Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(44)

Several times we needed to reshoot the scene where Tom carries me out of the jungle. As Tom ran, my inner thigh bounced up and down, up and down, up and down, on top of his shoulder. We shot take after take, and when the day’s shooting was over, I started to stand up and suddenly collapsed. All that bouncing on Tom’s shoulder resulted in a football-sized bruise on my leg. I could barely walk. Fortunately, all the Vietnam scenes were finished, so I headed back to Los Angeles (where all the rest of my scenes were scheduled to be shot) and had three weeks off while others went to shoot in Savannah and elsewhere before my shooting resumed. This was good because up next were the scenes where Lieutenant Dan’s legs are gone.

The special effects team had designed several ingenious ways of making the camera see me as if my legs were no longer there. In a hospital scene, my legs are covered in a blanket. Forrest comes in with an ice-cream cone for me, and I toss it in a bedpan. A medical guy comes in and says, “Time for your bath.” He pulls the sheet off where my legs should be, but my legs are gone. He then picks me up and sets me in a wheelchair. People often ask me if my legs were down inside the gurney—and they were. But when I’m lifted out of there, the rest of that scene was shot using an old technology known as blue screen. I wore stockings made out of blue screen material on my legs; then the special effects guys in postproduction removed my legs and painted in the background, frame by frame.

For the wheelchair scenes, the special effects guys had created a wheelchair that I could sit in while bending my legs underneath me. I needed to be limber for those scenes. But I still had this huge welt on my thigh. I could hardly move my leg, much less bend it underneath me. For those three weeks in L.A., I went for physical therapy every day, trying to get my leg limber again. Fortunately, by the end of the three weeks, my leg was back in shape.

I finished shooting my scenes earlier than some of the other actors. Then, right before principal photography ended in December 1993, I was called back to the set to reshoot one of my scenes. Lieutenant Dan’s ancestors are shown fighting and dying in every major war America has ever fought in between the Revolutionary War and World War II. I’m dressed up differently to play each “ancestor,” and the scene plays out like a montage, with the camera never cutting away and getting closer and closer to my face as the scene progresses. For the scene of World War II, I die on a little sandy beach (made to look something like Iwo Jima), and they’d discovered that when I’d fallen over during the initial shoot, the set had shaken underneath me, ruining the shot. On the very last day of shooting, actress Robin Wright was shooting her final sequences on the roof of an apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard in the Westwood area of Los Angeles. It’s the scene where Forrest’s love interest, Jenny, contemplates suicide, and they were shooting at night. They called me in about midnight to reshoot my sandy-beach death scene. They had built a little beach set on the apartment building’s rooftop. About two in the morning, we shot the final scene with my falling down on the sandy beach again. That was the last shot of Forrest Gump. We held a celebration, and all was a wrap.

Paramount held a small screening right before the release for all the cast and insiders. There are a lot of scenes that don’t feature Lieutenant Dan, so I was able to sit there almost like an audience member, watching it in its entirety for the first time. At the end, the credits rolled, and we all had big smiles on our faces. We didn’t know exactly how it would play to audiences, but I think we all knew we’d put together an excellent movie. I told Bob and Tom how great it was, how fortunate I felt to be a part of it. The movie felt satisfying. Moving. Inspiring. It just sat right in our guts.

Before the movie opened, we started the press junkets. That’s when you plant yourself in a hotel for a couple of days, and all the press from around the world flies in and stays at the hotel. Each actor stays put in an individual room, and you do interview after interview, saying similar things in each. It can get repetitive, but on June 17, 1994, something broke up the monotony. Bob Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and I, along with some others, sat in a conference room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and watched on TV as O. J. Simpson’s white Bronco rolled through Los Angeles. Just before the movie came out, Paramount had put up billboards all over Los Angeles, all saying a single word—GUMP. It was a brilliant promotional gimmick, and got people all over town wondering, What’s a GUMP? I wondered if O. J. had driven by any of those billboards and asked himself that same question.

Forrest Gump came out on July 6, 1994, and was an instant box-office smash hit. I couldn’t tell you exactly why the film worked to the degree it did, but it played to a lot of different emotions, covered a lot of territory, and had lovable characters at the center of it, anchored by Tom as Forrest and Sally Field as his mom.

Right after the movie opened, Mykelti Williamson and I went overseas to help promote the movie in Munich, London, Vienna, and other cities. He and I had become good friends during the filming, and in our free time we’d played a lot of golf on Fripp Island. Alligators had crawled out to sun themselves on that course, but no alligators were on the courses in Europe. We headed up to Scotland from London one evening to play at the famed Turnberry course. The idea was we’d play three rounds at Turnberry, two the next day, and one the following morning before heading back that afternoon to continue more press engagements. It was a couple of hours’ drive from London to Turnberry, and we had a driver, so Mykelti and I drank champagne in the back of the Rolls-Royce, and I eventually nodded off. Next thing I knew, Bubba was screaming at the driver, “Watch out! You’re going into the ditch!” The driver had nodded off too. I stayed awake for the rest of that drive. We played a couple great rounds in Scotland and finished up the press junket. Everywhere we went, people seemed to love the movie.