Love Jones

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Of course, moviegoers have always had a fickle relationship with love. "It's the oldest trend in the world," says Laurence Mark, producer of Jennifer Aniston's cockle-warming Object of My Affection. But thanks to a huge demographic shift, what's old is new again. A bumper crop of teenage girls, hungry for tender plots and soft-edged stars like DiCaprio and Matt Damon, are making this the best time to pitch celluloid woo. Another factor: Young people, whose intimate connections are via E-mail, want to download real emotion. Just witness the reports of audiences seeing Titanic simply to cry. "People want to feel whole," says Paltrow. "So often we're watching films where we're removed from the emotional content."

Maybe what certifies romance as the trend of '98 is that it's about to get Screamed. Writer Kevin Williamson, who made horror chic again, has set his sights on love stories, producing Her Leading Man, which will inject attitude into the genre. Says Man screenwriter Greg Berlanti, "All romantic comedies have the same tricks and conventions, but we still fall for them."

We wouldn't have it any other way. In fact, there might be only one thing that stops Hollywood from a lasting embrace: crummy writing. Romance is "still a genre that's harder to make than an action movie," says writer-director Nora Ephron, whose upcoming You've Got Mail reteams that winning Sleepless in Seattle duo—Ryan and Tom Hanks. "It actually requires a script."

(Additional reporting by Dave Karger and Jessica Shaw)

Originally posted May 08, 1998 Published in issue #431 May 08, 1998 Order article reprints

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