The Making of ‘Forrest Gump’

Forrest Gump is one of the stranger artifacts of ’90s popular culture. Indeed, its whole premise sounds like an extended comedy bit, rather than a fully-fledged dramatic feature: A mentally challenged Southern man inexplicably finds himself caught up in historical events he doesn’t really understand, fulfilling a complete boomer life cycle from the ’50s to the ’90s. This was boomer nostalgia before anyone had any notion that boomer nostalgia was a bad thing, because back then, boomers were still under 50.

On the Set of Forrest Gump
By Steve Starkey
University Press of Kentucky; 189 pages

Steve Starkey, the producer and second unit director of Forrest Gump, a boomer himself, narrates the new book On the Set of Forrest Gump with about all the enthusiasm you might expect from a man who remembers it as the high point of his career. Though, as Robert Zemeckis’ right-hand man  Starkey has amassed plenty of competition for that category. Starkey is a well-established Hollywood name, but critically, not one of the more famous ones, and his coffee table book nostalgia trip over how exactly he and Zemeckis made Forrest Gump contains a surprising degree of nuance regarding the Hollywood production process.

While Hollywood films are often described as collaborations, the convoluted way budgets are approved means that movies tend to be whatever survives the pitching process. Forrest Gump was no different. Neither Zemeckis nor Starkey knew anything about the original 1986 novel by Winston Groom. What excited them was the screenplay by Eric Roth, which appears to have been created at Paramount because Warner Brothers had the rights to the novel at the time, passed on it, and producers Steve Tisch and Wendy Finerman failed to shop it at Columbia before it showed up at Paramount, as a mostly forgotten property.

Starkey notes two elements of the novel that Roth wisely omitted. First, the novel implies Forrest isn’t as dumb as he looks by having him make a lot of literary references and second, Groom went further in the wackiness than the film. At one point in the novel Forrest goes into space with an ape and later also gets stuck on a desert island. Starkey does not tell us why Roth erased these plot points — perhaps a mixture of budget and taste — but his main point was to note that he told Zemeckis that he probably shouldn’t read the book since it would likely just confuse him.

The budget thing is important, incidentally, because most of the drama of Starkey’s narrative revolves around having to engage in dubious, duplicitous math to try and convince Paramount executives that they were trying to produce the film for $45 million budget when, in fact, there was no possible way to film Forrest Gump for less than $55 million, and everybody knew it. But Starkey, as producer, was stuck in the awkward position of trying to mediate this ten million dollar difference both ways. He convinces Zemeckis to hold filming of the hurricane scene to a single day, and letting a post facto newscast do most of the heavy lifting, while also helping Zemeckis managed to sneak the “silly shit happens” and “smiley face” gags into the film at the last minute thanks to successfully finagling a final shoot at Monument Valley, long after they’d otherwise finished shooting the cross-country marathon run part of the story.

Such is the magic of non-sequential filmmaking, even if Starkey openly admits that filming sequentially is generally preferable. For example, the schedule meant that they had to keep Sally Field on hand for a long time, even when she only had one scene left to film as Forrest’s mother on her deathbed. He still feels bad about that.

On the Set is at its most compelling when it manages to be a nostalgia tale within a nostalgia tale, where Starkey admits that for all the passion everyone had for the project, they had no idea whether audiences would actually like it. There simply wasn’t the time or budget left for the micromanaged focus groups that are so prevalent in Hollywood today.

Even then, though, they had pre-screenings and Starkey opens up with a petty argument he had with executives as to whether or not an early pre-release audience should be given a full survey — in front of that audience much to their surprise. And the surviving members of The Doors apparently had their mercenary hearts softened by the film’s power of montage, when Starkey sent them an early version of the film to try and convince them to lessen the licensing fee for their music.

According to Starkey’s telling, so much of the final outcome relied on unpredictable dice rolls like this. The surprise hero of the story is Michael Conner Humphreys, who plays the young Forrest Gump in the prologue part of the film. His particular Southern drawl was so genuinely unique that Tom Hanks actually copied it to create his iconic Academy Award winning character. Hanks, who writes the foreword to Starkey’s book, has long corroborated this story. In general though, On the Set, is fundamentally unverifiable. Starkey mentions in the epilogue that Zemeckis himself can’t remember many of these stories he was present for, not because they didn’t happen, but because memory is a funny, fickle thing, and as Starkey mentions time and again, everyone working on Forrest Gump was in the zone.

It’s a messy story that doesn’t exactly correspond to the legacy of Forrest Gump as a brilliant, preeminent piece of American filmmaking. But then again, On The Set avoids talking up the movie in terms of its broader legacy. Did Forrest Gump really deserve to beat Pulp Fiction for Best Film at the 1994 Oscars? Did Tom Hanks really deserve a consecutive Oscar for Forrest Gump after Philadelphia in 1993?

On the Set doesn’t answer any of these questions. Nor should it! Starkey is an industry professional and On the Set is a craft-oriented piece of writing. Indeed, Starkey shows surprising humility throughout the text. He does not presume that people have a high opinion of Forrest Gump but only recognizes that he, and the people working on the film, were very passionate about it, and that the film itself is very beloved, to the point that University Press of Kentucky thought it was worthwhile to have him write a book explaining how they made it.

I should note, lastly, that despite certainly looking like a coffee table book, with its large type, sturdy cover, and emphasis on production stills (many from deleted scenes), On the Set is a surprisingly authoritative tome with enough detail about the on-the-ground movie production process that it’s well-suited to the ethos of a university press. Starkey strips away the mystery of filmmaking without deromanticizing it.

To the contrary, it invokes a sort of humanity to the whole project that’s aptly reflected in the title character, who too, only just barely understands why anything that he’s doing is working. Honestly, I don’t think you even have to like Forrest Gump to like On the Set. I’m no huge fan of the movie, but the book’s accomplishment is that it makes it that much easier to understand why other people loved it so much, and continue to love it 30 years later.