Column Chronicles
 
The alternate endings of the movie 'Love Story'
 
 
Frank Cotolo
June 1, 2017
 
Erich Segal's smash novel, Love Story, is a tearjerker that instantly sold millions of copies. It's a simple story about a boy (Oliver) and girl (Jenny) from entirely different backgrounds. They fall in love and then Jenny dies of cancer.
 
Of course its success made Hollywood notice and a script went into development. However, the book's author did not write the first drafts. He was busy on the book's sequel, so the movie producers used a few salaried screenwriters to get the script going.
 
All of the screenwriters disliked the ending of Segal's story, so they concocted a number of alternate endings they thought would bring the film to a rip-roaring end.
 
In the first draft, Jenny becomes paranoid, thinking Oliver's rich father will take out a contract on her life so she won't marry his son. She buys a gun and carries it everywhere she goes. One night she is spooked into thinking the hit man is following her, so she reacts by turning around quickly, taking her gun out, aiming at the man and pulling the trigger. The guy backfires and shoots her in the chest. Oliver still gets to cry over the tragedy of her death, per the book's ending.
 
Another ending turns the movie into a horror film as Jenny joins a witches' covenant to learn how to cast spells. Oliver is unaware she is trying to put a spell on his rich father, who disapproves of his son's fiance. Jenny learns a spell that makes Oliver's father slowly turn into a gorilla, which he does, but she forgets to add in the spell that he kills himself, so Oliver's dad-turned-gorilla hunts Jenny down and kills her along with slaughtering every other witch in the covenant. Oliver still gets to cry over the tragedy of her death, per the book's ending.
 
In yet another possible ending, just as she is about to marry Oliver, Jenny contracts a disease that turns out to be contagious. At the wedding ceremony everyone becomes sick and begins throwing up. At first, everyone thinks there was bad food served at the cocktail hour before the ceremony. After the ceremony, people stop throwing up but their skin begins to peel off. Someone crashes the party screaming that most of the city's population is decomposing. Oddly enough, however, Oliver is not affected. He leaves the party and finds an antidote (somehow) but is too late to save Jenny. Oliver still gets to cry over the tragedy of her death, per the book's ending.
 
When Segal heard what the screenwriters proposed for the movie he threatened to take back the rights and sue the producers. Instead, the producers hired Segal to write the script, which followed the book and was a success at the box office.
 
Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.
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