Ode to Billy Joe

About Ode to Billy Joe

Ode to Billy Joe is a 1976 film with a screenplay by Herman Raucher, inspired by the 1967 hit song by Bobbie Gentry, titled "Ode to Billie Joe". The film was directed and produced by Max Baer, Jr. and stars Robby Benson and Glynnis O'Connor. Made for $1.1 million, it grossed $27 million at the box office, plus earnings in excess of $2.65 million in the foreign market, $4.75 million from television, and $2.5 million from video. Gentry's song recounts the day when Billie Joe McAllister (a fictional person) committed suicide by jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge on Choctaw Ridge, Mississippi. When Gentry and Raucher got together to work on the screenplay, she explained she had no idea why the real person who inspired the character of Billie Joe had killed himself. Raucher thus had a free hand to pick one. His novelization of the story, published the year of the film's release as a movie tie-in, used the same rationale for the suicide. more »