The Movie That Made Me Want to be a Writer
On seeing the romance in everything, pickle juice, and the sliver of a dream
The film that made me want to be a writer is a little known gem called A Love Song for Bobby Long (2004). Based on the novel Off Magazine Street, written by Ronald Everett Capps, A Love Song for Bobby Long stars a white-haired John Travolta and a young Scarlett Johannson, who was in the early years of making a household name for herself. Not to be forgotten, the movie also stars the brilliant Gabriel Macht, who would go on to star in comic book legend Frank Miller’s directorial debut The Spirit (2008) after the wild success of Sin City (2005), Robert Rodriguez’s excellent adaptation of Miller’s graphic novel noir. Unfortunately, The Spirit bit the dust hard, but Macht turned out to do just fine for himself when he began starring in a hit show with the future Duchess of Sussex in 2011. Suits went on to break streaming records on Netflix in 2023. Yea, I’d say Macht is doing just fine.
I don’t remember how I discovered A Love Song for Bobby Long, but I know that I discovered it when I returned home to Kentucky after one semester of Bible college in New Orleans. It just so happens that the movie takes place in New Orleans, so I like to think that my old friend Serendipity is how I discovered the movie. I had quit Bible college essentially because my faith was falling apart. I made A’s in all four of my classes, made a couple friends, learned a lot about Biblical history and evangelism, and fell into more or less a spiritual tailspin.
“We shall not cease from exploration / And at the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” -T.S. Eliot
But soon after I found A Love Song for Bobby Long. The movie had the uncanny power to make me nostalgic for New Orleans when most of what I knew of New Orleans was what I saw when I looked out the window of my dorm room. To say I did not burn the candle at both ends would be an understatement, and aside from one foray to Bourbon Street, multiple quick trips for fast food, and aimlessly driving around a main loop of the city listening to the modern rock radio station, I knew nothing firsthand of the unique and wonderful culture that New Orleans had to offer. And yet, A Love Song for Bobby Long made me long for all that I had not experienced by, in some strange way, making me feel like I had experienced it.
While the film made me wish I could move back to New Orleans and live the supposed good life, the free life, it also helped nourish in me a growing desire to write. I understand that sounds cheesy, like I wanted to live life the way they do in the movies, but that’s the truth. You have to understand that this is a film about romance. Everything is romanticized to some degree in the movie: alcoholism, dilapidated houses, smoking cigarettes, not showering, and of course the inglorious life of the writer. I loved every second of it, wanted to live every second of it. In fact, I watched it alone multiple times while smoking half a pack of Marlboro Lights and drinking screwdrivers. There is a scene where they run out of orange juice, so they pour some vodka into the only mixer they can muster: a jar of pickle juice. I am unashamed to say that, yes, I also tried this cocktail many years ago. What can I say, I was a dreamer.
A Love Song for Bobby Long was for me a succinct re-introduction to the power of words and books and stories, but also an introduction to writers I’d never heard of like T. S. Eliot, Carson McCullers, and Dylan Thomas (movie director Christopher Nolan’s favorite poet, as well as singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s). Travolta plays a once respected professor, also the namesake of the movie, while Macht plays his former student and now protege, Lawson, and it’s not a stretch to say that they are quite literally obsessed with books. Over the course of the movie, they make a game of spouting quotes to each other from memory while the other tries to guess the literary origin of said quote. In one scene, a friend named Junior walks up to them with a smoker’s cough from hell, asking for a cigarette, but Bobby tells him he’s all out. As Junior walks away coughing up his last lung, Bobby pulls out a smoke. The conversation goes as follows:
Bobby: Got a light?
Lawson: I thought you didn’t have any.
Bobby: I don’t. Not for Junior. He’s got to cut down. He’s got fierce emphysema. That cough sends shivers of mortality down my spine. “He’d make a lovely corpse, but I’ll make no contribution.”
Lawson: Of course not. Contribute only to one’s death. That’s my motto…
Bobby: “He’d make a lovely corpse.”
Lawson: Come on, man. Charles Dickens. Are you serious? That’s Martin Chuzzlewit.
Bobby: Smartass.
Watching the movie made me want to be the kind of person who could go around quoting books and poems to people in everyday life. To impress people a little bit, sure, but also to make them think, to add a bit of cultural flair and value to a conversation. Life, however, has taught me that the kind of person who would go around doing this is often insufferable, so I suppose it’s a good thing that memory recall has never been one of my strong suits.
Beyond just talking about and quoting great writers, the screenplay, written by Shainee Gabel, (again, based on the then unpublished novel by Ronald Everett Capps) is pretty good too. It’s not necessarily a movie that many would call great; the pace is leisurely and the story is fairly standard and predictable. But much of the writing is quite evocative and resonated a great deal with me, particularly the voiceover narration delivered by Macht with casual Southern charm. It is Macht who I believe gives the true standout performance of the film, lending it some swaggering, Southern, drunken authenticity as a man whose literary dreams have yet to materialize in life the way they have in his head. Some examples of his narration:
“Time was never a friend to Bobby Long. It would conspire against him, allow him to believe in a generous nature, and then rob him blind every time.”
“New Orleans is a siren of a city. A place of fables and illusion. A place Lorraine had to escape from, and a place Bobby and I had to escape to. Away from Alabama, away from lives that no longer belonged to us.”
“Some people reach a place in time where they've gone as far as they can. A place where wives and jobs collide with desire. That which is unknowable and those who remain out of sight. See what is invisible and you will see what to write. That's how Bobby used to put it. It was the invisible people he wanted to live with. The ones that we walk past everyday, the ones we sometimes become. The ones in books who live only in someone’s mind's eye. He was a man who was destined to go through life and not around it. A man who was sure the shortest path to Heaven was straight through Hell. But the truth of his handicap lay only in a mind both exalted and crippled by too many stories and the path he chose to become one. Bobby Long's tragic flaw was his romance with all that he saw. And I guess if people want to believe in some form of justice, then Bobby Long got his for a song.”
But the truth of his handicap lay only in a mind both exalted and crippled by too many stories and the path he chose to become one. Bobby Long's tragic flaw was his romance with all that he saw. -A Love Song for Bobby Long
Sure, it’s not a perfect movie, but much of the writing holds up beautifully in my opinion. Critics across the board absolutely hate voiceover narration in any capacity, but if it’s well-written, I rarely mind, and sometimes quite prefer it as a storytelling device. Lawson’s narration is concise yet colors the movie with a touch of the novelistic, making it that much more of an early literary influence for me.
After quitting Bible college and coming back home, I had to decide what was next for me as far as school was concerned. I started attending the University of Kentucky in the spring semester of 2005. I don’t recall immediately declaring a major. After being sure I was going to become a youth pastor and then my faith unexpectedly fizzling while I attended undergrad seminary, I thought it best to give myself a little bit of time before making up my mind. So I was “undeclared” for awhile, as they say. But I eventually made up my mind. Looking back, I’m sure many of my family and friends thought I was crazy. And maybe I was; I cannot say with certainty that I am completely without regret about my decision to major in English (I mostly don’t regret it, for the record). But I do know there are at least three reasons why I decided to: Catcher in the Rye blew me away, A Prayer for Owen Meany rocked my world, and A Love Song for Bobby Long gave me permission to believe I could. Reading several more classics and watching Dead Poets Society in the ensuing years only confirmed my decision.
Making a living as a writer hasn’t quite worked out for me. I did well in school but squandered my free time when I could have been writing for journals or magazines or the student newspaper. I loved my creative writing classes, but I pretty much did the bare minimum. Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young. So while I mostly don’t regret majoring in English, I certainly regret not taking what that entailed seriously enough. I didn’t really have much of a plan after graduation except to write; somehow, somewhere, sometime, and that didn’t quite materialize in a money-earning capacity. I guess you could say I had concepts of a plan.
But I’ve never grown tired of the power of a good book, a good short story, a good poem. Good literature is for me a kind of scripture, speaking to the deepest parts of myself, guiding me on my life’s path, enriching my soul, making me a more passionate and hopefully better human being in the process. There’s not much on Netflix or HBO that moves me in this way, but the product they offer is much easier to consume (and I, like everyone, consume too much of it).
A Love Song for Bobby Long, in a sense, through some utterly flawed human beings (who among us isn’t?) gave me permission to be interested in reading books and the craft of writing, the world of literature. And it allowed me to believe I could even feel kind of cool about it. Not superior, not an anomaly, just respectable. It was okay that I wasn’t that interested in cars, sniper rifles, or the minutiae of sports statistics and trade deadlines. And it certainly didn’t make me less of a man.
I still hold on to a sliver of my writing dream, of making some portion of my living from it in some form or fashion. I’ve accepted the fact that it will always be a part of me. Many dreams I’ve given up, some gladly, but this one I’ll always be holding onto somewhere in the back of my mind. And as I grow older, having reached middle age, and feel time start to move faster, the desire only intensifies. So, while I hope to never smoke cigarettes or drink vodka and pickle juice again, perhaps one day this writing thing will pan out. I have nothing to lose by keeping on trying. For it is as Lawson says to Bobby, quoting the French poet and playwright Molière, “We die only once, and for such a long time.”
“We die only once, and for such a long time.” -Molière
An aside: Grayson Capps, son of Robert Everett Capps, contributes several songs to the soundtrack, which is worth checking out in full if you can find it. Here’s the title track: