Looking for the muse, just re-watched this movie about a book, not a song…

A Love Song for Bobby Long, a 2004 American drama film written and directed by Shainee Gabel and based on the novel Off Magazine Street by Ronald Everett Capps, was shot on location in New Orleans and Gretna, Louisiana while I lived in the city from 2000-2004. It was released in December, 2004.

The story combines elements of characters and stories from Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. It focuses on 18-year-old Purslane Will, who leaves the Florida trailer park where she lives with her abusive boyfriend to return to her hometown of New Orleans following the drug overdose death of her jazz singer mother Lorraine, a free spirit she hadn’t seen for several years.

The girl is startled to discover one-time Auburn University professor of literature Bobby Long and his protégé and former teaching assistant, struggling writer Lawson Pines, living in her dilapidated childhood home. Both men are heavy drinkers who while away their days smoking numerous cigarettes, quoting Dylan Thomas, Benjamin Franklin, and T.S. Eliot, playing chess, and spending time with the neighbors while Bobby strums a guitar and sings melancholy country-folk songs.

The case included John Travolta as Bobby Long, Scarlett Johansson as Purslane Will, Gabriel Macht as Lawson Pines, Deborah Kara Unger as Georgianna and Clayne Crawford .as Lee.

A Southern writers tale if there ever was one…

Tags: A Love Song for Bobby Long

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