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Winston Groom

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Forrest Gump The Rewatchables
Forrest Gump

Half-Assed Internet Research

Fictional Greenbow, the demolished Gump house, Jenny’s disease, Elvis, prosthetics, doubles, props, the rally speech, profit points, the novel, and death theories

In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 01:12:15Read transcript
  • Greenbow, Alabama is fictional, and the Gump house built for two months was demolished after a land dispute rather than preserved as an attraction. — Bill Simmons
  • Novelist Winston Groom intended Jenny’s disease as hepatitis C, while the filmmakers’ presentation is interpreted as AIDS. — Bill Simmons
  • Kurt Russell voiced Elvis, Michael Clarke Duncan wore a prosthetic lip as Bubba, and Hanks’s brother Jim doubled the cross-country run. — Bill Simmons
  • Jenny’s birth date matches the Trinity nuclear test, and the Savannah bench is now in the Smithsonian. — Bill Simmons
  • Hanks said Forrest’s cut-off rally speech described soldiers returning without legs or not returning at all. — Bill Simmons
  • Hanks and Zemeckis exchanged fees for profit points when Paramount sought cuts and earned enormous returns.
  • The novel also makes Forrest an astronaut, wrestler, chess player, and broader savant. — Chris Ryan
  • An internet theory says bullies kill Forrest early and the braces breaking mark his spirit’s release, with the feather as eventual angel wings; Osment’s later Sixth Sense role is playful support. — Chris Ryan
Forrest Gump The Rewatchables
Forrest Gump

Probably Unanswerable Questions

Why didn't Forrest go pro? Why didn't Forrest catch Jenny's illness? Did Jenny die of AIDS or hepatitis? How many sexual partners did Jenny and Forrest have? Where did the followers go when Forrest stopped running? What does the feather mean?

In the discussion (8)
Approx. transcript time · 00:56:41Read transcript
  • Why didn't Forrest Gump go pro? Out of college around 1964 as an all-American kick returner with both the NFL and AFL in business, he got no offer, and he sounds like the perfect Jet a year after they signed Joe Namath. Maybe he was not a good teammate, selfish without knowing better; a scene of teammates taping him to the goalpost is wished for; the leg braces give him a checkered injury history like Michael Porter Jr.; and he joined the military because it sounded like a good idea, so going pro may never have occurred to him.
  • Why didn't Forrest catch whatever Jenny had? Maybe they had no sex life when they got back together; the hosts assume she contracted HIV.
  • Did Jenny die of AIDS or hepatitis B or C? One host had answered this years ago as a mailbag question: she died in March 1982, nine months after the first recorded AIDS case in the United States, so she would have caught it around 1980 or 1981 while raising her son as a cocktail waitress and presumably off drugs; the film never approaches how.
  • A controversial take: she did not have AIDS, she was just sick, probably hepatitis leading to liver cancer; the other buys it, noting she only says 'I'm sick, Forrest' and uses the word virus. Or the filmmakers botched the timeline and should have had her die in 1984. The implied message that drug use and promiscuity lead to AIDS is a weirdly moralizing note in a film that is not otherwise moralizing; the hosts assume an AIDS death is what we are meant to believe and joke about calling Winston Groom.
  • How many sexual partners did Jenny Gump have? One host will not put a number on it. Forrest had one, since Jenny was his girl, even as an all-American at Alabama.
  • Where did everyone go after Forrest stopped running in Montana or Utah with 150 people behind him, far from a Greyhound station? One thing to respect is that when interviewed he does not invent a reason, he just felt like running, and people follow anyway; LeBron would have played up the narrative.
  • Feather interpretations found online: the unbearable lightness of being, which is overreading; Forrest's impaired intellect; the randomness of experience, which one host subscribes to; Hanks interpreted it as destiny defined by how we deal with the chance elements of life, the thing that can land anywhere landing at your feet, with theological implications and the question of planned versus chance. Both hosts settle on that reading.
  • Earlier, while listing the American touchstones Forrest brushes against, AIDS is included with the caveat that it cannot be confirmed and is an unanswerable question.
Forrest Gump The Rewatchables
Forrest Gump

Half-Assed Internet Research

Hanks took percentage points instead of a salary and made over $40 million; Jim Hanks doubled in the running scenes; Eric Roth's 2001 sequel script from Gump and Company was dropped after 9/11; what Forrest says when the rally microphone cuts out; Jenny's tombstone birthday is the day of the Trinity test; the run was inspired by Louis Michael Figueroa's 1982 run; the Savannah bench went to the Smithsonian; Bubba Gump has 33 locations; Kurt Russell voiced Elvis; Warner Brothers traded the rights for Executive Decision; a cut scene of Forrest distracting dogs attacking Martin Luther King; Jenny's gift shoes were 1974 Nike Cortez; six Doors songs

In the discussion (10)
Approx. transcript time · 00:38:15Read transcript
  • Tom Hanks was not paid for the film but took percentage points and made over 40 million dollars; the film is based on the 1986 novel; Hanks's younger brother Jim Hanks doubled for him in the running scenes, and nobody has heard of Jim Hanks, prompting a joke about parents giving every son a three-letter name.
  • Eric Roth wrote a sequel screenplay in 2001 based on Winston Groom's follow-up novel Gump and Company, opening with Forrest on a bench waiting for his son to return from school; after the September 11 attacks, Roth, Zemeckis and Hanks decided the story was no longer relevant. The hosts are glad there is no extended universe and agree a Forrest Gump 2 would have been a big mistake.
  • When the microphone cuts out at the Vietnam rally, the lost lines are that sometimes people who go to Vietnam go home to their mamas without any legs, sometimes they don't go home at all, that's a bad thing, and that's all there is to say about that.
  • Jenny's birthday on her tombstone, July 16, 1945, is the same day as the Trinity test, the first atomic bomb detonation; whether it was purposeful is left uncertain, someone is working hard on connections, and joke that Jenny was the atomic bomb of Forrest's life.
  • The running was inspired by a real event: in 1982 Louis Michael Figueroa, aged sixteen, ran from New Jersey to San Francisco for the American Cancer Society, somehow stretched into three and a half years. The park bench was in Savannah's Chippewa Square and was sent to the Smithsonian; Bubba Gump now has 33 locations including the Santa Monica pier, where one host has never eaten and the other says he is not missing much; Kurt Russell voiced Elvis and famously played Elvis in a John Carpenter movie, and Val Kilmer was the Elvis in True Romance.
  • In 1988 Warner Brothers gave up the rights to the film in exchange for the rights to Executive Decision, released in 1996, because the studio felt the project had lost commercial promise after Rain Man; the hosts call it the Harden trade for movies and joke that Steven Adams was thrown in.
  • A planned effects shot had Forrest running into Martin Luther King and his supporters and distracting the dogs attacking them by playing fetch; cutting it was a strong edit that probably saved the movie. The hosts also note that Forrest is literally a descendant of the Ku Klux Klan, with the sheet-pulling scene, which would not make a 2018 version, and agree nobody wants Woke Gump.
  • The shoes Jenny gives Forrest were Nike's 1974 Cortez running shoes.
  • Is wearing replicas of the Cortez shoes right now. — Bill Simmons
  • The six Doors songs are Soul Kitchen, Hello I Love You, People Are Strange, Break On Through, Peace Frog and Love Her Madly; Soul Kitchen is liked but the use is obvious, especially in Vietnam. One host is accused of destroying Zemeckis for obvious musical taste while giving Scorsese a pass for Gimme Shelter in seven movies; the reply is that Scorsese's reuse of the same nine Stones songs is annoying but not literal, whereas the songs chosen by Zemeckis are literally about the feeling being conveyed.
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