Keillor: Up in Smoke

A story that Garrison Keillor wrote 15 years ago for The New Yorker magazine will be turned into a 15-minute film. The premise of Keillor’s “End of the Tale” is that cigarette smoking is outlawed with the passage of the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, and the country’s last five smokers are tracked to a box canyon in the Sierras. “Garrison was prescient in 1984 . . . and he gets more prescient as our government tightens the noose around smokers’ throats,” said co-producer Irv Letofsky, a former newspaper reporter and TV critic. Letofsky and his wife Brian Ann Zoccola adapted the article for the short film, which will be shot in Minnesota next spring.