Nice digs, expensive cars, tennis matches, and all the comforts of the Yuppie lifestyle can’t seem to lift Oliver out of his perpetual state of gloominess. His family, including his patrician father, would like for Ollie IV to buck up, get through the Seven Stages of Grief, and move on, but it’s no use. Set roughly 18 months after the events in Love Story, the film paints a pathetic portrait of Oliver Barrett IV, still in mourning over his lost Jenny but now a practicing lawyer and making a pretty decent – some would say extremely good – living despite a perpetual “woe is me, I lost my wife” attitude.

The source film’s storyline, after all, is simple, straightforward and doesn’t have any bits of extraneous business that needed to be explored, unlike, say, Star Wars, which has Darth Vader getting away to live and chase down Luke Skywalker & Co. The problems with Oliver’s Story – and there are quite a few – begin with its raisson d’etre – it was made purely for financial gain. Unfortunately, Oliver’s Story, which reunites Ryan O’Neal and Ray Milland in their respective roles as the young lawyer and his blue-blood father, is a movie so unremarkable, so forgettable, and so insufferable that it bombed at the box office when it was released in 1978.

Whether or not Segal had also figured he’d make a killing by writing Love Story II: The Story Continues at a time when very few dramas spun off sequels it’s not certain, but since the guy was a screenwriter as well as a college professor, it wouldn’t be terribly shocking to hear that he had indeed written a script before the novel yet again. Segal, who had risen from almost near-obscurity with the phenomenal success of both the novelized version of his Love Story screenplay and Hiller’s movie, had written a novel about Oliver Barrett IV’s post-Jenny life titled (what else?) Oliver’s Story in response to the wild success of both versions of his story about a rich law student who falls in love with a working-class music major, marries her, then loses her to a fatal illness. With the popular and critical success of Arthur Hiller’s 1970 Love Story (it grossed over $100,000,000 at the box office), and perhaps taking some inspiration from Universal Studios’ tendency to make “let’s squeeze a property for all it’s worth” with the dreadful Airport franchise, the executives at Paramount Pictures (led now by Barry Diller) were probably humming Francis Lai’s Theme from Love Story while having visions of dancing dollar signs when Erich Segal approached them with a screenplay for a sequel.

Oliver's story by erich segal