"Love Story" -- I was in the Navy and attending a school in Bainbridge, Maryland in the fall of 1970. I had been in boot camp all summer, so if there had been any noise about this film, I hadn't heard it.
I drove into Baltimore one fine Saturday morning and putzed around, shopping and checking out the lay of the land. The road back out of Baltimore was littered with roadside shopping strips, including one that had a movie marquee you could read a quarter of a mile before you got to it. This marquee indicated a major studio preview that night (and not late, either). Curious, and never having seen a sneak preview, I pulled into the shopping strip. There was a restaurant where I had an early dinner and then I stood in line for the preview.
The preview was "Love Story". I had not heard of the film's having been made (which is odd to me now, because I used to be on top of stuff like that). But I was mesmerized by the movie and charmed and swept up in it. I wrote a friend that weekend telling him what I saw and what I thought. One of my thoughts was that it was going to be a huge hit. Funny enough, I got a letter from him early the next week (before he had seen mine) and he had previewed the film and found it "light" on importance. He figured it would do middling business and disappear. He didn't like the Lai score, either.
Go figure.
