Forrest Gump

‘Forrest Gump’ became one of the biggest hits of the ’90s—but it was never a sure thing. What started as a seemingly unadaptable novel bounced through multiple directors, screenwriters, and studios before it finally found the team that could bring it to life. This week, Chris and Lizzie break down how Robert Zemeckis pulled off the film’s groundbreaking visual effects, why the first three days of Tom Hanks’ performance were thrown in the trash, and the unexpected source behind Forrest’s now-iconic accent. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lizzie Bassett?

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• 0:45Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:04Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full 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, picturesque 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 Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this morning? And which Best Picture winner are we discussing today?

• 2:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, that was a lot of peas. Congratulations. And we are today, of course, talking about one of the best examples, I think, of somewhat invisible effects in recent movie history is Forrest 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

• 3:08Lizzie Bassett?

  commercial breaks. So join for $5 to be a part of that. Chris, I am sure you've seen Forrest Gump before, but what was your initial impression of it? And what did you think upon rewatching it for the pod?

• 3:20Chris Winterbauer?

  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 described, folks who listen to this podcast know, 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. Forrest 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 movie. It was all of these movies.

• 4:04Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Forrest 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, you know, 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 rewatched Forrest Gump for the podcast and I really liked it. It's a, it's a really fun movie.

• 4:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It is as just a pure vehicle for entertainment. It's tough to beat. This movie is well over two hours and it just goes. Do I think it cheats 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 in introducing the Vietnam scene in a row? Just going from Fortunate Son to Snoop John B in 90 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. Alan Silvestri's 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 Picaresque stories or tall tales or anything like that.

• 5:32Chris Winterbauer?

  But this movie very much fits into the, I think, long history of the Picaresque hero, the kind of roguish hero who ascends through society. Thinking of something like Barry Lyndon, for example, and Forrest Gump very much subverts that in a lot of ways. And it's like an American tall tale, right? You're 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 in Forrest 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. Another way to interpret this movie is actually that it's about how little

• 6:17Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Forrest, 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 is slow, he's never going to keep up. But he has a really strong advocate in his mother and he is good friends. I know Jenny, eventually you could argue is not a great friend, but she 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 thrives throughout these situations as opposed to someone like Jenny,

• 6:58Chris Winterbauer?

  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 a 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 Forrest 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 Forrest tries to do.

• 7:40Chris Winterbauer?

  So anyway, that's my optimistic, I'm now an adult take on Forrest Gump. Perhaps I am just Pollyanna-ish and naive, but I really enjoyed rewatching this.

• 7:48Lizzie Bassett?

  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, 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 United States history, this is almost like cheapening these moments in history by putting

• 8:30Lizzie Bassett?

  him in them. And while I'm not saying there's no merit to that argument, I think that 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 a, 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

• 9:15Lizzie Bassett?

  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, when 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, Forrest 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 Forrest Gump, much the same way everyone underestimated Forrest Gump. So the basic information, as always, this is directed by Robert Zemeckis, who we

• 9:59Lizzie Bassett?

  have talked about before. So if you would like more of a primer on Zemeckis, you can go back to the Back to the Future episode. It was written by Eric Roth, based on the novel Forrest Gump, by Winston Groom. It was released July 6, 1994, and it, of course, stars Tom Hanks, Sally Field, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Michael Conner Humphries, Michael T. Williamson, who I love so much, and 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 ACU of 75, who yearns to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart." Yeah, I guess. I don't know.

• 10:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I would really call it, this is the most American tall tale maybe ever put on film, certainly in the last 35 years.

• 10:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Forrest Gump is Gumping. Big Fish lives in the same world as this to me.

• 10:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It lives in the same world. I don't think Big Fish touches this movie, personally.

• 10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm. Okay. I love Big Fish.

• 10:56Chris Winterbauer?

  But yes, I agree. Little Big Man, Big Fish, and then on the pickeress side, I put together some other examples. Barry Lyndon, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Zelig, and then, Lizzie, Marty Supreme.

• 11:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, interesting.

• 11:07Chris Winterbauer?

  That's a pickeress story, I would argue.

• 11:09Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, great. Okay, Chris, our story begins not with Forrest 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-defunct Washington Star, covering the court system in Washington, DC. But soon, tragedy struck. His beloved mother, Ruth Groom, who was a high school teacher with a master's thesis on Shakespeare, 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

• 11:52Lizzie Bassett?

  what he loved, and that was writing novels. It turns out, he was really good at it. His first two novels, Better Times Than These and As Summers Die, were pretty favorably reviewed. They did quite well. And his third book, Conversations With The Enemy, earned him a Pulitzer nomination.

• 12:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 12:07Lizzie Bassett?

  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 his son a story. 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 wafting 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.

• 12:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Those kids are still assholes. It doesn't matter that they liked the piano that he was playing. Winston and his dad started chatting about a recent 60 Minutes 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 marked 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.

• 13:36Lizzie Bassett?

  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 novel is pulled straight from his own life. 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 Forrest... He had a pretty hard time with the last name, Chris. So, let's rewind to 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's sitting at his desk trying to figure out Forrest's last name,

• 14:21Lizzie Bassett?

  he looked down, and there's a Gump's catalog. And he had it. Forrest 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 Feinerman, who had just joined Steve Tisch Productions as the Vice President of Production and Development. Now, Steve Tisch, 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 twenties at this point, I believe. And when she came across The Galley, which is basically a first look at a book before it's

• 15:04Lizzie Bassett?

  published for Forrest 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?

• 15:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm gonna guess, Lizzie, the reaction is, what is this?

• 15:26Lizzie Bassett?

  You nailed it. That's 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've pointed out. It's basically a fairy tale, but also not really. And then the main character isn't really very likeable. More on that in a moment.

• 15:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's a picaresque. Like, that's kind of, you know, it's like wandering. The story's wandering.

• 15:46Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very meandering. Yes.

• 15:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Hollywood stories have, like, clear arcs.

• 15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Groom to write his own screenplay, and they were off to the races, right? No, because when Forrest Gump, the novel, came out in March of 1986, it pretty much bombed.

• 16:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 16:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Kirkus called it, quote, "gawky and ham-handed," and a, quote, "stumbling, droopy-droored attempt at a picaresque novel."

• 16:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm.

• 16:27Lizzie Bassett?

  While Publishers Weekly wrote, "The, quote, 'Absurdity gathers its own speed and begins to run dangerously amok,' and that, quote, 'Groom has written better books than this.'" The general consensus was, this was a pretty big letdown from a usually very reliable Winston Groom. And in fact, the only person who seemed to still believe in it was Wendy Finerman. So she plowed ahead. And she did have one ally, Kevin Jones, who was an exec at Warner Brothers, who was genuinely excited about the idea, but not so much Groom's script. Because Forrest Gump, as written in both the novel and the original script, was a horny, sweary, marijuana-smoking, lady-chasing, money-loving, all-around, complicated guy.

• 17:10Chris Winterbauer?

  He's what we'd call a Winston Groom. I don't know anything about him, but he's just based it on his own life. So maybe, you know, I mean, that's kind of, that could describe any number of people that could, a lot of, outside of the marijuana smoky, you know, you could call it, call it Chris Winterbauer there, maybe.

• 17:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Hey, there was a time.

• 17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  There was a time.

• 17:27Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 17:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 17:37Lizzie Bassett?

  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 pointed 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 Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise riding escalators and dissing Kmart. Because what came out in 1988, Chris?

• 18:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Rain Man.

• 18:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Rain Man. And execs thought, well, there can't be two of these. So.

• 18:13Chris Winterbauer?

  No. The performance Pauline Kael, I believe, said was equivalent of playing one note on the piano at varying intensities for two hours.

• 18:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Rain Man?

• 18:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Dustin Hoffman's performance. Yeah, that's what Pauline Kael didn't like his performance in that movie. I actually like his performance in that movie.

• 18:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I like Rain Man, but I don't think that Dustin Hoffman is the standout performance there. It's Tom Cruise.

• 18:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no, it's Tom Cruise. That's, it's one of his best movies.

• 18:37Lizzie Bassett?

  He is incredible in Rain Man.

• 18:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Anyway, by 1990, Warner Brothers put poor Forrest Gump in Turnaround. And Chris, what happens in Turnaround?

• 18:46Chris Winterbauer?

  So Turnaround is when a studio decides that they 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 when a project goes into turnaround, 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 other things get shoved on there just to make sure we make a little money and 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.

• 19:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 19:28Chris Winterbauer?

  For example.

• 19:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Feynman said, people would ask me what I was working on and I'd say Forrest Gump and they'd get that glazed look. I knew they were thinking, when is she gonna give up? So eventually Feynman did have to start working on something else in the late 80s and that happened to be an adaptation of David Brin's novel, The Postman. She had optioned the book and brought in screenwriter Eric Roth to write the adaptation with Tom Hanks attached.

• 19:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, wow. This is the one that would end up being Kevin Costner, right?

• 19:57Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 20:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, second or third nail in his coffin after Waterworld. We'll definitely need to cover that one.

• 20:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yes. And Kevin Jones, Gump's only big fan at Warner Brothers, had moved over to Paramount, but he had not forgotten about Forrest Gump. And he also knew that Warner Brothers wanted to make Executive Decision, which Paramount currently held the rights to.

• 20:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Great movie.

• 20:26Lizzie Bassett?

  It is a good movie.

• 20:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Love that movie.

• 20:28Lizzie Bassett?

  So Jones made a trade. Jones is like, listen, we will give you Executive Decision if Warner Brothers will give Paramount Forrest Gump. And Paramount said, yes. Warner Brothers said, yes. And the deal was made. Now, it should be noted, Executive Decision grossed $122 million at the box office on a budget of about $55 million. It was pretty good. We'll get to how Forrest Gump did a little later.

• 20:53Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 20:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Still good.

• 21:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Gotta love a movie that kills Steven Seagal in the first five minutes.

• 21:02Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Lancing. And she was cautiously optimistic about Forrest Gump, 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. Forrest Gump, not a clear winner. Nevertheless, Groom was paid $350,000 upfront for the rights to Forrest Gump and he got a 3% share of the film's. Net profits. Remember that number?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 21:42Lizzie Bassett?

  And Feynman, who had already been working with Eric Roth on The Postman, brought him on to take another stab at the screenplay here. Now, while Feynman loved Forrest Gump, 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.

• 22:20Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:05Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:49Lizzie Bassett?

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• 24:32Speaker 03

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• 25:09Lizzie Bassett?

  So rather than writing Groom's 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 was someone that we have discussed on the podcast before, but have never covered one of his movies, Barry Sonnenfeld.

• 25:27Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 25:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Chris Winterbauer?

  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 with.

• 25:42Lizzie Bassett?

  He'd made one movie at this point. He had made The Addams Family, which was a pretty big success.

• 25:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 25:49Lizzie Bassett?

  But on a 2020 Real Blend interview, Sonnenfeld said, quote, "When I was finishing Addams Family, the head of Paramount was a guy named Gary Lucchese. Gary had a novel called Forrest 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 fat 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 fat guy and I'll send it to Tom Hanks if you're okay with it. So thanks to Barry Sonnenfeld, 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 Addams Family values on his radar.

• 26:31Lizzie Bassett?

  And his loyalty to that franchise was a lot stronger than his loyalty to Forrest 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 Finerman to develop the postman, 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 when he was five and his parents divorced. He was the third child of four. Two of his siblings lived with his father, who 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.

• 27:15Lizzie Bassett?

  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 theater 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 Selznick in Bosom Buddies. I liked Bosom Buddies.

• 27:41Chris Winterbauer?

  What year was Bosom Buddies?

• 27:43Lizzie Bassett?

  1980 to 1982. So very early.

• 27:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I've never seen it.

• 27:47Lizzie Bassett?

  It's cute. I mean, he's very cute in it.

• 27:49Chris Winterbauer?

  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 of episodes. But yeah, I never, never watched Bosom Buddies.

• 27:58Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Studios back then as looking like, quote, "a Greyhound bus station in Selma, Alabama."

• 28:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like Popeye, the Black Cauldron. This was like, live action at Disney was at its nadir at this point in time.

• 28:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Except Splash ended up getting nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It's great.

• 28:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Except on Disney Plus, they like blur out Daryl Hannah's butt at one point with fake digital hair when she gets out of the water. And it's just like, let the people see Daryl Hannah's butt.

• 28:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Let us see her butt. The kids see her butt.

• 28:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Maybe they changed it. I just remember seeing this a little while ago.

• 28:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Take that hair out of there.

• 28:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Get the hair out of her butt.

• 28:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Kind of when you first said that, I thought you meant that they had like digitally painted.

• 28:47Chris Winterbauer?

  They gave her a hairy ass crack.

• 28:50Lizzie Bassett?

  So I was like, that's not better. And then I remember she has very long blonde hair. Anyway, so and then in 1988, of course, we get Big, which was an enormous success. And this really like solidifies him as pretty much a superstar. So by the time Barry Sonnenfeld called him up, Hanks has an awful lot of power in the industry.

• 29:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, what year is this pursuit happening?

• 29:13Lizzie Bassett?

  This would be early 90s, like probably around, I would think 92 is my guess.

• 29:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 29:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Penny Marshall?

• 29:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Penny Marshall.

• 29:33Chris Winterbauer?

  A League of Their Own.

• 29:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 29:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Got it. I love A League of Their Own.

• 29:36Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. Penny Marshall is wonderful.

• 29:37Chris Winterbauer?

  We gotta cover that one.

• 29:38Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Hanks, 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, Forrest is more on the spectrum with a low IQ and a massive frame that makes him seem oafish, 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 Zelig."

• 30:22Lizzie Bassett?

  There's a pretty massive change to the character of Forrest Gump with the screenplay from Eric Roth. But the screenplay was a big hit with the next director that they approached, and this was finally Robert Zemeckis. In fact, he said, "Fuck your book, Winston Groom. 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 Zemeckis was particularly drawn to in the script?

• 30:50Chris Winterbauer?

  This is the opportunity to like use a lot of technology to bring all of these events to life.

• 30:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, bingo.

• 30:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And he 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 he was an effects wizard. I mean, Death Becomes Her still looks great.

• 31:08Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Death Becomes Her.

• 31:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He's the guy's a maestro.

• 31:12Lizzie Bassett?

  He is. That's right. It's the technological leaps. Now, in the screenplay, Roth wrote brief descriptions like, "We see Forrest getting his award from Lyndon Johnson," and it was pretty much entirely up to Zemeckis to figure out how the hell they would actually bring those scenes to life and like what would happen in those scenes. So Zemeckis did request some additional changes to the screenplay because it was originally pretty overwritten, which even Roth admitted. Roth's script included actually more fantastical surreal elements, like whenever Forrest 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 you're like watermelon head," followed by Forrest imagining a whole room of people with watermelon heads. I might

• 31:56Lizzie Bassett?

  have liked that. There was even a cartoon Curious George that was sitting on Forrest's shoulder talking to him, and Zemeckis said, "Get rid of all of this. Let's focus..."

• 32:05Chris Winterbauer?

  This is not a Michelle Gohnery film.

• 32:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, exactly. He's not around yet. Let's focus on the overarching love story between Forrest and Jenny. Good call.

• 32:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 32:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I would imagine if he hadn't been a runner.

• 32:26Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 32:26Chris Winterbauer?

  In the book, right?

• 32:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep. And, you know, we've discussed this, but the book Forrest is kind of aggressive. He's foul-mouthed. 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, being an idiot is no box of chocolates. But in the movie, of course, we get what?

• 33:06Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 33:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 33:14Chris Winterbauer?

  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 that, not surprised, but I was, it seemed very overwhelmingly positive, especially in recent years. I was reading a lot of blog posts from autistic writers and whatnot. And one person basically made the point that Forrest takes everything literally.

• 33:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 33:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And so because he's told so many times that he is low IQ, he's just internalized that and accepted it.

• 33:40Lizzie Bassett?

  That he's stupid. Yeah.

• 33:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And we as an audience accepted as well, but really he displays very high intelligence throughout the movie, like especially moral and emotional intelligence.

• 33:49Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 34:02Chris Winterbauer?

  But one point that this one writer, who's, who I want to put his name in, Ron Stoffer, Ron Stoffer, put on his blog post that I thought was interesting is 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 Forrest Gump, 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 $24,562.42 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 American clearly. That scene, you know, remembering you died on a Saturday morning. She had got the cancer and died on a Tuesday.

• 34:38Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what I was gonna say. His memory is like-

• 34:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Incredible.

• 34:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Picture perfect. Yeah.

• 34:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Picture perfect, which from what I read online seems like a consistent trait 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, I just think it's interesting.

• 34:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's different from the book. I don't think it's wrong at all.

• 34:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Lizzie Bassett?

  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 the autistic community feeling positively about it. Cause you're right, he's not an idiot.

• 35:11Chris Winterbauer?

  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, Forrest is amazing and everybody around him is an idiot.

• 35:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's true.

• 35:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Do think is what the movie is saying.

• 35:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally what the movie is about. Yeah. Everyone around him is fucking up and Forrest is just flying through life. But Chris, the changing of the chocolates quote, in particular, was something that Winston Groom hated. He said, everywhere I go, people send me chocolates. I hate chocolates. And he hated that it was not his line.

• 35:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I prefer the line that they wrote.

• 35:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's better, you know? So Zemeckis was locked in, but Forrest himself still was not. Robert Zemeckis had a different top choice and it was Bill Paxton.

• 35:54Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 36:01Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 36:09Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I mean, this is right around Philadelphia, right?

• 36:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 36:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 36:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Once Hanks got his hands on the final screenplay though, he said, he was in and they dropped all the other choices and said, lock it in, boys. But Bob Zemeckis 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 Zemeckis and Hanks 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.

• 37:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I agree with you.

• 37:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Gary Sinise 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 Forrest Gump was really his big mainstream breakthrough. And the role of Lieutenant Dan was very, very personal for Gary Sinise. He had actually been working with Vietnam veterans since the mid 80s. He had a long line of vets in 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 prepared for the role by watching documentaries and reading a book by Lewis Puller, who was a triple amputee who had stepped on a booby trap. And after his research, Sinise went to Zemeckis and Roth with some concerns about the script. He basically said, "A lot of the stuff in here with Lieutenant Dan is not

• 37:46Lizzie Bassett?

  believable." He said, you know, "He would not be like able to do these things at certain points in his recovery, like going to bars around Saigon." And Sinise said, "We need to change this stuff to make it more realistic," and they actually did.

• 37:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Good.

• 37:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, the role of Bubba was not originally to be played by Michael T. Williamson. They offered it to someone else. Do you have 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.

• 38:13Chris Winterbauer?

  But he wasn't a very big comedian yet?

• 38:15Lizzie Bassett?

  He was not.

• 38:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Dave Chappelle.

• 38:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Dave Chappelle!

• 38:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. Yeah, it was gonna be Eddie Murphy before that, but he was already too big.

• 38:21Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 38:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Interesting.

• 38:22Lizzie Bassett?

  So Dave Chappelle turned down the role, saying that the script stunk. He basically felt like it had created a black friend whose only purpose was to make the white leader look smarter by comparison. It is worth noting that in the book, Bubba is white, they met in college, and Bubba is quite a bit smarter in the book than he's portrayed in the movie. So, I mean, I'm not gonna discount what Dave Chappelle is saying there.

• 38:46Chris Winterbauer?

  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 kinda how I felt when they were both in-

• 38:58Lizzie Bassett?

  That's what he says. Me and Bubba was two peas in a pod.

• 39:01Chris Winterbauer?

  In Vietnam. And it was Forrest's 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.

• 39:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 39:57Lizzie Bassett?

  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 we've 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.

• 40:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, no, it's as far as his natural persona as Forrest Gump is from Tom Hanks.

• 40:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It's farther, honestly. Like when you watch other performances of his, like I'm thinking particularly, you know, Limehouse on Justified, he is-

• 40:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Or Heat.

• 40:32Lizzie Bassett?

  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. What's Forrest Gump gonna sound like? Should he have an accent? No accent? So they had Hanks read lines 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 Humphries as young Forrest Gump. Here is Tom Hanks on Graham Norton talking about it.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  I didn't realize till two were coming this time that in Forrest Gump, the famous voice that you use as Forrest, it came from a specific person.

• 41:09Speaker 05

  Young Michael Connor Humphries who played young Forrest Gump. We were trying to- Bob Zemeckis came to me and said, hey, we got a problem on this. You have to teach this kid how 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 his, if he said, it wasn't thinking, it was thinking. It wasn't making, it was making. And says, what does, what does your, your father do? My, my, my daddy makes grease. That's what he said. And he said, he make, he, I don't understand. Is grease something you make? Yes. He says, what do you do with grease?

• 41:52Speaker 05

  Well, grease goes into all different sorts of products. And I said, well, like what products? Oh, grease goes into lipsticks.

• 42:05Speaker 05

  And I was like, well, I'm not, this is it. This is it. So somewhere I have cassettes, hours and hours of me just making chit chat with a very young Michael. But he doesn't talk like that anymore. No, no, no, he doesn't. It was just a, you know, we were seven, eight years old. He was a young man. And that's, that's the, that was the vernacular that we spoken and it was priceless. Oh, that's adorable. And, and of course, a huge success for you.

• 42:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Meanwhile, the production team needed to figure out where Forrest 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 Forrest 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 Yamaste, South Carolina, and arrived at Bluff Plantation. When Zemeckis saw the location, he absolutely loved it.

• 43:08Lizzie Bassett?

  He's like, this is it. This is Forrest 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 Forrest Gump, the old southern house, was built entirely from scratch by the team.

• 43:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Amazing.

• 43:25Lizzie Bassett?

  It is amazing. They studied southern houses in the area. They combined all the best features. They worked so hard on this. They showed so many different versions to Zemeckis. They got it exactly what he wanted. They flew in artisans from all over the country, refinished the wood 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.

• 43:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I would have guessed it was not. Maybe the interior.

• 43:52Lizzie Bassett?

  They are on a soundstage.

• 43:54Chris Winterbauer?

  For some of it, but there are also a lot of shots out of the foyer. You know what I mean? That you can see it. I would mention too, we just talked about Begonia and the house in that was also completely built.

• 44:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It's so cool.

• 44:04Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 44:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It is visually remarkable. It's it's really sets the scene. It's so worth it.

• 44:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, everything was going great until Paramount decided to take a little looksy at the budget and it became quickly apparent that the original $40 million was not going to cut it. They were short by at least 10 million, more like 15 million. And that figure was going to go up because Industrial Light and Magic was doing the visual effects. So Sherri Lansing 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.

• 44:51Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 44:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, we'll get there.

• 44:58Chris Winterbauer?

  You could actually shoot some of that second unit because my guess is a lot of those wide shots are not Tom Hanks.

• 45:04Lizzie Bassett?

  They're not.

• 45:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Lizzie Bassett?

  But Zemeckis said, no way. He was not going to cut those. And so Sherri Lansing had a tough call to make and Chris, she made it. Right before filming was set to begin, she called Zemeckis's agent and said, we need $10 million off this budget or this movie does not go ahead. And according to Zemeckis, this request took place 48 hours before cameras started rolling. Other sources say they were given a couple of weeks. I don't know. Either way, the message was the same, but Zemeckis wasn't having it. He agreed to stay with Forrest Gump, though, and he worked with Tom Hanks on. Deal. Hanks and Zemeckis 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. Lansing agreed, and she agreed to bump Paramount's investment up by $5 million,

• 45:49Lizzie Bassett?

  getting it to what they needed. So Forrest Gump could finally move forward. And principal photography began the summer of 1993. Zemeckis 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 Forrest's 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 and how self-conscious this can be before we get into the groove, 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

• 46:31Lizzie Bassett?

  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. There were tidal marshes and waterways that could kind of double for it. They had military advisor Dale Dye 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.

• 47:05Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a lot of great compositing in that sequence.

• 47:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 47:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Because 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 in Vietnam.

• 47:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It looks great.

• 47:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Beyond the rice fields. Yeah, it's really well done.

• 47:20Lizzie Bassett?

  They did an 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.

• 47:37Chris Winterbauer?

  The feather's amazing.

• 47:38Lizzie Bassett?

  The feather is amazing.

• 47:39Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm pretty sure that first crane shot, Lizzie, 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 Forrest's feet. It's so good.

• 47:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and the feather is shot on a blue screen and then blown around to kind of, you know.

• 47:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 47:54Lizzie Bassett?

  They also speed up the tree shadows overhead when Forrest is running to make it look more dreamlike. There's just tons of stuff happening all the time.

• 48:02Chris Winterbauer?

  They do some fun Texas switches when like Tom Hanks will cross screen and then the camera will pan. And he's now way further ahead and it's clearly like they've swapped in another runner.

• 48:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 48:12Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what 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.

• 48:18Lizzie Bassett?

  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 swell a massive crowd, something we've talked about before? And of course, how do you insert Forrest 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.

• 48:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 48:47Lizzie Bassett?

  But in Forrest 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.

• 48:57Chris Winterbauer?

  There's one example I love so much in this movie.

• 48:59Lizzie Bassett?

  It might be what we're about to talk about. So, in addition to painting out Gary Sinise'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.

• 49:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 49:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 49:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's the New Year's. 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.

• 49:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 49:37Chris Winterbauer?

  To establish it, so you know that table's there. And then in the wide shot, he swings his leg so close to it that you think, oh my, how could he possibly have done that? And if you pay a very close 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.

• 49:55Lizzie Bassett?

  It's really. Smart.

• 49:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And I never would have noticed, you know, if I wasn't really looking for it.

• 49:59Lizzie Bassett?

  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. Zemeckis 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 Sinise 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.

• 50:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Lizzie Bassett?

  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 250,000 people, which obviously can't do.

• 50:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Wasn't that like the Abbie Hoffman rally?

• 50:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So the visual effects solution was to film 1,500 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 yeeted out of there. They left. 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.

• 51:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Is it basically, if I'm remembering correctly, they did something very similar in Braveheart?

• 51:30Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 51:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. Yeah.

• 51:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, of course, Forrest Gump is probably most famous for what effect, Chris?

• 51:48Chris Winterbauer?

  The historical footage of various events that Forrest has been inserted into.

• 51:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 51:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Desegregation, you know, in Alabama, the George Wallace scene, meeting JFK.

• 51:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Lyndon Johnson.

• 51:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Lyndon Johnson.

• 51:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, John Lennon.

• 52:01Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my favorite things is that I believe Lyndon Johnson was notorious for, I kid you not, like, showing off his penis.

• 52:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he was.

• 52:08Chris Winterbauer?

  He had a very large penis and would show it to men to intimidate them at the Capitol. And I just love that Forrest shows him his butt. I just think it's such a fun little Easter egg in this movie.

• 52:17Lizzie Bassett?

  It is funny. So at the time, there was a very primitive version of this effect that had been seen in things like Zelig, which you referenced, and in The Line of Fire. But in comparison, the work in Forrest Gump is genuinely groundbreaking. They actually pioneered new CGI techniques under the leadership of ILM's Ken Ralston. And Ralston had served as the special effects supervisor for six Zemeckis films at this point, including Forrest Gump. He'd won two of his four Oscars for Zemeckis films, which was Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Death Becomes Her, the two that you just referenced. So together, they had to basically invent the technology for this. According to Ralston, quote, "In films that Bob Zemeckis 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.

• 53:02Lizzie Bassett?

  They could only work with whatever archival footage they could find. So researchers pored through hundreds of hours of newsreel 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 Forrest playing football was because they found footage of Kennedy talking with the all-American football team.

• 53:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 53:26Lizzie Bassett?

  But in the "I need to pay" 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 shot of Kennedy shaking hands, but the background wasn't right. So what they actually do in this, they rewrite it to take place in the Oval Office, and then they rotoscoped Kennedy out of the original footage and dropped him into footage with Tom Hanks that they had shot on a fake Oval Office set.

• 53:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I think that's why that one actually looks better to me than some of the other ones.

• 53:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 53:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I think when he's inserted, is it with Dick Cavett and John Lennon later?

• 54:03Lizzie Bassett?

  That one looks not good.

• 54:05Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 54:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree, but it was unbelievably hard to get this.

• 54:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I can't imagine.

• 54:18Lizzie Bassett?

  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 eye line. 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 setup.

• 54:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 54:46Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 54:53Chris Winterbauer?

  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, Lizzie, the zoom as well.

• 55:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 55:03Chris Winterbauer?

  On top of that.

• 55:04Lizzie Bassett?

  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 match is better than when they're dropping him into the older footage. They also did some pretty crazy Island of Doctor Moreau things 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.

• 55:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I was wondering if they did some mouth replacements, how they would do animals, you know, like in the 90s.

• 55:36Lizzie Bassett?

  They look like the annoying orange sometimes.

• 55:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 55:38Lizzie Bassett?

  John Lennon in particular.

• 55:40Chris Winterbauer?

  The sponge monkeys from Quiznos.

• 55:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I love those things.

• 55:48Lizzie Bassett?

  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 alter the 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, Ken 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."

• 56:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Forrest running and his leg braces bursting off of his legs, that's completely practical.

• 56:39Chris Winterbauer?

  That's crazy.

• 56:40Lizzie Bassett?

  They removed the screws and the joints. They rigged them with small explosive charges triggered by remote control.

• 56:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 56:46Lizzie Bassett?

  This obviously scared eight-year-old Michael, but the crew told him he was going to be fine, and he was. It looks amazing.

• 56:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I wondered if they were using a body double, but they weren't.

• 56:57Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 57:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Hey, great game.

• 57:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Great game, and with Sally Field, what's not to like?

• 57:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Sally Field, who had co-starred with Hanks, I think, like, I mean, 15 years earlier, and all of a sudden, she's his mom.

• 57:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I know.

• 57:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And so, yeah.

• 57:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. Well, she starts out quite young.

• 57:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, yeah. They're only 10 years apart. Actually, the old age makeup on her is very good.

• 57:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. I said the same thing. I think it looks excellent because they don't do that much.

• 57:23Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very subtle.

• 57:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It's like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. It looks really good.

• 57:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 57:27Lizzie Bassett?

  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, uh, doing some push-ups upstairs. Can you make the noise of someone doing push-ups?" And that's what he does.

• 57:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I actually like the weirdness of that scene quite a bit. The movie really does sink into some sentimentality sometimes that could be quicksand, but scenes like that give it the strangeness it needs, I think.

• 57:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. Last thing here, I want to talk about that massive napalm strike when Forrest rescues 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 Forrest 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 wire rig hanging from a crane.

• 58:39Lizzie Bassett?

  That's how he's able to move as quickly as he is. And obviously, the wires are painted out in post. Then they went in, rigged everything with giant tubes of, you know, 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 rotoscope 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.

• 59:20Lizzie Bassett?

  It's amazing. I really think that that shot looks so good.

• 59:25Chris Winterbauer?

  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 Zemeckis 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 Zemeckis have done it a little differently now? For example, but that's all. But no, it's an incredible effect. Again, because the explosions are real, that effect is actually more believable than the, I would say, the majority of explosions that we see now, you know, comped in.

• 1:00:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it's difficult to beat a real gasoline explosion captured on camera.

• 1:00:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Zemeckis get crew shirts at the end because there was no room in the budget. In a 2024 interview with Marc Maron, Zemeckis 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 Forrest's 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.

• 1:00:53Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:01:01Lizzie Bassett?

  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, Zemeckis and Hanks treated certain sequences that were deemed unnecessary as basically indie movies, working with the support of producer Steve Starkey. Hanks and Zemeckis 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 guessed 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.

• 1:01:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I just guessed based on availability. It makes sense, but they have slightly different running styles. Hank's brother has a more forward leaning style where his legs kick out a lot further behind him.

• 1:01:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris is a runner.

• 1:01:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom's more of an upright. Tom Hanks, underrated cinematic runner, closer to a Tom Cruise, very upright runner. Looks great. Looks fast.

• 1:02:03Lizzie Bassett?

  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 stride. He said, that's a stupid Hanks thing. So that's why his brother ended up doing it.

• 1:02:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Nice.

• 1:02:18Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Forrest decides to stop running. And Zemeckis still wanted to shoot that one last scene and he wanted to shoot it in Monument Valley. In Zemeckis's words, the guy who was running the 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, shoot the goddamn thing in Griffith Park. And Bob Zemeckis said, no. And as you'll remember, that scene is indeed shot in Monument Valley. So how did Zemeckis 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.

• 1:03:03Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Zemeckis and 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, Zemeckis really allowed him to be a major collaborator in post-production where he could help Kraft Gump alongside Zemeckis. After this, principal photography wrapped in December of 1993, but the problems sure did not stop there. Now you mentioned this, but this has one of the craziest soundtracks of all time. I had the CD of this. Did you have it?

• 1:03:48Chris Winterbauer?

  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 is the first time I heard Snoop John B. I really liked that song. Then you get into Lynyrd Skynyrd and everybody.

• 1:04:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Everybody.

• 1:04:01Chris Winterbauer?

  It's gotta have 50 top 40 hits throughout this movie. It's nuts.

• 1:04:05Lizzie Bassett?

  It's crazy. And executive music producer Joel Sill found himself up against the clock to license one of the most ambitious, as you pointed out, soundtracks of all time, because it was covering three decades.

• 1:04:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Lizzie Bassett?

  And Paramount was like, uh, you have zero dollars.

• 1:04:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's not like Warner Brothers, which has like Warner Brothers music, you know?

• 1:04:26Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Zemeckis were basically not on speaking terms. They're not going to do him any favors. So Zemeckis was like, all right, you know what we're gonna do? We're just gonna 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 audiences 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.

• 1:05:10Lizzie Bassett?

  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 screened the rough cut and had Zemeckis explain 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.

• 1:05:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very smart.

• 1:05:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Except for a few holdouts.

• 1:05:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Initially, Syl 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.

• 1:05:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Can we get the Skinnerd out of here?

• 1:06:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Put in more of the Doors. But actually the biggest battle, Chris, was on a song that you mentioned. It was Fortunate Son.

• 1:06:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 1:06:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Here's why. Little bit of a side quest here, but it is interesting. John Fogerty was in the middle of a 20 year long legal battle with Saul Zentz. Now Creedence Clearwater Revival had made a fortune for Saul Zentz, who owned the copyrights to their songs, the vast majority of which were of course written, produced and sung by John Fogerty. After Creedence Clearwater split up, John Fogerty was very unhappy with his deal and he actually had To cede an even greater portion of his royalties to Saul Zentz to get him out of the deal so that he could record elsewhere. And then to top things off, a lot of the money that he had made was lost in an offshore tax shelter deal, also arranged by Saul Zentz and Fantasy, the studio that he had been recording with. So, the real cherry on top is that Saul alleged that John Fogerty's song, "The Old

• 1:06:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Man Down the Road," was an illegal remake of Creedence's "Run Through Centerfield," which Zentz owned the copyright for. So this guy actually sued John Fogerty for plagiarizing himself.

• 1:07:04Chris Winterbauer?

  The chutzpah.

• 1:07:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. All to say, by the mid 90s, John Fogerty did not want his music used if Saul Zentz 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 Creedence Clearwater's "Fortunate Son." It was absolutely perfect. They really tried to make a case for using it in the movie, and John Fogerty 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 Zentz." And you know what? Saul Zentz said, "Go right ahead and use it." And Bob Zemeckis said, "Okay." And they did.

• 1:07:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 1:07:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Doesn't make me feel great about it.

• 1:07:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I think it's pretty shitty.

• 1:07:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I was trying to think of what else would make sense to go there.

• 1:07:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I get that it's the perfect song. It's an 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.

• 1:08:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I was trying to think of a... They do "All Along the Watchtower" later in that sequence, right?

• 1:08:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that could totally have worked there.

• 1:08:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, that's... Yeah, it's too bad.

• 1:08:11Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. I mean, put the doors in there! Riders on the Storms! There's plenty of things that could go in there.

• 1:08:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Just do the opening of Apocalypse Now?

• 1:08:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah! Do that, why not? Well, Forrest 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 went through the roof, so Winston Groom was making kind of a lot of money on this. And with his newfound 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?"

• 1:08:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we're losing money on this movie.

• 1:08:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh huh. Because in May of 1995, Paramount Studios financial statement was leaked that Forrest Gump was losing money.

• 1:09:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:08Lizzie Bassett?

  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 costs 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 in 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 Buckwald had gone

• 1:09:51Lizzie Bassett?

  through this ordeal over Coming to America. And so Groom called him up and asked for advice, and then hired the same lawyer that Buckwald 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.

• 1:10:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I was gonna say.

• 1:10:10Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:10:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Who? Or excuse me?

• 1:10:14Lizzie Bassett?

  And Paramount was like, "Groom, just have some patience." You know, they even gave him a $250,000 check as like, "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."

• 1:10:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Similarly, Barry Sonnenfeld's Men in Black, I can't remember the writer's name, but there was, it was same Hollywood math. Men in Black made Buco bucks.

• 1:10:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:10:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And he saw none of it.

• 1:10:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you might like to know that less than three weeks after Groom and Paramount resolved their differences, they did settle. He also sold them the rights to his sequel, Gump & Co., which addressed the existence of the movie in an outright sale, which was worth well over $1 million. At this point, of course, Groom backtracked, saying, "Oh, the recent 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.

• 1:11:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Lizzie Bassett?

  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 Woolf? This would, of course, be superseded by Titanic and then, most recently, by Sinners, which has now set the record for most Academy Award nominations. Now Forrest Gump beat The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction to win Best Picture. Bob Zemeckis 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 Ralston and the whole visual effects team also won, as did Arthur Schmidt, for Best Film Editing.

• 1:12:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Wasn't Hanks the first one to get back-to-back Best Actor since, like Spencer Tracy back in the 30s?

• 1:12:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:12:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And then who won score?

• 1:12:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It went to The Lion King, Hans Zimmer.

• 1:12:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you know, well deserved, candidly. And I love Sylvester's score in this movie, but this movie relies arguably more on the needle drops than it does on its score.

• 1:12:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Chris Winterbauer?

  In a lot of senses, it's 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.

• 1:12:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Very true. Now, Chris, you referenced this. We're not going to get into it a ton, because frankly, we don't have a ton of time. But I do think it's interesting that The National Review cited Forrest 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.

• 1:13:07Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the strongest case would be this is a libertarian film.

• 1:13:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:13:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Or it is a deeply centrist or apolitical film, to the point where, at the moment when Forrest presumably will make a political statement, the mic is literally pulled away from him.

• 1:13:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Although, you will notice that Abbie Hoffman said that that was beautiful, and you nailed it.

• 1:13:24Chris Winterbauer?

  He did. So it suggests a weight in one direction, potentially.

• 1:13:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, but you're right, they don't go for it.

• 1:13:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Or it suggests that Abbie Hoffman is actually dumb, but...

• 1:13:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:13:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I feel that perhaps a more moving message that could be taken from the movie is that it is morality, which I think is interesting, is clearly innate and derives from within. Forrest doesn't seem like a particularly religious person. For example, 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 Forrest navigates it with a very personal sense of morality of right and wrong. And, and so maybe that's more an interpretation that makes sense.

• 1:14:13Lizzie Bassett?

  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.

• 1:14:20Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:14:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Specifically.

• 1:14:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. There's someone said it was jingoistic and pro America. I actually think they did a good job with Vietnam because they never showed the enemy. They never suggest that this is a good fight. They just saw that the cost to American soldiers.

• 1:14:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a mess. It's a confusing mess.

• 1:14:34Chris Winterbauer?

  The pointless deaths of all of these characters.

• 1:14:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Chris Winterbauer?

  With no clear objective other than to find Charlie, who to Forrest's point, we're just trying to find this guy Charlie. I have no idea who he is.

• 1:14:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he 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 Forrest Gump that essentially says, no, your life is worth more than that.

• 1:14:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:14:57Lizzie Bassett?

  And he is, you know, furious with him for that initially. In fact, speaking of Gary Sinise, 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 in Forrest Gump. And after nine 11, Sinise 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 nine 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 nine 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 faux title referred to a fake

• 1:15:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Out prologue, based on the short story, A Fight With A Cannon by Victor Hugo. But Eric Roth turned in the sequel script on September 10th, 2001.

• 1:15:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Lizzie Bassett?

  And as soon as the Twin Towers fell, they realized they could not make a movie in Forrest Gump's sort of rose-colored glasses view of America because it didn't really exist anymore. Roth, Feynman, and all of the producers, quote, "all felt this part of our history with Forrest Gump was done and that they would never pursue a sequel from that point forward." Chris, that wraps up our coverage of Forrest Gump. What went right?

• 1:16:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So much. If I may give a couple shout outs before I do my official what went right. A very precocious young Haley Joel Osment. He's adorable at the end of this film. He's so good, 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.

• 1:16:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, she is selfish, but I mean.

• 1:16:40Chris Winterbauer?

  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 the 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, "Forrest 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.

• 1:17:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally.

• 1:17:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is what we eventually reveal. He's literally has the hand-eye coordination of Roger Federer.

• 1:17:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Multiple times over. He is incredibly successful as a college athlete. He becomes a ping pong star. Yeah.

• 1:17:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, he's a multi-sport athlete. So like, we can set that aside, obviously. And I agree. I think this is somebody who has accepted and internalized a slur that's given to him in the film.

• 1:17:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:17:32Chris Winterbauer?

  But he doesn't allow it to define him in the end, and he actually is very much not that thing. I agree. Some people have written, "This is a neurodivergent character written, like a neurodivergent mishmash, pastiche written by neurotypical people."

• 1:17:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's true.

• 1:17:45Chris Winterbauer?

  True, true. But I actually think Hanks finds humanity without, it doesn't feel as exploitative as other representations of, you know, characters like this.

• 1:17:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree with that. And I also think that because it is, as you've said, a tall tale, 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.

• 1:18:11Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I have to give this one, I'm gonna give it to Robert Zemeckis because I was going through his filmography and I think Forrest Gump is his best movie. There are some others I maybe prefer who framed Roger Rabbit I really like. Death Becomes Her will always hold like a really weird little place in my heart. Back to the Future is great.

• 1:18:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Contact?

• 1:18:30Chris Winterbauer?

  No, not a fan.

• 1:18:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Whoa, David's gonna get you for that.

• 1:18:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. I, 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'll say is I completely understand, or I think I understand, much of the criticism aimed at this movie.

• 1:18:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I think so much of it is completely valid. That being said, this movie's a crazy accom- like he directed the shit out of this movie. It's just the set pieces, the momentum, the pace. Everything looks so good. Thirty years later, everything looks so good.

• 1:19:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree.

• 1:19:02Chris Winterbauer?

  As a movie, it's hard to beat. And so I just gotta give it to Zemeckis.

• 1:19:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, since you mentioned Zemeckis's filmography, and of course, this came up in Back to the Future, but the star of Used Cars, do you know where Kurt Russell appears in this movie?

• 1:19:16Chris Winterbauer?

  No, does his voice appear in something?

• 1:19:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, what's his voice appear in?

• 1:19:21Lizzie Bassett?

  He's Elvis.

• 1:19:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's cool, cuz he played Elvis in the John Carpenter TV movie that they did as well.

• 1:19:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It's obviously not his body, but it is his voice.

• 1:19:30Chris Winterbauer?

  No, yeah. They did a great job with whoever played his face in the blurred out reflection that you see. That looked exactly like Elvis.

• 1:19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Last thing, I had Gary Sinise and Greg Kinnear face blindness in the 90s. I could not tell them apart.

• 1:19:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Gary Sinise is like if you turn Greg Kinnear into a snake, I feel.

• 1:19:47Chris Winterbauer?

  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 I could not tell those various people apart.

• 1:19:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:19:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Kurt Russell, star of Executive Decision, brings it full circle.

• 1:19:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. I'm gonna put What Lies Beneath and Cast Away at least at the same level as Forrest Gump. 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-

• 1:20:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Stands the test of time.

• 1:20:14Lizzie Bassett?

  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 gonna 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 Ralston, ILM and the entire visual effects team. It just blew me away. The more that I learned about it, I really, really loved it.

• 1:20:59Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, you mentioned they had a magician on set.

• 1:21:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:02Chris Winterbauer?

  A good visual effect works the same way as a good magic trick, right?

• 1:21:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:05Chris Winterbauer?

  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.

• 1:21:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:23Chris Winterbauer?

  In some of these scenes.

• 1:21:24Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 1:21:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So Lizzie, are you ready to eat a giant bowl of crow about the genius that is Robert Zemeckis?

• 1:21:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. I know in the Back to the Future episode, I said, I am not sure that I really like Robert Zemeckis. And then even in that episode, I believe I was looking at his filmography and going, well, wait a minute.

• 1:21:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, this one's pretty good.

• 1:21:40Lizzie Bassett?

  That one's also pretty good.

• 1:21:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I like that one.

• 1:21:42Lizzie Bassett?

  And I said, I didn't like Forrest Gump. 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 Forrest Gump, much in the way that you did, Chris. I do think it's worth a rewatch. I think it's more hopeful than 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 Zemeckis. I love Death Becomes Her. I love Cast Away. 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.

• 1:22:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and also, post, early 2000s Zemeckis, I think most people would agree, has been a little more hit or miss, a little maybe more focused on the technology.

• 1:22:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26Chris Winterbauer?

  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 and direction, anyway. But, uh, all right, we will send that clip to Robert Zemeckis and

• 1:22:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Bobby!

• 1:22:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Pull him out of his depression.

• 1:22:43Lizzie Bassett?

  You're pretty good, I guess, from me, someone who can't do anything that you've done across your career.

• 1:22:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Wouldn't be a podcast without those types of takes. All right, guys, if you're liking 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 podcatcher you're listening to us on. Number three, make sure you hit follow and/or subscribe on whatever podcatcher 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 tandem,

• 1:23:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Train Dreams in Frankenstein, and then we're gonna be doing a little Oscars livestream on our Patreon, which brings me to Patreon. Patreon is a platform that connects podcasters 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 and some other goodies, you know, some polls, some little musings by me, et cetera. And for $50, you can get a deeply problematic Forrest Gump-style shout-out

• 1:23:59Lizzie Bassett?

  No!

• 1:23:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Just like one of these. Just kidding, you can do Jenny, you can do whoever you want.

• 1:24:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna read it. I'm just gonna read it. I'm no Tom Hanks. Adrian Pang Korea, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Liel, Chris Zucka, David Friskalanti, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Scheible, Ellen Singleton, M. Zodiac, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, Grace Potter, Half Grey Hound, James McAvoy, Jared Ugg, Jason Frankel, JJ Rapidow,

• 1:24:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emilano Salto de Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgashlager McCoy, Lazy Freddie, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mariposas Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Knifes, Nathan Santeno, Rosemary Southward, Rarol Jera, Sadie, Still Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, So Man Shainani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, The O's Sound Like O's, and There Is No Spoon. Thank you all so much. We love you guys.

• 1:25:26Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Thank you, guys, so much. Thank you, Lizzie, 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 Seven 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.

• 1:25:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. I can't wait.

• 1:25:51Speaker 06

  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 ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krupso. (Music)