big dinners for cast and crew twice a week at his place "and we'd all go on the porch and shoot fireflies."

But what made it possible for Altman to exploit the settings was Rapp's evocative writing. "Bob's so visual," says Rapp, "that as soon as you lay a story out in front of him you see the wheels start turning. He finds ways of capturing a place that are both honest and unusual. If you give him material where the setting is already strong, he really can take off with it."

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