'On the Set of Forrest Gump' by Steve Starkey
Forest Gump became one of the most beloved box-office hits of the ‘90s, winning six Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. According to producer Steve Starkey, writing in his new book, On the Set of Forest Gump, the studio hesitated to make the picture, giving it a flashing yellow, not a green light. The creative team accelerated anyway and zoomed past the speed bumps, reaching audiences through Tom Hanks’ endearing performance in the title role.
Forest Gump began life as a novel by Winston Groom and endured many Hollywood turndowns and turnarounds before reaching screenwriter Eric Roth and director Robert Zemeckis. The director approached the producer with determination. “This would be his next movie,” writes Starkey, who recalls being easily won over by its Boomer fantasy.
“Forest and I had lived through the same era,” he writes, even though he never had Gump’s experience of Vietnam or meeting Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Like Zelig for the multiplex crowd, Gump was present at many turning points.
On the Set of Forest Gump is an enlightening survey of how a movie gets made: budgets must be determined, locations scouted, crew recruited, actors cast—plus working out the special effects of inserting Gump-Hanks into archival footage of real events. They discovered the boy who played young Forest, Michael Conner Humphreys, only after the frustrated casting director extended the call beyond LA to the South, Gump’s homeland. Humphreys came with his mom from Independence, Miss. for the screen test.
Perhaps the big surprise is how that novice child actor shaped the direction of Forest Gump. According to Starkey, Hanks was having trouble getting his Southern dialogue down until hearing the boy’s “appealing thick accent … Tom shadowed Michael, learned his accent and his body language, and modeled his character on the young boy from Mississippi.”
A grateful Tom Hanks contributes the forward to On the Set of Forest Gump, published by University Press of Kentucky.
