A couple of years earlier, Paramount head Robert Evans had put together a similar deal to pay a writer for screenplay rights so that he could finish the book and Paramount could make the film that writer was Mario Puzo, and the film became 1972’s The Godfather.

Its strong sales and word of mouth paved the way for the film to be a hit. No one expected the book to become something of a literary phenomenon. When Paramount bought the script, they also encouraged the novel idea to generate publicity ahead of time for the movie. The script didn’t sell at first, and an agent advised him to turn it into novel. Segal had written Love Story as an original screenplay, as he’d already had experience from working on pictures like Yellow Submarine.

(Uploaded to YouTube by Movieclips Classic Trailers) The Film Went from Screenplay to Novel to Movie

Jones made his film debut in Love Story as one of Oliver’s friends. Interestingly enough, Gore and Jones later acquired another future-famous roommate: actor John Lithgow. Those qualities merged in his character of Oliver. Jones supplied Segal’s picture of a jock with a soul. Gore gave Segal the idea for a lead with a successful and heavy legacy (Gore’s father, Albert Gore, Sr., served 14 years in the House of Representatives and 18 years in the U.S. They were roommates Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones. But it was two students that he met at Harvard in 1968 that would inspire one of Love Story’s two main characters, Oliver Barrett IV. Throughout his academic career, he would teach at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Oxford. Oliver Was Part Al Gore, Part Tommy Lee JonesĮrich Segal earned his doctorate in comparative literature at Harvard in 1965. However, even though it’s a much-watched and well-loved films, there are almost certainly things about the movie and its production that you don’t know. Nominated for a metric ton of awards, the film remains a cultural touchstone for a variety of reasons. As the movie opened in more and more venues, it experienced explosive success, keeping it at #1 at the box office for weeks at a time. Before the year was out, the film version arrived in two New York theaters on December 16. Released on Valentine’s Day, 1970, it overcame dismissive reviews to be a major success. Erich Segal’s novel Love Story broke out as one of the first literary hits of the 1970s.

Love Story by Erich Segal