Log line:

Romeo and Juliet” cross “The Bridges of “Madison County’ en route to ‘Cold Mountain.’

Following a diagnosis of breast cancer, Rachel Marin’s producer/director husband abandons her. A beautiful, successful, professional woman—her world collapses. She attempts suicide then struggles to lift herself from the basement of her life. On a road trip across country, she stops in the small, Texas town of her father’s birth, and discovers reasons to live forever.

Eisenhower (“Ike”) was President; bread was eighteen cents; gas— twenty-three; Popsicles came two to a package; Elvis was twenty, and twelve year-olds, David Joe Fallon, Jr. and Jessie Marie Taylor were in love.

​It’s been said that few, younger than twenty or so, could possibly know what true love is. That may be true, unless you happened to have been Jessie Marie and David Joe, and lived in Rosedale, a small, north-central Texas town, back in the 1950s.

​First taken with each other at age nine, these love-struck youngsters were not yet teens, when they professed a love so deep, in their hearts and minds, it transcended life itself.

​And in spite of Cyrus Ecclesiastes Taylor’s success, in keeping his daughter and David Joe apart, there was never any doubt these two lived and breathed for each other. Not much else mattered to them. His efforts only served to steel their vows to love each other forever.

​Theirs was a love, cloaked with an aura of destiny, imbued with an air of inevitability. Most everyone in Rosedale knew that to be fact. And there could only have been one Jessie Marie and David Joe.  

​Town folk, who were alive then, still speak of them in mythical tones. No true love story can rightly be told, without the mention of their names and the storybook lives they shared.

​David Joe and Jessie Marie live on. And more than forty years later, the world beyond their part of Texas may never have known of and been inspired by them, except for events half a country and nearly half a century away, in southern California.