Love Is Paramount in Watson Rink

What happens when a preppy jock from Winthrop House falls in love with a poor Cliffe from Cranston, R.I. on a music scholarship?

Right; she dies of leukemia.

Yale Classicist Erich W. Segal '58 has captured the Harvard of 1965 in the script for his new movie, Love Story, being shot around Harvard through December 6.

The action through Saturday is at Watson Rink. Yesterday, Hollywood types trying to look like Harvard people competed with Harvard people trying to look like Hollywood types as Harvard beat Dartmouth in the morning and Harvard lost to Cornell at Ithaca in the afternoon.

The Harvard rink is being used to shoot both games for economy reason. The crowds were given dark red Harvards scarves in the morning, bright red Cornell ones in the afternoon. Production manager Sal Scuppa said he didn't think anyone would notice. "It's only fiction, you know." he explained.

In the movie. Ryan O'Neil of Peyton Place fame plays the hockey jock, and Ali McGraw (who played a Cliffie in Goodbye, Columbus) plays his musical Cliffie. They meet first in some place called "the Radcliffe Library." then again at a Dunster House musical. Harvard will not allow Paramount Pictures to shoot scenes inside buildings other than the rink, so Dunster House and other interiors will be simulated at Fordham University, City College of New York, andin New York movie studios.

"After all." said Seuppa, "a library is a library."

For the crowds in the hockey scenes, Paramount hired 125 professional extras, 125 Harvard and Brandeis students at ten dollars a day, and anyone else who walked in for one dollar. Harvard hockey players play the Harvard, Dartmouth, and Cornell teams in the movie.

Freshman hockey coach Billy Cleary is O'Neil's stand-in for the action shots, but O'Neil will do some close-ups on the ice today. "When it's all spliced together he'll look like the greatest skater in the world." Scuppa promised.

The movie will probably be released some time next fall. Segal describes it as "a simple love story with no message." The jock and the Cliffie get married when the jock is in law school (number three in his class). His father cuts him off for getting married, so they have to slave and swear together to make it through. ("There are lots of funny episodes in this part." Scuppa said.)

Finally he graduates, and they move to New York, where they can't have any children and she dies of leukemia.

"Every time I think of the last scene," Scuppa said, " I get tears in my eyes."