Forrest Gump: 15 Amazing Facts You Might Not Know

It won Tom Hanks his second Best Actor Oscar in a row and beat the likes of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’ to the Academy Award, but do you know all there is to know about Robert Zemeckis’ goofy run-through of America’s history?

Forrest was a shrewd investor

When Lieutenant Dan wisely invests the money he and Forrest made shrimping in “some fruit company”, the audience knew he was talking about Cupertino tech giants Apple. When the book by Winston Groom was released in 1986, those shares were worth about £31 million – a great gag back then. But now? If the investment was estimated at a notional £65,000, earning Dan and Forrest in the region of 1.5 million shares in Apple, then following stock splits and market conditions, that’d work at approximately 3% of Apple’s total value – which works out at around £4.5 billion in today’s money. That’ll get you a hell of a lot of boxes of chocolates.

Tom Hanks didn’t collect a wage

Like Forrest, Tom Hanks was also clever with his money. The movie was a huge hit and wound up raking in over £400 million worldwide in 1994 – but Tom Hanks was never actually paid for his part in the film.

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Ever the wise investor, Hanks forewent his paycheque and opted for percentage points, so when ‘Forrest Gump’ was the huge hit he knew it would be, Tom cashed in – it’s thought he made around £26 million from the film at the end of its run.

About that ‘CGI’ feather…

The infamous feather scene – in which a white feather flutters in the air and flies away as if to symbolise Forrest’s journey – is actually not CGI, despite the common misconception. Bizarrely, the feather is real, but its movement was captured on blue-screen and several different flights were digitally morphed together to create movement the camera could follow. We can’t help but think it’d have been easier just to create a CGI feather and have done with it.

Buttoned up

Though America seems to be constantly changing as Forrest weaves his way through its chequered history, one thing remains constant through his adventures. Every time Robert Zemeckis skips forward in time, he’s careful to show Forrest wearing the same blue plaid shirt in the first scene. Also worthy of note: Forrest wears his shirts buttoned all the way to the top in every scene, until Jenny’s death, after which he leaves his top button undone.

Gump on the menu

Maybe you’ve seen one yourself and performed a double-take – Forrest and Dan’s fictional shrimp restaurant, The Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, now really does exist in real-life. Paramount’s parent company Viacom opened a chain of Bubba Gumps in the US after the success of the movie and later opened 43 branches worldwide, including one in London’s Leicester Square. Diners can choose from dishes including Jenny’s Catch and Forrest’s Seafood Feast. Bonus shrimp fact: Chris Pratt was discovered working in a Bubba Gump restaurant in Hawaii in 2000.

John Travolta nearly played Forrest

It’s a role that defined Tom Hanks’ career and one that won him his second coveted Best Actor Oscar in a row, following ‘Philadelphia’ the previous year, but ‘Forrest Gump’ was almost played by a number of actors placed above Hanks’ name on the wishlist. Chevy Chase and Bill Murray both passed on the role, considering it too cloying, while John Travolta would later admit that turning down the part of ‘Forrest Gump’ was the biggest mistake of his career. ‘Battlefield Earth’ would later supercede that decision.

Alternate casting

Robin Wright-Penn put in a memorable and emotional turn as Forrest’s tragic girlfriend Jenny, but she too was not first choice – Demi Moore and Nicole Kidman were both pursued for the part but couldn’t commit. The role of Bubba was originally offered to David Alan Grier, Ice Cube (just imagine!) and comedian Dave Chappelle before Mykelti Williamson accepted. Seen him in anything recently? He played Brian Hastings in Day 8 of ‘24’ back in 2010.

Kurt Russell: The King of cameos

'Forrest Gump' contains several famous cameos from history, but often they appear via the magic of digital imagery and/or scene splicing, using existing audio cut into the movie. For Elvis's cameo appearance, however, Zemeckis needed some new lines read to illustrate how young Forrest showed him how to move his hips (“Say man, show me that crazy little walk you did there. Slow it down somethin'…”). Unbeknown to most, that voiceover was provided by an uncredited Kurt Russell, who also played The King in John Carpenter's 1979 biopic, 'Elvis'.

Blink and you’ll miss it

It’s a fun visual gag but an often overlooked one. Every single time you see a still photograph of Forrest Gump shown on screen throughout the movie, Tom Hanks has his eyes closed in the exact same unphotogenic way.

Fake balls

The CGI in ‘Forrest Gump’ is usually quite obvious – a shot of a confused Gump shaking the hand of a digital John F Kennedy here, a few missing legs on Lieutenant Dan there – but there are a number of subtle shots that fly under the radar.

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For example, when Forrest plays ping pong, you never once see a real ball – every shot is supplemented with a CG table tennis ball. Further to that, after being told to “keep [his] eye on the ball”, Forrest doesn’t blink once while playing for the rest of the movie.

The missing speech

The scene in which Forrest talks into a muted microphone at a Vietnam rally in Washington was actually written in full, despite the fact you can’t hear any of Hanks’ dialogue. According to Hanks, the line he was given was as follows: “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.”

Take a seat

In the realm of movie benches, the bench from ‘Forrest Gump’ has to go down as one of the all-time greats. The fibreglass bench was situated in Savannah, Georgia, at Chippewa Square, but it had to be moved to a museum, probably due to the excessive weight placed upon it by the butts of tourists arriving by the busload.

The awful truth

In the movie’s original script, the Vietnam scenes had an even darker edge to them, as every single one of Forrest and Bubba’s platoon mates has a similarly low IQ. This is actually based on a real practice, since discontinued by the US Army, whereby soldiers with abnormally low IQs were allowed to enlist during the Vietnam War, on the proviso they were all placed together in the same platoon. The Army objected to being presented that way in the movie, so only Forrest and Bubba were portrayed as being mentally challenged.

Uncanny foreshadowing

When Gary Sinise’s war veteran Lieutenant Dan scoffs at Forrest’s business idea to become a shrimp farmer, he jokes “Yeah, and I’m an astronaut!” One year later, Hanks and Sinise appeared together in ‘Apollo 13’, both playing astronauts. In Winston Groom’s book, Forrest actually does become an astronaut and travels into outer space, where he meets a chimp named ‘Sue’ – they later crash land in Papua New Guinea and are taken hostage by cannibals. This has never happened to Gary Sinise, as far as we know.

The weird sequel

Unbelievably, up until fairly recently, there was a ‘Forrest Gump’ sequel in active development. ‘Gump & Co’ was based on the book written by Winston Groom in 1995 after the movie made it big. The meta sequel saw Gump come to terms with the release of the Robert Zemeckis movie based on his own life, complaining that it was inaccurate and did not include details in his first book (which is kind of true: see above). In the novel, Gump actually meets Tom Hanks. Thankfully, the project seems to currently be in development hell, which is quite clearly where it belongs.

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Image credits: Paramount/Rex/Universal Pictures/Amazon/YouTube