Forrest Gump

stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them let alone a good one let alone a picturesque, pickaresque picture pointing out the

pinnacle of visual effects in the mid-1990s as always I am your host Chris Winterbauer

and joining me unlike a box of chocolates is the very reliable Lizzy Bassett Lizzy how are you doing this morning and which best picture winner are we discussing today? Well Chris that was a lot of

“appease congratulations and we are today of course talking about one of the best examples I think”

of somewhat invisible effects in recent movie history it's forest gump gump there's a P in that but before we get into it I need to mention that this Friday we will release our final pre-oscars bonus episode and not only will we discuss the two remaining best picture nominees but we will go over each of our top 10 lists of our favorite movies for 2025 and briefly discuss them also if you are a patron we will be live streaming during the Oscars on Patreon moderating a live chat during

the program and hopping on video during commercial breaks so join for five dollars to be a part of that Chris I am sure you've seen forest gump before but what was your initial impression of it and what did you think upon rewatching it for the pod? I think as have most folks of our generation and probably gen Xers I would imagine this movie has loomed large in the American film landscape

I don't remember how old I was when I first saw it probably middle school and I remember thinking

I once have described folks who listen to this podcast now James Bond movies as a bit of a grab bag an attempt to give you five genres for the price of one only done at a very discounted price forest gump gave me five movies that seemed like high quality versions of those movies for the price of one and I couldn't believe it I thought oh my god this is a historical you know period piece it's a football movie it's a war movie it's a business with it was all of these

movies in one I really thought this is the greatest movie I have ever seen just in terms of the spectacle of what a movie could be and then of course I aged into my douchey intellectual period in college and then forest gump was constantly railed and criticized it's a conservative

“propaganda film this is a movie that suggests that all you have to do is take orders and that's how”

your life will work out and God forbid you question authority or you join the counterculture movement because you will get addicted to heroin and eventually get aids and Jenny is the villain and this movie is bullshit and I survived that portion of my movie going existence and then I rewatch forest gump for the podcast and I really liked it it's a really fun movie it is as just a pure vehicle for entertainment it's tough to be this movie is well over two hours and it just goes

do I think it sheets by using an insane amount of montage sure does it have so many needle drops that I was like wait a second did we just do three needle drops and introducing the Vietnam scene in a well just going from fortunate sun to sleep John B and nine B seconds yes it does did I mind not really great performances very fun as you mentioned for the most part very effective visual effects wonderful cinematography Allen Sylvester score is very iconic and I actually think

that there's a less cynical way of interpreting the message of the movie and Lizzie I don't know if you're going to talk at all about like pick or ask stories or tall tales or anything like that

“but this movie very much fits into the I think long history of the pick or ask hero the kind of”

roguish hero who ascends through society I'm thinking of something like very linden for example and forest gump very much subverts that in a lot of ways and it's like an American tall tail right and explaining the names behind so many things the shit happens the smiley face Elvis Presley's dancing John Lennon's Imagine but I like this idea and forest gump that it seems like it's a movie that's almost got this libertarian streak of you know individualism can triumph in America only in

America could a man with a 75 IQ become this wealthy I think that's actually a really surface level take and my pitch to the audience or my pitch to you Lizzie would be another way to interpret this movie is actually that it's about how little control we have in our lives and how much our existence comes down to pure luck I would argue entirely luck but if not largely luck on the one hand you have forest who I think nowadays maybe we'd say maybe on the autism spectrum but who is not in 1956 they're

never going to diagnose that and so he simply pointed out his slow he's never going to keep up but

argue it's not a great friend but he is a good friend when he's little and because of the systems

“around him football his mom I know the military is a mixed record but he actually really thrive”

yes throughout these situations as opposed to someone like Jenny who comes from a home where she's it's suggested sexually abused and then faces continued forms of abuse as she tries to find her place in the world and eventually you know dies of really terrifying sickness at the end of this I think a cynical way to view the movie is that the movie is punishing her for her decisions I actually don't think that is the intention or I would suggest an alternate reading which is Jenny had bad luck

and didn't have the right infrastructure to catch her and help her right and forest just had good luck I like that idea that the movie is actually pointing out we have no control we are all just feathers on the wind and our goal collectively should be to raise the floor of everyone around us which is kind of what forest tries to do so anyway that's my optimistic I'm now an adult take on forest camp perhaps I am just polyanation naive but I really enjoyed rewatching this no I think you're

“touching on a lot of really important points there I had a very similar experience I same thing I think”

everyone our age saw this movie probably around 10 or 11 years old which is arguably too young since it features sex intravenous drug use but hey he's so happy about it it's fine and you know the same thing I loved it I thought it was funny I thought it was fun I was entertained it felt like I was ingesting history without actually understanding any of it or any of the context and then of course as it was revisited you know through the millennial lens I think everybody started to think

this is a massive oversimplification of you guys say it's history this is almost like keeping these moments in history by putting him in them and while I'm not saying there's no merit to that argument I think there there is I think we'll talk about this a little bit but this is a movie from another time this is a movie from the early 90s and that was a very different time with a very different outlook and I think that is reflected here I don't think that's a bad thing

I think honestly this time watching it I was so impressed by Robin Wright because there is like

“there's a coldness and a hardness to her that I think is actually really essential to Jenny in this”

and had they cast someone who was sweeter I actually don't think it would have worked as well I think she's really good in this she does not shy away from that she doesn't you know try to play it softer like she's mad she's fucking mad and I don't blame her at all so I really was impressed by her very impressed by some of the special effects which we're going to talk about quite a bit in this there's some really good ones there's really clever things that they did

that you wouldn't even notice you know I said hidden effects at the top it's like obviously there are some things of course we know that they're doing inserting you know forest into archival footage but there's a lot more that's really cool and really innovative let's get into it Chris and you know let's find out why everybody underestimated forest gump much the same way everyone underestimated

forest gump so the basic information as always is is directed by Robert Samakis who we have

talked about before so if you would like more of a primer on Samakis you can go back to the back to the future episode it was written by Eric Roth based on the novel forest gump by Winston groom it was released July 6 1994 and it of course stars Tom Hanks Sally Field Robin Wright Gary Sunnis Michael Carter Humphrey's Michael T Williamson who I love so much in Hannah Hall and many more and the IMDB Logline as always is the history of the United States from the 1950s to the 70s

unfolds from the perspective of an Alabama man with an acute of 75 who yearns to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart yeah I guess I don't know I would really call it this is the most American tall tale maybe ever put on films certainly in the last 35 years forest gump is gump and big fish lives in the same world as this to me it lives in the same world I don't think big fish touches this movie personally okay I love big fish but yes I agree little big man big fish and then on the

pickarask side I put together some other examples Barry Lyndon Bill and Ted's excellent adventure interesting that's a pickarask story I would argue all right great okay Chris our story begins not with forest gump but with his creator Winston groom he was born in 1943 and raised in mobile county Alabama and he attended university military school where he became an editor of his school newspaper in 1965 he graduated from the University of Alabama with a BA in English then he joined the

army did a tour in Vietnam and got his first post-war writing job he worked as a reporter at the

now defunged Washington star covering the court system in Washington DC but soon tragedy struck

died while Winston was out on the job and when she passed away he decided that he was done

“wasting time and he wanted to pursue what he loved and that was writing novels and turns out he was”

really good at it his first two novels better times than these and as summer's die were pretty favorably reviewed they did quite well and his third book conversations with the enemy earned him a Pulitzer nomination wow yeah not the case for most people that decide to leave their job and become novelist in 1985 he was now a successful three-time author he's living in New York City but he went back home to visit his dad in mobile Alabama and over lunch Winston senior told us

on a start he said there's a local special needs kid in the neighborhood who was always teased

growing up he got chased he got roughed up by all the other kids and then one day a truck showed up outside his house and delivery men wheeled out a huge piano and within days beautiful music started whafting out of the home turns out the kid was a musical genius and as soon as word got around the other kids stopped picking on him everybody took him under their wings

“and everything was forgiven those kids are still assholes it doesn't matter that they liked”

the piano that he was playing Winston as dad started chatting about a recent 60-minute segment on savant syndrome now if you're not familiar according to the National Institutes of Health savant syndrome is a rare but extraordinary condition where people with serious mental disabilities including autistic disorder have an island of genius which stands in market incongruous contrast to overall handicap in other words someone who might not be able to even

tie their own shoes by themselves can somehow also solve the world's most complex math problems now it seems like it does occur more frequently in people with autistic disorder but it can appear in other developmental disabilities it can also appear in other types of central nervous system injury or disease which is really interesting and this sparked an idea in Winston

after lunch he went home and by late that evening he had written the first chapter of his next

novel now much of the novels pulled straight from his own life the Vietnam Alabama, shrimping, boating all that took place around Mobile, Lieutenant Dan and Bubba were based on sort of a mishmash of his friends and he would call it forest he had a pretty hard time with the last name Chris so let's rewind 1967 he was fresh home from Vietnam on the west coast and he learned the hard way that walking into a San Francisco bar in his army uniform was not a good way to meet

women so he went out and bought a new suit at a department store called Gump's the it shop of the time and then 20 years later as he sitting at his desk trying to figure out forest last name he looked down and there's a Gump's catalog and he had it forest gump and six weeks later Winston finished writing his novel and he sent it off to his agent and then it landed on the desk of Wendy Finerman who had just joined Steve Tish Productions as the vice president of production and

development now Steve Tish that is a name that as many others has popped up in the Epstein files he's not super relevant to this episode so we're not going to get into it or talk about him now Wendy we are going to talk about she had come from business affairs at Universal Television and she was hunting for the movie that was going to launch her film career she was also really young like early 20s at

“this point I believe and when she came across the galley which is basically a first look at a book”

before it's published for forest gump she thought this is it this is my movie she told the New York Times quote I was floored when do you come across material that literally makes you laugh and cry almost at the same time the characters were timeless so she took it to Warner Brothers thinking she's got a hit on her hands and Chris what do you think their reaction was I'm going to guess Lucy the reaction is what is this you nailed it exactly right you can't really boil it down

to a marketable pitch it's not really a comedy or drama as written as you put it out it's basically

a fairy tale but also not really and then the main character isn't really very likable more on that in a moment what's a pick a risk like that's kind of you know it's like wandering the story's wandering very meandering yes yeah Hollywood stories have like clear arcs yeah very much not the novel and as we'll discover more so than the movie even so they thought ah what the hell they bought the rights anyway in 1985 which you know it's existing IP from a successful Pulitzer nominated

author at this point it makes sense to go ahead and grab it. Finerman hired Winston Grim to write his own screenplay and they were off to the races right no because when forest gump the novel came out in March of 1986 it pretty much bombed hmm Kirk is called it quote Gawkey and Ham handed and a quote stumbling droopy drawer to tempt at a pickarask novel um while publishers weekly wrote the quote absurdity gathers its own speed and begins to run dangerously a muck and that quote

groom has written better books than this the general consensus was this was a pretty big letdown

it was Wendy Finerman so she plowed ahead and she did have one ally Kevin Jones who was an exact

“at Warner Brothers who was genuinely excited about the idea but not so much groom's script because”

forest gump as written in both the novel and the original script was a horny swearing marijuana smoke and lady chase and money loving all around complicated guy he's what we'd call a Winston groom I don't know anything about he's just based it on his own life so maybe you know I mean that's kind of that describe any number of people that could a lot outside of the marijuana smokey you know you could call it a call like Chris Waterbauer then maybe but hey there was a time there was a time

he was also a really big guy he was six foot six and around 240 pounds groom had actually envisioned John Goodman playing the role interesting so at this point they kicked Winston groom to the curb

and two more screenwriters were brought in to now adapt both the novel and groom's first draft

of the screenplay but nobody could really crack it because as you point it out Chris the novel itself does not follow a typical story structure it's very episodic it's flowy there's no real build towards any kind of climax and then the film was dealt the ultimate blow in the form of dust and Hoffman and Tom Cruise ride nescalators and dis and came art because what came out in 1988 Chris Rain Man Rain Man and execs thought well there can't be two of these so no the performance

Pauline Kale I believe said was equivalent of playing one note on the piano at varying

“intensities for two hours Rain Man Dustin Hoffman's performance yeah that's what”

Pauline Kale didn't like his performance in that movie I actually like his performance in that movie I like Rain Man but I don't think the Dustin Hoffman is the standout performance there it's Tom Cruise oh no it's Tom Cruise that's that's one of his best movies he's incredible in Rain Man yeah anyway by 1990 Warner Brothers put poor forest gum in turn around and Chris what happens in turn around so turn around is one of studio decides that no longer want to pursue a project so effectively

you're putting it back out to the market to see if another studio would like to pick it up

and develop it further but the problem is that one of project goes into turn around it has a

price tag associated with it and that price tag is however much the studio has spent on the project thus far so in this instance that would be the purchasing rights for the book or option or whatever it is plus whatever they've paid screenwriters and you know studio math maybe a couple of things get shoved on it just to make sure we make a little money in turn around and so it becomes a sunk cost issue right there's all this dead money shoved against this project and it's not

as appealing anymore because your investment is going to be higher than if you found it clean on the market exactly example finerman said people would ask me what I was working on and I'd say forest gum and they'd get that glazed look I knew they were thinking when is she going to give up so eventually finerman did have to start working on something else in the late 80s and that happened to be an adaptation of David Brinn's novel the postman he had option the book and brought in screenwriter

Eric Roth to write the adaptation with Tom Hanks attached oh wow this is the one that would end up being Kevin Costner right yes this is of course the one that would wind up both directed by and starring the one and only Kevin Costner that's for a different episode yes second or third nail in his coffin after water world we'll definitely need to cover that one yes yes and Kevin Jones Gump's only big fan at Warner Brothers had moved over to Paramount but he had not forgotten about

forest gum and he also knew that Warner Brothers wanted to make executive decision which Paramount currently held the rights to great movie it is a good movie love that movie so Jones made a trade Jones is like listen we will give you executive decision if Warner Brothers will give Paramount forest gum and Paramount said yes Warner Brothers said yes and the deal was made now should be noted executive decision grossed 122 million at the box office on a budget of about 55 million

was pretty good we'll get to how forest gum did a little later yeah and executive decision was

“vastly I think overshadowed by Air Force One when that came out a year or two later I believe so”

still good got a lot of movie that kills Steven Segal in the first five minutes that's true good decision and Paramount had a brand new chairman and CEO of the motion picture group at this point which is around 1992 and that is someone we have talked about before Sherry Lansing and she was cautiously optimistic about forest gum but she was under a lot of pressure Paramount was being bought by Viacom and her time at Paramount at the top was basically entirely dependent on the lineup of

pictures that she greenlit so this is definitely a risky bet forest gum not a clear winner never the

less groom was paid $350,000 up front for the rights to forest gum and he got a 3% share of the films net profits remember that number and finerman who had already been working with Eric Roth

loved forest gum the book, Eric Roth thought it was bad he told Forbes quote I thought the book

“was goofy and farcical even though the movie is goofy and farcical to an extent I tried to give”

it a little more meaning I just figured what the hell it was such a crazy story. Condeed is the way I look at it I thought I had the license to go anywhere I wanted with it that was a lovely freedom to me that makes so much sense I don't know if you've ever read condeed but this is like I totally understand what he's doing here through that lens this podcast is supported by built guys I don't like paying rent I'm guessing you don't either but built makes it feel a little

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even though it's only February it's simple paying rent is better with built and now owning a home can be better with built too earn rewards and get something back wherever you live join the loyalty program for renters at joinbuilt.com/wrong that's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T.com/wrong make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you so rather than writing rooms screenplay which stayed close to the book Roth went back to the drawing board and started from scratch and as he worked on the script the hunt for a director

and a forest began now the first director attached with someone that we have discussed in the podcast

before but have never covered one of his movies very son-in-felt oh that's interesting that actually

if you think about something like men in black you know which would follow that and he handled a lot of special effects in his films as well that makes a lot of sense yeah I don't know if he was established and they certainly wouldn't have gotten the budget they got I don't think you know that they would end up getting what he'd made one movie at this point he had made that out of his family which was a pretty big success right but on a 2020 real blend interview son-in-felt said quote

when I was finishing Adams family the head of paramount was a guy named Gary Luchesi Gary had a novel called Forest Gump and he said look I've got eight scripts and they all suck can you read

“this book and tell me if you want to do it so I read gump and the lead of gump was actually a big”

fact guy who was really strong he was like Confederacy of Dunces in many ways and I said to Gary well

here's what I would do I would make gump a runner instead of a big fact guy and I'll send it to

Tom Hanks if you're okay with it so thanks to Barry Son and Feld we have Tom Hanks he called up Tom and Tom said I'll think about it but back to Barry he did not stick around for very long because he had the Adams family values on his radar and his loyalty to that franchise was a lot stronger than his loyalty to forest gump again it's spent seven years in limbo this is not a sure thing at all but the idea of Tom Hanks stuck around and he'd already been working with Roth

and Finer meant to develop the postmen of course and he seemed perfect for the role a little bit about Tom Hanks because we haven't really talked about him as a person a ton on the show before he was born in Concord, California in 1956 he started bouncing from one household to the next one he was five and his parents divorced he was the third child of four two of his siblings lip of his father was a nomadic cook who kind of ambled around from job to job he rarely saw his

mother who remarried three different times so he had a very tumultuous upbringing that it sounds like he dealt with by being funny he wasn't particularly good in school he's not like a standout in sports or anything but he was really funny and he developed very good social skills so he starts out in theatre after graduating from Cal State University and then he moved to New York where he worked with the Riverside Shakespeare company in Manhattan and he started to audition for some TV he auditioned

for ABC and of course he was cast by Joyce Selznik in bosom buddies I liked bosom buddies

what year was bosom buddies? 1980 to 1982 so very early I've never seen it it's cute I mean he's very

cute at it I'll check it out I knew he had a guest appearance on happy days and I thought he was on family ties for a couple episodes but yeah I never never watched bosom buddies well his next big break was of course Ron Howard's splash in 1984 which he auditioned for at a time when he said nobody wanted to work for Disney he actually described Disney's studio as back then as looking like quote a greyhound bus station in Salma, Alabama it's like pop by the black hole frame this was like

yeah why the action at Disney was that it's an idea at this point in time except splash ended up getting nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay it's great except on Disney

out of the water and it's just like let the people see Darrell Hannah's butt come on let's see

“your butt the kids see your butt maybe they changed it I just remember saying this a little while ago”

take that hair out of there get the hair out of her butt kind of when you first said that I thought

you meant that they had like digitally painted the camera hair yes crack so I was like that's not better and then I remember she was very long blonde hair anyway so in that in 1988 of course we get big which was an enormous success and this really like solidifies him as pretty much a super star so by the time Barry Sonnenfeld called him up Hank's has an awful lot of power in the industry yeah we'd say what year is this pursuit happening this would be early 90's like probably around

I would think 92 is my guess yeah Tom said that with the right script he could be convinced to join the project and he also was like I have the perfect director for this it's someone he has worked with before it's a woman Penny Marshall Penny Marshall a league of their own yeah exactly got it I love a league of their own Penny Marshall's wonderful we got to cover that one yes we do there's been a lot about that recently actually but Penny Marshall said no thank you it turns out

“one of her best friends was dying of lymphoma and as she told Hank's sometimes life is more”

important than show business she wanted to be with her friend meanwhile Eric Roth was still chugging along on the screenplay which took him a year to complete and in December of 1992 he handed in his screenplay so in 2024 Scott Tobias wrote for the Guardian quote in groom's novel forest is more on the spectrum with a low IQ and a massive frame that makes him seem selfish but who likes Mark Twain is natural at chess and can do enough math in his head to be recruited by NASA Eric Roth's

screenplay turns him more into a lobotomized zealig so there's a pretty massive change to the character of forest gump with this screenplay from Eric Roth but this screenplay was a big hit with

the next director that they approached and this was finally Robert's a mechus in fact he said

fuck your book Winston grew I don't need to read it I like this screenplay that's all I need but Chris it wasn't just the story in the screenplay that he liked what do you think Robert's a mechus was particularly drawn to in the script this is the opportunity to like use a lot of technology to bring all of these events to life yes bingo and she seems to have had a fascination with diving into the past and alternate versions of the past obviously with something like

back to the future or back to the future part three and if he was an effects wizard and it's right becomes her still looks great I love that becomes her yeah and who framed Roger Rath's right the guy's a mechus he is that's right it's the technological leaps now in the screenplay Roth wrote brief descriptions like we see forest getting his award from Lyndon Johnson and it was pretty much entirely up to the mechus to figure out how the hell they would actually bring those

scenes to life and like what would happen in those scenes so the mechus did request some additional changes to the screenplay because it was originally pretty overwritten which even Roth admitted Roth script included actually more fantastical surreal elements like whenever forest saw Jenny she had angels wings lieutenant Dan had a black cloud over his head there was a line from mama gump don't let anybody tell you your lock water millen head followed by forest imagining

a whole room of people with water melon heads I might have liked that there was even a cartoon curious George that was sitting on forest shoulder talking to him and Samaka said get rid of all of this let's not a me shell go yes exactly he's not around yet let's focus on the overarching love story between forest and Jenny good call yeah although some of that sounds fun but you don't need it some other pretty big changes to the final script from the book Chris the entire running

sequence not in the book well I would imagine if he hadn't been a runner that's right in the book right yeah and you know we've discussed this but the book forest is kind of aggressive he's fell mouth he actually comes across as quite smart in certain instances he displays moments of high intelligence particularly with mathematics and physics he's much more like what we were discussing with savant syndrome than where we actually end up in the movie in fact he actually goes to space

in the book Jenny also did not have what I think is you know heavily insinuated as a drug problem in the movie and then the big one in the novel the quote was be in an idiot is no box the chocolate's

“but in the movie of course we get what life is like a box of chocolates you're an idiot no um life”

is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're going to get yes so I was really interested in

the and maybe I'll talk about this at the end but the the response from especially like the autistic community to this movie and I was surprised it when it surprised but I was it seemed very overwhelmingly

and one person basically made the point that forest takes everything literally yeah and so because

he's told so many times that he is low IQ he's just internalized that and accepted it that he's stupid yeah and we have to not even accepted as well but really he displays very high intelligence

“throughout the movie like especially moral and emotional intelligence I think the difference here is that”

Roth takes the intelligence level and applies it to an emotional arc versus in the book it's much more applied to like you know physics and mathematics and actual problems but one point that this one writer who's who I want to put his name in Ron Stofer Ron Stoffer put on his blog post that he thought was interesting as he said you know he has autism Ron and he was saying that he has no aptitude for math but he's hyper fixated on numbers and he remembers all of these details like

dates and stuff and he loved that forest gum you know didn't you say you were waiting for the number seven bus like he immediately notices that the woman's bus arrives I'm taking the 24,562 dollars and 42 cents that I got that's left after a new haircut and a new suit so he obviously understands you know and he can do math better than the average in American clearly in that scene you know remembering you died on a Saturday morning she had got the cancer and died on a Tuesday

“that's what I was gonna say his memory is incredible picture perfect yeah picture perfect”

which from what I read online seems like a consistent trade of that many people with autism have

expressed like they have an incredible memory for details and take everything literally and you

know so I just think it's interesting I think it's different from the book I don't think it's wrong at all yeah it's very easy to you know I think underestimate what Roth did with the character in the movie and I'm glad that you shared that you know about people in autistic community feeling positively about it because you're right he's not an idiot and I'm not saying it's universal I'm just saying it seems like a lot of people in the autistic community actually took the opposite perspective of like

forest is amazing and everybody around him isn't idiot well that's true do you think is what the movie is that literally what the movie is about yeah everyone around him is fucking up and forest is just why and through life but Chris the changing of the chocolate's quote in particular with something that Winston groomed hate it he said everywhere I go people send me chocolates I hate chocolates and he hated that it was not his line I prefer the one that they wrote yeah it's better you know so

as a mechus was locked in but forest himself still was not Robert's mechus had a different top

“choice and it was Bill Paxton hmm I mean he does I think he makes a lot of sense too he's just not”

as big a star but I could see him doing the role I could too he has a similar sweetness to Tom Hanks that I think would have worked in this case but the producers were like not big enough to carry this movie no I mean this is right around Philadelphia right this is right after Philadelphia one year after so Philadelphia I don't think would have come out but he would have at least been attached to it if not have filmed it yeah once Hank's got his hands on the final screen play though he said

he was in and they dropped all the other choices and said lock it in boys but Bob's a mechus called him up and said Tom I cannot make a movie without the star of the movie being my soulmate so you and I have to be joined at the hip and they were with the mechus and Hank's finally on board

suddenly it was go time and according to groom he said I have never seen a movie get made so fast

in my life from this point forward Sally Field was cast as mama gump jodie foster Nicole Kidman and Demi Moore were all considered for the role of Jenny before Robin Wright landed it I think they got the right one there Nicole Kidman could have been interesting yeah I grew with you Gary Sunnis was cast as lieutenant Dan came of course from a very strong stage and character actor background when he was 18 years old he had co-founded Chicago Steppenwolf theater but

forest gump was really his big mainstream breakthrough and the role of Lieutenant Dan was very very personal for Gary Sunnis he had actually been working with Vietnam veteran since the mid-80s he had a long line of vets and his own family his wife's two brothers her sister's husband a navy father who had actually developed film and photographs from war zones and he repaired for the role by watching documentaries and reading a book by Lewis Polar who was a triple amputee who had

stepped on a booby trap and after his research Sunnis went to the mechus and Roth with some concerns about the script he basically said a lot of the stuff in here with Lieutenant Dan is not believable he said you know he would not be like able to do these things that certain points in his recovery like going to bars around Saigon and Sunnis said we need to change the stuff to make it more realistic and they actually did good now the role of Bubba was not originally to be played

by Michael T. Williamson they offered it to someone else do of any guesses as to who they might have offered this to in the early 90s he's a comedian he became a very very big comedian but he wasn't a very big comedian yet he was not Dave Chappelle Dave Chappelle okay yeah it was going to be any Murphy before that but he was already too big that's right interesting so Dave Chappelle turned down the role saying that the script stuck he basically felt like it had created a black friend who's

Bubba is white they met in college and Bubba is quite a bit smarter in the books than he's portrayed

“in the movie so I mean I'm not going to discount what Dave Chappelle is saying there no I won't”

either when I watched it I mean yes he is definitely the token black guy you know in the movie for sure but I viewed him as equivalent in terms like he and Bubba were two peas in a pod is kind of how I felt when they were both in what he says me and Bubba was two peas in a pod and Vietnam and it was forest singular focus on whatever task he has at hand has met its match with Bubba's singular focus on getting back home and starting a shrimping you know business and I liked that element of the story

I actually you know I remembered when I was younger watching this and thinking that Bubba was like really dumb he's not at all like upon rewatching it he just comes from like a simpler background that's really it with Bubba I don't want to discount Dave Chappelle's criticism here because I actually you know he's correct like they changed something from the book and it's maybe not serving Bubba as well as they could have developed that character but he's also not what I remembered

now when it came to Michael T. Williamson he was not a known actor at all he was actually working as an acting coach and he had already coached two students who auditioned for the role and they didn't get it he asked their blessing if they were okay with him going out for the same role they said yes but his agent called him back and said I'm sorry I can't get you an audition they don't know who the hell you are but he didn't give up and they squeezed him in on a Saturday he stuffed his lip full of paper

and as soon as he walked in there he was Bubba I know he said this every time he pops up in a movie but I love Michael T. Williamson I do wonder if because he looked so different in this it like

“impacted his ability to get roles as many roles as I think he deserved moving forward but he's so”

good if you haven't watched justified watch it yeah no it says far as his national persona as forest campus from Tom Hanks it's far there honestly like when you watch other performances of his like I'm thinking particularly you know lime house on justified he is or heat or heat yes he can be very sinister like he's got a lot of weight to him and it's yeah I just think he's a wonderful actor so the cast was all set but as Tom Hanks was figuring out his character they hit a wall

on one pretty crucial detail but forest gum got a sound like should he have an accent no accent

so they had hanks readlines every single way trying to figure it out he was really struggling with it and then it all changed as soon as they cast Michael Connor Humphrey's as young forest gum pierced Tom Hanks on Graham Dorton talking about it I didn't realize to be coming this time that in forest gum the famous voice that used as forest it came from a specific person the young Michael Connor Humphrey's who played the young forest gum we were trying to Bob's or Macas

came to me say hey we got a problem on this that the teachers kid had to talk the way you want to talk and I thought why don't why don't I just talk the way he talks right now and so we started hanging out with him and he was from Mississippi deep in Mississippi and he had this he had this hard G at the end of this if he said it wasn't thinking it was thinking it wasn't making it was making and says what does it what does your your father do Michael my my my dad it makes

“grease that's what he said he said he made he I don't understand it's grease something you make”

yes he says what do you do with grease well grease goes into all different sorts of products how does it look like what products oh grease goes into lipsticks yeah that was like well I'm not this is it this is it so somewhere I have cassettes hours and hours of me just making chitchette with a very young Michael back on but he doesn't talk like that anymore no no no it is not it which is the you know we've seven eight years old he was a young man and that's

that's that was the vernacular that we spoke it and it was priceless oh that's adorable and of course a huge success for you meanwhile the production team needed to figure out where forest gump was going to be filmed now naturally production designer Rick Carter initially went to Alabama but they pretty quickly discovered that real Alabama was not anything like what was described in forest gump and so they were like this is not it they traveled around until they finally landed in Savannah

which is what you see with the bus stop the old oak trees dripping in Spanish moss behind him and that was the visual aesthetic they were looking for but they still needed a house so location scouts searched all over the country and they couldn't find it until one scout drove up an old tree lined oak alley in Yamassi south Carolina and arrived at bluff plantation when some extra-style location he absolutely loved it he's like this is it this is forest gump's childhood home

but there was a problem Chris there was actually no home there there was just a lodge used for weekend hunting so the house that you see in forest gump the old southern house was built entirely

from scratch by the team amazing it is amazing they studied southern houses in the area they combined

to the mechus they got it exactly what he wanted they flew in artisans from all over the country

“refinished the woods so it looked like it had been there for hundreds of years when i found out”

this was built for the movie i was blown away it looks incredible yeah i would have guessed it was not

maybe the interior they are on a soundstage for some of it but there are also a lot of shots out of the foyer you know i mean that you can see it i would mention to we just talked about begonia and the house and that was also completely built it's a fraction of the size but i love this it's this is the hollywood magic you know these technicians come in and they it's perfect yeah it is visually remarkable it's it's really sets the scene it's so worth it

well Chris everything was going great until paramount decided to take a little looksie at the budget and it became quickly apparent that the original forty million dollars was not going to cut it they were short by at least ten million more like fifteen million and that figure was going to go up because industrial light magic was doing the visual effects so sharing land saying was really

“worried this whole thing is getting way too expensive she wanted to cut two story arcs that she”

deemed unnecessary the shrimping and Vietnam i was going to guess the running was going to be one that was going to be cut but the running's probably relatively affordable because well we'll get there you could actually shoot some of that second unit because my guess is a lot of those white shots are not Tom Hanks they're not yeah but the mech has said no way he was not going to cut those and so sharing land saying had a tough call to make and Chris she made it right before filming

was set to begin she called the mech is agent and said we need ten million dollars off this budget or this movie does not go ahead and according to the mech is this request took place 48 hours before cameras started rolling others sources say they were given a couple of weeks i don't know either way the message was the same but the mech isn't having it he agreed to stay with force gump though and he worked with Tom Hanks on a deal Hanks and the mech has each agreed to take a 50%

pay cut of their salaries which got them halfway but in exchange they would get a bigger share of the gross profits down the line lancing agreed and she agreed to bump paramount investment up

by five million dollars getting it to what they needed so force gump could finally move forward

and principal photography began the summer of 1993 the mech has brought in his longtime cinematographer Don Burgess filming takes place all over the country we're talking south Carolina north Carolina Georgia Los Angeles Arizona Maine Montana this was a huge production and while Hanks had found for his accent before they started filming he had not really found the character according to Hanks he said quote Bob said look i know what you're trying to do

i know how nervous you are in house self-conscious this can be before we get into the group but we're not going to use any of these first three days because i don't think you've got it you haven't got the character and i said i don't you're right and he just said don't try so hard and from that everything settled down in a moment's notice so they literally threw out everything they filmed in the first three days now of course they were going to be spending a lot of

time in south Carolina so production designer Rick Carter decided to also create vietnam in south Carolina which makes sense they were title marshes and waterways the kind of double for it they had military adviser Dale die set up the camps exactly the way they were set up in actual vietnam for the helicopters they filmed one or two real ones and then composited them into shots to make them look like they were more there's a lot of great compositing in that secret

yeah cutting behind those palm trees i'm guessing actually some of the palm trees were layered in

“too now that i think about it and they do a really good job of layering in those distant low rising”

mountain you know ranges that you see it on the rice fields yeah it's really well then they didn't incredible job and speaking of this we have to talk about the visual effects in this movie now aside from the more obvious effects like we discussed there's a lot of things that you may not even notice that are incredible effects in this the birds flowing out of the fields the feather

the feathers amazing the feather is amazing i'm pretty sure that first crane shot was a must be like

a stitch of some like when they go up to the sky and they stitch it's an incredible crane shot to bring you all the way down to forest feet it's so good well and the feather is shot on a blue screen and then blown around to kind of you know right they also speed up the tree shadows overhead when forest is running to make it look more dreamlike there's just tons of stuff happening all the time they do some fun Texas switches when like Tom Hanks will cross screen and then the

panel will pan and he's now way further ahead and it's clearly like they've swapped in another run right you know i'm saying they do it when he jumps off the boat and comes up the dock there's a lot of fun practical effects that they do in this movie too there's a lot yes now on the large scale the production faced three visual effects hurdles that 90s technology had not yet caught up to one how do you convincingly turn a full-bodied man into an amputee two how do you digitally

gump into archival footage so let's talk about problem number one first because up until this

“point film effects hid legs usually through false floors and false beds right but in forest”

gump they did not want to do that they wanted to make the audience think that they knew how the trick worked and then show them something that seemed impossible to fake as one example i love so much in this movie it might be what we're about to talk about so in addition to painting out Gary Sunise's legs frame by frame which is incredibly painstaking and they did do this he wore blue stockings on set they also added some stuff in and maybe this is what you're thinking

about yep in one scene where lieutenant Dan swings his legs around after falling off of his wheelchair they digitally insert a table next to him where his real legs would have hit if they were there which is so cool yeah it's the new years he falls off his wheelchair there's a table that sits there that looks like a giant spool that's been turned on its side they establish it they open the scene with a shot of that table yep to establish it so you know that tables there and then in

the wide shot he swings his legs so close to it that you think oh how could he possibly have done that and if you pay a fair reclose attention and you're in high def and you pause it you can maybe just make out the like matte cut where they inserted the table but it's so well done it's

really smart and i never would have noticed you know if i wasn't really looking for it no i love

that that's such a smart way to do this but as you pointed out it was not just digital they also did have to rely on some practical effects as a mech has actually hired a magician to design a special optical illusion wheelchair so the seat slanted back a little bit and it had a platform in the middle which allowed sines to bend and then tuck his legs in completely so it actually looked normal from any angle and this is if they needed to shoot around him but he could only sit in it for about

10 minutes because it was incredibly uncomfortable yeah all right second let's talk about the crowd so this is of course the DC rally scene from the Lincoln Memorial and to film a crowd that looked true to size they would have needed about 250 thousand people which obviously can't do yeah wasn't that like the Abby Hoffman rally yes so the visual effects solution was to film 1500 extras and rearrange them in every take into different quadrants and then using augmentation

“multiply them and move them to different parts of the frame so this is of course something that honestly”

wasn't really solved until Lord of the Rings right but they were shooting in November it was freezing cold and halfway through the day after lunch Chris half the extras just eat it out of there they love it was too cold which means the visual effects team had to do this with half the number of extras they had originally planned for this was incredibly tedious it took months for them to actually be able to complete this and it honestly looks pretty great is it basically from

remembering correctly they did something very similar in Braveheart yes they did although Braveheart I think was a bit easier because they're panning down one long line kind of versus this you're actually seeing like a full wide shot of everything so they really had to fill it all in right yeah now of course forest gum is probably most famous for what effect Chris the historical footage of various events that forest has been inserted into that's right de-segregation you know in

Alabama the George Wallace scene meeting JFK Lyndon Johnson yes John Lennon one of my favorite

“things is that I believe Lyndon Johnson was notorious for I kid you not like showing off his penis”

as he had a very large penis and would show it to men to intimidate them at the capital and I just love that forest shows him his butt I just think it's such a fun little Easter egg in this movie it is funny so at the time there was a very primitive version of this effect that had been seen in things like zeleg which you referenced and in the line of fire but in comparison the work in forest gum is genuinely groundbreaking they actually pioneered new CGI techniques under the leadership

of ILM's Ken Raulston and Raulston had served as a special effects supervisor for six Zimacus films at this point including forest gump he'd won two of his four Oscars for Zimacus films which was who framed Roger Rabbit and deathbecomes her the two that you just referenced so together they had to basically invent the technology for this according to Raulston quote in films that Bob Zimacus

makes 20% of everything he wants to do is impossible up to that point the problem is in this case

they were still bound by reality they could only work with whatever archival footage they could find so researchers poured through hundreds of hours of news real footage looking for anything that mirrored something close to what was in Eric Roth's script and there were cases where they actually had to rewrite the stories around the clips that they could find for example the storyline of forest playing football was because they found footage of Kennedy talking with the all-American football team right

but in the onoot poo scene where gump shakes hands with Kennedy the scene was originally written for the rose garden but they couldn't find a good comp of that anywhere they did find a good

rewrite it to take place in the oval office and then they wrote a scoped Kennedy out of the original footage and dropped him into footage with Tom Hanks that they had shot on a fake oval office set.

“I think that's why that one looks good better to me than some of the other ones. I agree.”

I think when he's inserted is it with Dick Cavitt and John Lennon later that one looks not good. I think that one's a little rougher because he's in the middle and we know everything around him is seamless so I do think that the Kennedy one works particularly well. I agree but it was unbelievably hard to get this because they had to copy the lighting and shadows on Kennedy's face from different footage and replicate those inside the fake oval office. He had to perform against

blue screens he had to fit extremely specific marks to be in Kennedy's eyeline. It was crazy. The other issue is that the original footage was handheld so it's jittery it's 16 millimeter it's constantly moving and zooming in and out so they had to literally replicate the exact camera set up as the original footage in order for it to look as good as it does and I agree with you I think this is the most successful one in the bunch. They're manually motion tracking across not just the three axes of

you know up down sideways but forward and back but then as you mentioned was the zoom as well on

top of that. It's amazing then of course they have to go in afterwards and make the footage that they've

“shot in the oval office look as aged and scratchy as Kennedy and I agree with you I think that”

matches better than when they're dropping him into the older footage. They also did some pretty crazy island of Dr. Moro thanks where they would like cut off Lyndon Johnson's head from one thing and composite it onto a stand-in's body in order to get that whole sequence where he shows off his butt. I was wondering if they did some mouth replacement so they would do animals you know like in the 90s. They look like the annoying orange sometimes. John Lennon in particular. The sponge monkeys from

McQuizmas. I love this thing. Yes. Yeah the making people talk convincingly was really really hard. They did use voice impersonators to create new dialogue and then they tried to digitally altered lip movements which is what you're talking about. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but this actually brought up a lot of concerns about how this technique could be wielded in the future. In 1994, can Ralston told the LA Times we've opened a whole new can of worms. My feeling is that

this is a gentle nudge pointing out the possibilities of a potentially horrific problem. We got the rights to the footage we used but what's legal and what's moral doesn't necessarily mix. Yeah. Interesting parallels. It's you know parallels to AI everywhere. Now I want to talk briefly

about some of the practical effects in this movie because they are amazing. The scene of forest running

and his leg braces bursting off of his legs as completely practical. That's crazy. They removed the screws and the joints. They rigged them with small explosive charges triggered by remote control. Wow. This obviously scared a year old Michael but the crew told him he was going to be fine and he was. It looks amazing. I wondered if they were using a body double but they weren't. No no it's him. He actually had a great time on this set. Apparently he just played a lot of legends

of Zelda with Sally Field. Hey. Great game. Great game. It was Sally Field. What's not to like? Yeah. Sally Field. Who had co-starred with hanks? I think like I'm here 15 years earlier and all of the sudden she's his mom. I know. I know. Well she starts out quite young. I know yeah they're only 10 years apart. Actually the old age makeup on her is very good. I agree. I said the same thing I think it looks excellent because they don't do that much. It's very subtle. It's like

Marlon Brando and the Godfather. It looks really good. I agree. And by the way one last thing on Michael before we go back to the effects he in the principal sex scene they didn't tell him obviously what was going on at all they said oh the principal is just doing some push-ups upstairs.

“Can you make the noise of someone doing push-ups and that's what he does? Yeah. That actually”

like the weirdness of that scene. Oh it's great. Quite a bit. The movie really does sink into some sentimentality sometimes that could be quick sand but seems like that. Give it the strangeness it needs. I agree. I agree. Last thing here I want to talk about that massive napalm strike

when Forest Rescue's Bubba because the way they did this is amazing. So they actually found

a property in South Carolina that was supposed to be cleared for condominiums and they got permission to straight up blow up the whole thing. So that shot that looks like a continuous shot of Forest running out of the jungle. Here's how they did it. First they filmed a stuntman carrying another stuntman running at the camera from quite a distance. As he runs closer you'll notice when you're watching he trips and dips down a little bit pops back up. When he pops back up that is Tom

Hanks and Michael T. Williamson. He's not actually carrying Michael T. Michael T. is hoisted on a huge

obviously the wires are painted out in post. Then they went in, rigged everything with giant tubes of pyro material and gasoline and what they did was they shot the explosions at different speeds. And then they composited the shot so they obviously blocked the actors in front of where the pyro was going to be. Then they wrote a scope Tom and Bubba out of the original scene running including all the little bushes and leaves that were overlapping their legs, add them back into

the final scene. And then in the final composite they also added in computer-generated jets. The stuntman transitioning to Tom Hanks, the actors matted in, painting a new matching foliage that

was timed to the blast explosions. It's amazing. I really think that that shot looks so good.

“I agree. My only in modern times. Not complaint, but the only thing that bumps me about that”

shot has nothing to do with the execution. It's actually a design choice and I wonder if the mech is would agree. I think that the final explosion gets so close to Hanks and Williamson that I was waiting for an impact because I've been trained by Hollywood movies for the characters to be blown forward when the explosion gets close. And since that doesn't happen for some reason it bumped me a little bit. Again, that has nothing to do with execution. I just

noticed it and I was curious like oh you know would Zomekas have done it a little differently now for example. Interesting. But no, it's an incredible effect. Again, because the explosions are real, that effect is actually more believable than I would say the majority of explosions that we see now, you know, competence because it's difficult to beat a real gasoline explosion captured on camera.

It looks amazing. But even though it all looked incredible and I think everybody on set knew that

they were making something pretty groundbreaking the studio did not. They wouldn't even let Zomekas get crew shirts at the end because there was no room in the budget. In a 2024 interview with Mark Marin Zomekas explained that there was just a massive disconnect between the crew and the studio and it really was not a fun movie to make because of this. Paramount just didn't get it. And one sequence the studio especially did not understand was forest marathon run across America.

“They kept saying you have to cut this. Now, I agree with you Chris out of everything that you”

could cut. I actually think this is the most reasonable thing. Although I like it. I like it too, but it is also it's the last big chunk of the movie as well. And there's reason to be concerned about pacing at this point. Yeah, I think so. But as production flew past budget after budget, they started hiding overages to keep the cameras rolling. And they actually started shooting some scenes in secret. According to Den of Geek, Zomekas at Hanks treated certain sequences that

were deemed unnecessary as basically indie movies, working with the support of producer Steve Starky.

Hanks and Zomekas would disappear over the weekends with the bare minimum of crew and they would shoot all those running moments before heading back to the main shoot in time for Monday morning. They once shot 27 days straight doing this. And also you guess this, but many of those shots, it is not Tom Hanks even running. It's actually his brother, Jim Hanks, who traveled with a small unit to places like North Dakota. Yeah, I just guessed based on availability. It makes sense,

but they have slightly different running styles. Hanks brother has a more forward leaning style, where his legs kick out a lot further behind him. Chris is a runner. Tom's more of an upright. Tom Hanks underrated cinematic runner. Closer to a Tom Cruise, very upright runner. Looks great. Looks fast. Well, it is funny, but apparently they tried using other doubles, but they actually couldn't get close enough to Tom Hanks's run. And his brother told people magazine that it has to do with

“Gump's stiff geeky strides. He said, that's a stupid Hanks thing. So that's why his brother ended”

up doing it. Nice. But as they reached the final days of filming Paramount had had it, the budget was completely blown, and they were like, you're done. The tap is cut off. But there was one scene left to shoot, and it's the scene where Forest decides to stop running, and Sameka still wanted to shoot that one last scene, and he wanted to shoot it in Monument Valley. In Sameka's words, the guy who was running studio at the time, he was screaming. He said,

"You realize what problems you're causing me in New York? You realize what problems?" I said, "I'm sorry." He said, "Shut the goddamn thing in Griffith Park." And Bob Sameka said, "No." And as you'll remember, that scene is indeed shot in Monument Valley. So how did Sameka do it? Well, they managed to scrape together the extra funds to pull together a skeleton crew and fly there for a one-day shoot. But there was one other problem. It was now December,

and there was a chance that it could snow. And the studio was like, well, we're not paying for weather insurance. So you don't get to do this. And Sameka's in Hank said, yes, we do. They joined forces, and they personally paid for the weather insurance out of their own pocket to be able to capture that footage, turned out to be a beautiful day. And Hank said that in return for writing that check to pull off that run, Sameka's really allowed him to be a major collaborator

in post-production, where he could help craft gum alongside Sameka's. After this, principal photography wrapped in December of 1993, but the problems sure did not stop there.

I had the CD of this, did you have it? I don't think I did, but this was, I remember, you know,

“my dad was into CCR, and so like that was very noticeable. This was the first time I heard”

sleep John B. I really liked that song, then you get into Leonard Skinner and everybody. I mean, everybody is going to have 50 top 40 hits throughout this movie. It's not. It's crazy. And executive music producer Joel Still found himself up against the clock to licensed one of the most ambitious, as you pointed out, soundtracks of all time, because it was covering three decades. And Paramount was like, uh, you have zero dollars.

We're going to do more than brothers, which has like Warner Brothers music, you know, no, they said you literally don't get any more money for this. And of course licensing music is very expensive. And at this point, Paramount and Sameka's were basically not on speaking terms. They're not going to do him any favors. So The Mechis was like, all right, you know what we're going to do? We're just going to put in all the music that we really like. I don't care what it

costs. And we're going to show it to a test audience. And then we'll show the results of that test audience to Paramount. They did this. Of course, the audience is all highlighted the soundtrack and how much they loved it. And Paramount eventually did open its wallets to pay for the songs, but they gave the staff six weeks to get the clearance, which is not enough time. So he actually brought in a clearance specialist named Jill Myers. And what she did was pretty

revolutionary. She was like, we do not have time to negotiate with every single label individually.

We literally can't do it. So they actually gathered like a hundred of the people that they needed to clear these songs into a screening room. They screamed the rough cut and had the Mechis

“explained why the music was important. And then at the end, they were like, are you in or are you out?”

And most of them agreed. It's very smart. Except for a few holdouts. Initially, Jill actually struggled to get the doors music to clear it. They were very picky about what their music was included in, but they were brought in for a specific screening. And afterwards, they actually asked that more of their music get put in the movie. We get the scanner data and put in more of that stuff going. But actually, the biggest battle crisp was on a song that

you mentioned. It was fortunate, son. Here's why. A little bit of a side quest here, but it is interesting. John Fogretty was in the middle of a 20 year long legal battle with Saul Zense. Now, Credence Clearwater revival had made a fortune for Saul Zense, who owned the copyrights to their songs, the vast majority of which were, of course, written produced in song by John Fogretty. After Credence Clearwater split up, John Fogretty was very unhappy with his deal, and he actually

had to see it in even greater portion of his royalties to Saul Zense to get him out of the deal so that he could record elsewhere. And then, top things off a lot of the money that he had made was lost in an offshore tax shelter deal, also arranged by Saul Zense and fantasy. The studio that he had been recording with. So, the real cherry on top is that Saul alleged that John Fogretty's song, the old man down the road, was an illegal remake of Credence's run-through center field,

which Zense owned the copyright for. So, this guy actually sued John Fogretty for plagiarizing himself. The Hotspa. Yeah. All to say, by the mid '90s, John Fogretty did not want his music used

“if Saul Zense was going to profit from it. I think that's a pretty reasonable standpoint to take”

at this point. But Bob Zemeckis had his heart set on Credence Clearwater's fortune at son. It was absolutely perfect. They really tried to make a case for using it in the movie, and John Fogretty fought them tooth and nail. He actually called the president of Paramount Pictures and said, "Please, please, please, don't use my music in this. It has to do with Saul Zense." And you know what? Saul Zense said, "Go right ahead and use it." And Bob Zemeckis said, "Okay." And they did.

Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. Doesn't make me feel great about it. I think it's pretty shitty. I was trying to think of what else would make sense to go there. I get that it's the perfect song.

It's amazing song. Like, I understand that. And I understand that he didn't legally hold the

rights to it. But you knew he did not want it in there, and they did it anyway. Yeah. I was trying to think of, they do all along the watch tower later in that sequence, right? Yeah. That could totally have worked there. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway. That's, yeah. It's too bad. I know. I mean, put the doors in there. Riders on the storms. There's plenty of things that could go in there. Just do the opening up a box of loops now. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Well, forest gump opened in theaters on July 6, 1994,

and it became a box office, Goliath. It grossed $330 million in the US alone and $661 million worldwide. It was the fourth highest grossing global release in history at that time. Also sales of the novel

found fame and fortune, he said he upgraded to a better brand of toilet paper. But he also had

“not forgotten about that 3% of net profits deal that he'd signed to which Paramount said,”

what profits? Yeah. We're losing money on this move. Uh-huh. Because in May of 1995, a Paramount Studio's financial statement was leaked that forest gump was losing money. Mm-hmm. According to

them, Gump had not made a profit as of December 31, 1994, and was still $62 million in the red.

Despite having sold more than $660 million in tickets worldwide. Here's how they kind of break this down. $73.5 million for promotion, prints and advertising. $62 million for the cost of distribution to theaters. $62 million for fees to star Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis who agreed as we know to defer their upfront fees and exchange for a percentage of gross revenues. Gross, not net. $6 million in interest charges for the film's financing and more. Now, they had had similar lawsuits

in the past. In fact, humorist art buckwalled had gone through this ordeal overcoming to America. And so Groom called him up and asked for advice and then hired the same lawyer that buckwalled had to take on Paramount. And this really pissed off Paramount because Groom was essentially suggesting that the studio was playing dirty with its accounting, which they maybe were a little bit. For excuse me. And Paramount was like, "Groom, just have some patience." You know,

they even gave him a $250,000 check as like a look. Look, we're just trying to give you the money, no strings attached. And he ripped it up. He was like, "No." You gave me 3% of the profits, which is worth

“way more than $250,000. Similarly, Barry Sonnenfeld's men in black. I can't remember the writer's”

name, but they're the same Hollywood math. Men in black made bucobs and he saw none of it. Well, you might like to know that less than 3 weeks after Groom and Paramount resolved their differences, they did settle. He also sold them the rights to his sequel, "Gump and Co." Which addressed the existence of the movie in an outright sale, which was worth well over a

million dollars. At this point, of course, Groom backtracked saying, "Oh, the reason flap with

Paramount," you know, it was a misunderstanding that got out of hand. "I'm glad you got your money, sir." So, obviously Tom Hanks also made boku bucks on this. He ended up walking away with about $65 million dollars. And it led the pack at the 67th annual Academy Awards with 13 nominations, including Best Picture Actor, Director and Adapted Screenplay. It was the most nominations a film had received since who's afraid of Virginia Wolf. This would of course be superseded by Titanic and then

most recently by Centers, which is now set the record for most Academy Award nominations. Now, Forest Gump beat the Shawshank Redemption and pulp fiction to win Best Picture. Bob's Meckis took home Best Director, Tom Hanks, Best Actor. He won his second consecutive win, of course, after Philadelphia and Eric Roth did win for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ken Raulston and the whole visual effects team also won as did Arthur Schmidt for Best Film Editing.

Wasn't Hanks the first one to get back to Back Best Actors since like Spencer Tracy back in the 30s? Yes. And then who won Score? It went to the Lion King on Zimmer. Well, you know, while deserved, Ken and Lee and I love Sylvester's score. And this movie, but this movie relies arguably more on the needle drops than it does on its score. In a lot of sense, this is actually very similar to pulp fiction. Both are highly episodic,

somewhat unusually structured films that are sprawling, exploring very different aspects

of America and they rely on an incredible number of pop-hit needle drops to propel the story forward.

Very true. Now, Chris, you referenced this. We're not going to get into it a time, because frankly, we don't have a ton of time. But I do think it's interesting that the National Review cited Forest Gump multiple times as one of the best conservative movies of all time.

“And I think this is weird. It's interesting because everybody who made it is kind of like,”

that was not our intention at all. You know, this is about taking care of everyone. This is about lifting everyone up. In fact, Tom Hanks said the film is non-political and thus non-judgmental. I think the strongest case would be this is a libertarian film. Sure. It is a deeply centrist or apolitical film. To the point where, at the moment when Forest Presumably will make a political statement, the mic is literally pulled away from him. Although, you will notice

that Abby Hoffman said that that was beautiful and you nailed it. He did. So it suggests a weight in one direction potentially. Right. But you're right. They don't go for it. Or it suggests that Abby Hoffman is actually dumb. But yes, true. I feel that perhaps a more moving message that could be taken from the movie is that it is morality, which I think it's interesting is clearly innate

I know he starts going to church later in the film and it's very fun. But it is morality that

“you need to make sure that your morality is not hijacked by ideology. And that if your morality”

stays true, right, and it could be right-wing ideology, someone like George Wallace, it could be left-wing ideology, you know, you have Jenny's character, for example. But Forest navigates it with a very personal sense of morality of right and wrong. And so maybe that's more an interpretation that makes sense. I also, I think it's interesting that they try to sort of claim this as a conservative movie. I don't think it's painting a particularly great picture of the military at all, specifically.

I agree. There's someone said it was jingleistic and pro-American. I don't think they did a good

job with Vietnam because they never show the enemy. They never suggest that this is a good fight.

They just so that the cost to American soldiers is a mess. It's a confusing mess. The pointless deaths of all of these characters, with no clear objective other than to find Charlie, who to Forest Point, we're just trying to find this guy Charlie. I have no idea who he is. Yeah, it doesn't even know what he's fighting for. And Lieutenant Dan is someone who, you know, has lived his entire life thinking that it's his job to go out and get killed for America.

“And it's actually Forest Gump that essentially says no, your life is worth more than that.”

I agree. And he is, you know, furious with him for that initially. In fact, speaking of Gary Sinese, he actually continued to work with Vietnam veterans after this movie. The disabled American veterans invited him to their national convention,

and they honored him with an award for his role as Lieutenant Dan and Forest Gump.

And after 9/11, Sinese became even more aggressive about supporting America's troops. He volunteered with the USO. He formed the Lieutenant Dan band, performed for service members all over the world. And speaking of 9/11, it again comes back and has an impact on our story here today. I mentioned that this movie was of a different time. And what I meant really is that it was pre 9/11. They actually were going to try and make a sequel for this. Eric Roth was working on it.

It was codenamed the canon. The foe title referred to a fake out prologue based on the short story a fight with a canon by Victor Hugo, but Eric Roth turned in the sequel script on September 10, 2001. And as soon as the twin towers fell, they realized they could not make a movie in forest gumps sort of rose-colored glasses view of America because it didn't really exist anymore. Roth, finally, and all the producers, quote all felt this part of our history with forest gump,

was done, and that they would never pursue a sequel from that point forward.

“Chris, that wraps up our coverage of forest gump. What went right?”

So much, if I may give a couple of shoutouts before I do my official wasn't right. A very precocious young haily jolasmant. He's at the end of the film. He's so good. He's so cute. He's so teeny. I really like him. I agree with you Lizzie. I think Robin Wright is actually pretty transcendent in a role that could be viewed as one dimensional. I don't think it's fair and I think it's a little reductive to say that, you know, Jenny's the villain Jenny's a selfish friend.

Well, she is selfish, but I mean, she's self-destructive, but we see it very much where that comes from. You know, I like this movie as a fish out of water story. I was, again, when I was trying to figure out, you know, what does disabled community think about this movie? There was just some interesting things I'd like to call out that we didn't, you know, talk about Michelle Jace. She's an autistic artist and educator in Southern California. She wrote, "Force gump isn't a disability movie. You just

made it into one. It is a movie about all of the successes and heartbreaks in an American man's life. Some Americans use mobility equipment and have physical therapy. Americans can have speech delay." I agree with this. Like, if anything, he's actually, he's a professional athlete. Literally. What we eventually reveal, he's literally has the hand-eye coordination of Roger Federer. Multiple times over. He is incredibly successful as a college athlete. He becomes a ping-pong star.

Yeah. Like, he's a multi-sport athlete. So, like, we can set that aside, obviously. And I agree. I think this is somebody who is accepted and internalized a slur that's given to him in the film. Right. But he doesn't allow it to define him. In the end, he actually is very much not that thing. I agree, as some people have written, this is a neurodivergent character written, like a neurodivergent mishmash, pastiche, written by neurotypical people.

I think that's true. True, true. But I actually think Hank's finds humanity without, it doesn't feel as exploitative as other representations of, you know, characters like this. I agree with that. And I also think that because it is, as you've said, a tall tail, it is a fairy tale in many ways that that helps kind of soften the edges of this portrayal as well, in the way that some other films didn't quite achieve the same thing.

I agree. I have to give this one. I'm going to give it to Robert Symechus, because I was going through his filmography. And I think for us, campus, his best movie. There are some others I may be prefer who framed Roger Rabbit, I've really like. Test becomes a little weird little place in my heart back to the future's great. Contact? No, not a fan. Whoa, David's going to get you for that. I know. I think it's fine. Let me rephrase. It's an enjoyable movie. I don't think it's at the

same level as some of these other ones. All I say is I completely understand or I think I understand much of the criticism aimed at this movie. Yeah. I think so much of it is completely valid.

It's just the set pieces, the momentum, the pace, everything looks so good. 30 years later,

everything looks so good. I agree. As a movie, it's hard to beat. And sorry, I just got to give it to Symechus. Chris, since you mentioned Symechus' filmography, and of course, this came up

“back to the future. But the star of used cars, do you know where Kurt Russell appears in this movie?”

No, does his voice appear in something? Yeah. Oh, what's his voice appear in? He's Elvis. Oh, that's cool. Because he played Elvis in the John Carpenter TV movie that they did as well. It's obviously not his body, but it is his voice. No, yeah. They did a great job with whoever played his face in the blurred out reflection. Yeah. That looks exactly like Elvis. Yeah. Last thing, I had Gary Sunise and Greg Kineer face blindness in the 90s. I could not tell them

apart. Gary Sunise is like if you turn Greg Kineer into a snake, I feel. Yeah. They're both wonderful. And then I also had Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer face blindness in the 90s. I don't know why he's could not tell those various people apart. Okay. Kurt Russell, star of executive decision, brings it full circle. Yes. I'm going to put what lies beneath and cast away at least at the same level as for his group. I'm sorry. I just love them. I think they're very entertaining.

I have to give the what went right here to the effects team. I think that what they did on this movie is. Stan's the test of time. Well, because it's not showing off. I just I love that example of them actually adding something into a scene to make the audience think they know how it's going to work and then it doesn't because of the way that they thought about this. It's just so inventive. It's so cool. You know, the archival footage is honestly like the least interesting part of the

effects that they did in this to me. I think it's very fun. I think that example with Kennedy is

“incredible. And that one does look really really good. And we also have to remember that like”

this had not been done before at this level. And it really was groundbreaking. It was amazing to see

this in 1994. I have to give it to Ken Raulson, ILM and the entire visual effects team. It just blew me away the more that I learned about it. I really really loved it. You know, you mentioned they had a magician on the set. Yeah. A good visual effect works the same way as a good magic trick, right? You establish a baseline. You faint at what the audience is expecting. The misdirect. And then you reveal the trick, you know, as something that completely subverts what they were expecting.

And a good effect establishes itself in the same way. And like you said, it's just picture perfect. Yeah. And some of these scenes. It's great. So Lizzie, are you ready to eat a giant full of crow about the genius that is Robert Symerkis? Sure. I know in the back of the future episode, I said, I'm not sure that I really like Robert Symerkis. And then even in that episode, I believe I was looking at his filmography and going, well, wait a minute. Well, this one's really good. And

the one's also pretty good. And I said, I didn't like force gum. And you know, upon rewatching it for this episode, as I'm sure you can all tell. And we said at the top, I have changed my feelings

“on force gum much in the way that you did Chris. I do think it's worth a rewatch. I think it's more”

hopeful that I gave it credit for it's certainly joyful. And if you just let it wash over you, it is a very pleasant and lovely experience with perhaps some good messaging behind it. And you know what? I do like Robert Symerkis. I love death becomes her. I love castaway. I love what lies beneath. I actually think what I should have said is I don't like back to the future. That's the truth. Well, and also post early 2000s, Symerkis. I think most people would agree

has been a little more hit or miss, a little maybe more focus on the technology. Yeah, with some exceptions, the plane crash scene in flight is a masterclass on disaster directing. That scene is

amazing. It is the seamless integration of acting with Denzel Washington and effects in direction anyway.

But uh, all right, we will send that clip to Robert Symerkis. And Bob A. Pull him out of his depression. Yeah, pretty good, I guess. From me, someone who can't do anything that you've done across your career. Wouldn't be a podcast without those types of takes. All right, guys, if you're like in this podcast, there's a few easy ways to support us. Number one, just listen. Thanks for listening. We really appreciate it. Number two, you can leave us a rating and review on

whatever podcast you're listening to us on. Number three, make sure you hit follow and or subscribe on whatever podcast you are using to follow this show. Number four, you can get bonus episodes now. If you'd like, you can sign up by way of Spotify, Apple, or Patreon for 4 99 a month, you get access to at least one bonus episode a month. These are typically reviews of newer films. We are in the midst at the very tail end. I should say of our best picture coverage. This

coming Friday. We are releasing our final best picture root tandem, train dreams in Frankenstein. And then we're going to be doing a little Oscar's live stream on our Patreon, which brings me to Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasts, or is like ourselves with audience members like you. If you join our Patreon at $5, you get all the bonus episodes. You also get an ad free RSS feed

you can get a deeply problematic forest count style shout out just like one of these. Just kidding,

“you can do Jenny, you can do whoever you want. I'm going to read it. I'm just going to read it.”

I'm no Tom Hanks. Adrienne Peng Korea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Shindelman, Blaze Ambrus, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, Sea Grace Bee, Chris Leel, Chris Zucka,

David Friscollante, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Shibal, Ellen Singleton, M Zodia,

“Evan Downey, Felicia G, film it yourself. Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, the Broken Glass”

Kids, Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jared Ugg, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hill Piper, Jose Aminlano, South Tildo Georgeio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgashlager McCoy, Lazy Freddy, Lena L.J., Lydia House, Mark Bertha,

“Mariposa's Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knife's Nathan Santino,”

Rosemary Southward, Raryl Gerra, Sadie, still just Sadie. Scott O'Shida, Soman Cheyennehani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, the Provost, family of the O's sound like O's, and there is no spoon. Thank you all so much. We love you guys. Alright, thank you guys so much. Thank you Lazy for that fascinating dive into our favorite

Republican film, Forrest Gump. We will see you guys next week with one of our first trips overseas.

We're going to be discussing 7 Samurai in advance of some Star Wars coverage that we have coming since that was a big influence on Mr. George Lucas, and I am very excited. Great. I can't wait. To support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an at-free RSSP. You can also visit our website whatwinwrongpod.com for more info. What went wrong is a sad-boon podcast presented by

Lizzy Bassett, and Chris Winterbauer, post-production in music by David Bowman. This episode was researched in written by Laura Woods, and edited by Karen Krebsaw. [Music]