Trivia / Forrest Gump

• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Tom Hanks based Forrest's accent on that of Michael Conner Humphreys, the child actor who played young Forrest (not Forrest Jr.).
  • Gary Sinise suggested the "Hey! I'm walking here!" bit to director Robert Zemeckis, who liked the idea so much he underscored the scene with music from Midnight Cowboy.
• Approval of God: While Winston Groom thought the movie "took the rough edges off the character" while tacking on "several layers of sentiment", he had a very good opinion of the movie. (But disapproved of the Hollywood Accounting that took his share of the profits, leading to a Take That! on Hollywood executives in Gump and Co.)
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The line "Life is like a box of chocolates" is different from both Forrest Gump's recounting of his mom's line and his mom's actual line (when she's bedridden).
  Forrest Gump: Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.
  Mama Gump: Life is a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you're gonna get.
• California Doubling: Mostly set in Alabama, but filmed in the Carolinas. South Carolina also doubles for the jungles of Vietnam during the war scenes.
• Defictionalization:
  • Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. In a sense. The movie's Bubba Gump was a shrimp extraction concern, the defictionalized Bubba Gump is a chain of casual dining restaurants. There's even one at Universal Studios Orlando with Forrest's bench and shoes available for a photo op, and TVs that play the movie at all times.
  • Gary Sinise and the Lieutenant Dan Band.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Tom Hanks (38) and Robin Wright (28) play Forrest and Jenny in their teens and early twenties.
  • It's not clear how old Lt. Dan is supposed to be, but he probably would have been in his mid-late twenties during Vietnam. Gary Sinise was pushing 40 at the time.
• Deleted Scene:
  • A scene in which Forrest comes upon a confrontation between police and Selma civil rights marchers. He unintentionally defuses the situation by playing fetch with the police dogs, after which he apologizes to Martin Luther King Jr. for disrupting the "parade."
  • The filmmakers found footage of George H. W. Bush getting hit in the crotch while playing ping-pong and thought that was too good to not use in the movie. The effects team had already done much of the work inserting Tom Hanks into the footage when the decision came down to cut it.
• Development Hell: The adaptation of the book sequel, Gump and Co., featuring more of Forrest's crazy adventures, from encyclopedia selling to pig farming to attending the Academy Awards, helped by the fact that due to Hollywood Accounting, author Winston Groom didn't get a dime out of the $676 million the film took worldwide. It was also reported that another reason was that the script for the sequel was submitted on September 10, 2001, and the fact that the novel included Forrest getting deployed and having hijinks in The Gulf War ( his tank crew briefly captures Saddam Hussein!) became too soon in light of the attacks the day after. Hanks has also indicated that, after an initial burst of interest, he and Zemeckis decided not to get involved, which also stunted its chances of getting made.
• Doing It for the Art: Due to the budget ballooning out of control (because of all the groundbreaking special effects), the studio refused to provide any money for Forrest's cross country run. Knowing that it was important to show the run on screen, Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis used their own money to fly out to Monument Valley and pay for a small camera crew to shoot the necessary scenes on weekends before rushing back to the main production in time to start the week.
• Font Anachronism: The letter from Apple Computer is dated 21 September 1975. The font used on the logo, Apple Garamond, wasn't used by Apple until the launch of the Macintosh in 1984. The font was only designed in 1977. For that matter, the rainbow Apple logo was first used in May 1976.
• Hypothetical Casting: Winston Groom, who wrote the original novel, envisioned John Goodman as Forrest Gump.
• I Am Not Spock: Gary Sinise became so strongly identified as Lieutenant Dan that he decided to just start a band called the Lieutenant Dan Band, with the proceeds from the band's performances going to veterans' charities. He also starred in a series of ads as Lieutenant Dan supporting suicide hotlines for veterans. He also last-named his CSI: NY character, Mac Taylor, after Lt. Dan. (The first name was after his wife's brother, a high-ranking Army officer who died young from cancer, and later used for Gary's son.)
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The companion behind-the-scenes documentary Through the Eyes of Forrest Gump was aired on TV before an extended 37-minute version was included on the film's LaserDisc and video CD releases. The longer version has never been re-released since then, with DVD releases using the 30-minute broadcast cut.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Forrest offers the fat man and the old woman at the bus stop some chocolates, which they take. This was not in the film.
• Saved from Development Hell: It took nine years for the movie to come out, with original studio Warner Bros. even losing interest after Rain Man also had a savant. After a rewrite that took over a year was beloved by of one of Paramount's executives, Forrest Gump finally started to leave its turnaround.
• Star-Making Role: Gary Sinise was already well-established in theatre as an actor and co-founder of the well-regarded Steppenwolf Theatre Company, but his role in this movie made him a household name, albeit as Lt. Dan, not Gary Sinise.
• Those Two Actors: Tom Hanks and Sally Field had co-starred in the film Punchline six years earlier. No, she didn't play his mom in that one.
• Throw It In!: When filming the scene where Bubba tells Forrest "My given name is Benjamin Buford Blue, but people call me 'Bubba,'" Tom Hanks improvised the famous response of "My name is Forrest Gump. People call me 'Forrest Gump.'"
• Uncredited Role: Kurt Russell has a brief cameo as the voice of Elvis Presley who is portrayed physically by Peter Dobson.
• Underage Casting:
  • Sally Field played Tom Hanks' mother, though she's only ten years older than him. Many of her scenes are flashbacks where Forrest is played by a younger actor while he's still in school; once it came time for Hanks and Field to act off one another, Field plays the role in old-lady makeup while Hanks invokes Dawson Casting by playing a man in his 20's.
  • Robin Wright, then 28, plays Jenny into her late thirties.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Forrest wasn't supposed to speak with such a strong accent. Tom Hanks decided to mimic Michael Conner Humphreys' accent so that the young boy wouldn't be forced to take dialect lessons.
  • John Travolta was offered the role of Forrest, but turned it down. He regretted doing so, but he did pretty well anyway. Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Sean Penn, and Robin Williams were also considered.
  • Dave Chappelle (who would work with Hanks in You've Got Mail) was offered the role of Bubba, but turned it down, believing the movie would bomb. He, too, has regretted passing on his offer. (Hanks even brought Chappelle to You've Got Mail once he heard about it) However, given what happened to Mykelti Williamson, the actor who played Bubba, he may have done alright in the end.^note To wit, Williamson was quoted in interviews a few years later saying that after Gump, he was primarily offered roles as a comedic black character, only to be rejected because his lips weren't big enough. Tupac Shakur also auditioned for Bubba, while Ice Cube turned down the role, as he refused to play an idiot.
  • Jodie Foster, Nicole Kidman, and Demi Moore turned down the role of Jenny Curran.
  • Ivan Reitman, Terry Gilliam and Barry Sonnenfeld turned down the chance to direct the film. Penny Marshall said she only didn't do it because she wanted to take care of a sick friend.
• Word of Saint Paul: According to Tom Hanks, this was what Forrest said to the crowd at the March on the Pentagon:
  Forrest: Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don’t go home at all. That's a bad thing. That's all I have to say about that.

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