Mr. Roberts: How did you come to write “Love Is All Around”?

Sonny Curtis: It was a deal that happened all in one day. I had a very good friend who worked for the Williams-Price Agency, and they managed Mary Tyler Moore. He called me one morning in the summer of 1970 and asked me if I would be interested in writing a song for Mary Tyler Moore. He said they’re going to do a sitcom on her and they all need a theme song.

At his lunch break, he dropped off a four-page treatment that one of the writers or somebody had put together. It wasn’t a script. It was a treatment that didn’t have a lot of information. Like, “A young girl from the Midwest gets jilted and left at the altar” or something like that. “She’s in the big city of Minneapolis and gets a job at a news station and rents an apartment she has a hard time affording,” that sort of thing.

I wrote the song in about two hours and called him back and said, “Who do I sing this to?” He sent me to James L. Brooks — he and Allan Burns were the executive producers — who was over there on Ventura Boulevard. I don’t know if you ever saw “Gunsmoke,” where they have all those big Quonset hut-looking buildings? That’s where their offices were.

Read the rest of the Q&A at the LA Times.