July 6, 1994: "Forrest Gump" Premieres

July 6, 1994: Forrest Gump premieres, based (somewhat loosely) on the 1986 novel by Winston Groom, and directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Forrest (played as a boy by Michael Conner Humphreys) grows up in the fictional town of Greenbow, Alabama in the 1950s. He has an IQ of 75, and severe scoliosis that forces him to wear braces on his legs, but his mother (Sally Field) tries to raise him as normally as possible.

Forrest touches the lives of many celebrities and future celebrities. The 1st of these is an aspiring singer named Elvis Presley (body by Peter Dobson, voice by Kurt Russell, who had played Elvis before), who copies the way Forrest moves with his braces, and becomes the King of Rock and Roll.

Trying to break away from bullies, Forrest runs, breaks his braces, and finds he can run fast. A few years later (played between the ages of 17 and 40 by Tom Hanks, who was 33 at the time of filming), he's really fast, and, though he barely graduated from Greenbow High School, is recruited to play football at the University of Alabama under head coach Paul "Bear" Bryant (Sonny Shroyer).

While at the University, on June 11, 1963, he witnesses the speech that Governor George Wallace makes during his "stand in the schoolhouse door." After Wallace's removal, Vivian Malone walks in to register as a student. The film shows her dropping her purse, and Forrest picks it up and hands it to her.

He is selected for college football's All-America team, and, with the other honorees, is invited to the White House to meet President John F. Kennedy. With an early form of computer-generated imagery (CGI), Zemeckis used real footage of JFK shaking hands with All-Americans, with the special effects moving his lips to form the words of the script.

Forrest enlists in the U.S. Army, where he meets Benjamin Buford Blue, a.k.a. Bubba (Mykelti Williamson), a native of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi who wants to go into the shrimp business; and Lieutenant Dan Taylor (Gary Sinise), who ends up as his commanding officer. They all get sent to Vietnam, and all are wounded. As the least wounded, Forrest pulls Bubba and "Lieutenant Dan" out of the line of fire, but Bubba dies, and Lieutenant Dan loses his legs.

For his heroism, Forrest is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Lyndon B. Johnson, again with CGI aiding footage of the real LBJ. After leaving the White House, Forrest wanders into an antiwar demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial. A woman named Hillary is in attendance, and although we never see her, we are led to believe that this is Hillary Rodham, who, by the time the film is released, is Hillary Clinton, the First Lady of the United States.

The leader of the demonstration (Richard D'Alessandro) is not named, but his clothes and attitude suggest Abbie Hoffman. Seeing Forrest in full dress uniform, complete with Medal of Honor, he invites Forrest to speak. But the commanding officer of the Army unit guarding the Memorial pulls the plug on the podium, and it is plugged back in just as Forrest finishes. No one beyond the stage hears what he has to say. 

According to the script, this was it: "Sometimes, when people go to Vietnam, they 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 I have to say about that." Power is restored in time for the crowd to hear him say, "And that's all I have to say about that," and "Abbie" tells him, "That's okay, man. You said it all."

This is why I'm not so sure that the character is Abbie Hoffman: Abbie was a provocateur, for provocation's sake, an attention-seeker. He didn't care about the war, except as a means to make his own noise. The real Abbie probably wouldn't have reacted that way.

As time goes by, Forrest discovers another skill when he is named to the U.S. table tennis team -- serious players of that sport hate it when people call it "ping-pong" -- that played a team from Red China in one of the earliest cultural exchanges between the 2 countries.

Upon returning to America, he is booked to appear on The Dick Cavett Show. Zemeckis inserted Forrest into the May 11, 1972 episode on which John Lennon, formerly of The Beatles, appeared. Forrest's description of how the Chinese people have no possessions and have no religion thus inspire Lennon to write the song "Imagine" -- even though, in real life, Lennon had recorded the song over a year earlier.

As a result of his table tennis heroism, Forrest is permitted to meet one more President: Richard Nixon. Nixon asks him where he's staying. Upon hearing the answer, Nixon tells him he can get him a better place. It turns out to be the hotel portion of the Watergate complex, and Forrest sees the burglars and calls the police, leading eventually to Nixon's downfall.

Forrest goes to Bubba's hometown, off Mobile Bay, and keeps his promise to start a shrimping company in both their names: Bubba Gump Shrimp. Lieutenant Dan joins him, and theirs is the only shrimp boat in town to survive Hurricane Carmen in 1974. Dan invests their profits in Apple, and they become rich.

A parallel story is that of Jenny Curran, played as an adult by Robin Wright. Abused by her father, she befriended Forrest when no one else would. But she got expelled from college for posing for Playboy while wearing her college sweater, sang folk songs in strip clubs, saw Forrest at the Lincoln Memorial and introduced her to her hippie and Black Panther friends, and got hooked on drugs and a succession of bad boyfriends.

Having kicked drugs, she visits Forrest in Greenbow not long after his mother dies, and they finally spend the night together, then she leaves. In 1981, he meets Jenny again. She has a son, whom she's named Forrest Gump Jr. -- and an incurable virus, which the viewer is led to believe is AIDS. They get married so that Forrest can use his fortune to pay her medical bills, but she dies, anyway. Her tombstone lists her date of death as March 22, 1982. The following September, the story ends with Forrest Sr. sending Forrest Jr. off to his first day of school in Greenbow.

Someone once called Forrest Gump "a great conservative film": Despite being developmentally disabled, Forrest is a man who does everything the government asks of him, and is rewarded, becoming a war hero and a successful businessman; while Jenny is a woman who does all the rebellious things, and suffers for years until she dies as a result of her misbehavior.

The rebuttal to this is that Forrest loses the only 3 people that really matter to him: Mama, Jenny and Bubba. And all his money and all his status can't save them. So his story is actually a tragedy. But this isn't entirely true, either: He has his son, and Dan is still there for him, attending the wedding with his own wife, a Vietnamese refugee, and having learned to walk with prosthetic legs and a cane.

There are some differences with the novel. Although Tom Hanks was rather lean at the time of filming, the book's Forrest was 6-foot-6 and 242 pounds, more a bruising fullback than a speedy halfback. And yet, he flunks out of the University of Alabama. He doesn't meet Lieutenant Dan until after they're both wounded, and Dan is more encouraging to him at first. Having a talent for math despite his low IQ, he is recruited by NASA, and becomes an astronaut, then a professional wrestler, then an actor, starring alongside Raquel Welch in a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. (Raquel never appeared in such a film.) And he doesn't end up with Jenny, who has married someone else, who believes Forrest's son it be his own.

There were 2 brilliant parodies of the film. In 1994, the Fox variety show MADtv did "Gump Fiction," combining Forrest Gump with Pulp Fiction, with Forrest being the one to assassinate JFK. And in 1996, parody-song king "Weird Al" Yankovic turned "Lump" by The Presidents of the United States of America into "Gump."

Author Winston Groom, who grew up in Alabama and served in Vietnam at the same time Forrest would have, wrote a sequel, Gump & Co. Dan sells his share of Bubba Gump, and, without his business sense, Forrest is maneuvered into losing the company. His subsequent ventures all fail, including the creation of New Coke. This makes raising Forrest Jr., whose mother and grandmother have died, and whose apparent father left when he found out the truth, all the harder.

Forrest meets another President. Unfortunately, it's Ronald Reagan. He sends Forrest on a clandestine mission to Iran, and, because he's the only one who told the truth, he's the only person who goes to prison as a result of the Iran-Contra Scandal. While on a work-release program at the Rev. Jim Bakker's South Carolina theme park, he inadvertently exposes Bakker's affair with his secretary, Jessica Hahn.

He goes to work for junk-bond investors Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, and avoids a return to prison because of the Crash of '87. In 1989, he causes the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. He ends up playing football in West Berlin, and punts a ball over the Berlin Wall, leading to the Wall being torn down. While in Berlin, he meets a woman named Gretchen, and falls in love again.

He and Lieutenant Dan are reactivated for service in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, and they capture Saddam Hussein. But that was against orders, so they find a place to release Saddam. In the firefight that follows, Dan finally fulfills his destiny, as a man in every single generation of his family had died in an American war. He dies at peace with this fact.

Forrest ends this 2nd book having built a new fortune in harvesting oysters, and, looking to invest further, he meets one more President: Bill Clinton, who mentions the Whitewater housing development in Arkansas. Forrest marries Gretchen, but discovers that Forrest Jr. has begun drinking. A film is made about his life, although Forrest admits that he's not impressed by Hanks, who plays him. Forrest tells the reader, "Don't ever let nobody make a movie of your life's story. Whether they get it right or wrong, it don't matter."

But a 2nd film was never made. The script was submitted on September 10, 2001 -- a case of life imitating art, perhaps. Hanks later said that discussions of a sequel "lasted all of 40 minutes."

Groom was also a historian, specializing in the era between the American Revolution and the American Civil War, especially the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. And he wrote The Crimson Tide: An Illustrated History of Football at the University of Alabama. He didn't play football there, but he did graduate. He died in 2020. Not from COVID.

If I were to finish the story: Forrest makes a lot of money in the computer industry all over again in the 1990s, but loses both his fortune and Gretchen in the 9/11 attacks. Forrest Jr. serves in the Iraq War, and comes back physically fine, but troubled by what he saw. He probably warns his father against investing in the 2000s "housing bubble," but Forrest Sr. doesn't listen, and loses his shirt again.

But Forrest Jr. finds work at ESPN, and gets a 30 for 30 documentary made about his father. He introduces Forrest Sr. to Rudy Ruettiger, the one-play Notre Dame legend of 1975 who got a movie made about his life right before Forrest Sr. did, and Rudy convinces Forrest Sr. to sign with his agent, to become a motivational speaker. Forrest lives a good life in his golden years, until 2020, when he dies of COVID.

There is one final tragedy. Forrest Jr. beats Tommy Tuberville for the Republican Primary for U.S. Senate in Alabama, explaining, "All you people who love Alabama football, this guy coached at Auburn. And all you people who love Auburn football, this guy was a dumb coach." But when Senator Forrest Gump Jr. (R-AL) becomes one of the few Republican Senators who votes to convict in the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, a MAGA loon takes a gun, and, as Forrest Sr. might have said, "Somebody shot that nice young Senator. And he died." And Tuberville is appointed to the seat, anyway.

Which would be a tragedy, because it's all too close to what actually happened. As Forrest himself would have said, "And that's all I have to say about that."

*

July 6, 1994 was a Wednesday. These Major League Baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Oakland Athletics, 4-2 at Yankee Stadium. Former Met Ron Darling outpitched Jim Abbott. Rickey Henderson went 1-for-3 with a walk. Scott Brosius hit a home run for the A's. No one yet knew he would one day be hitting them for the Yankees. Paul O'Neill went 3-for-4. Don Mattingly did not play.

* The New York Mets beat the San Francisco Giants, 4-1 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Ryan Thompson hit a home run, and José Vizcaíno went 4-for-5. Barry Bonds went 0-for-4.

* The California Angels beat the Boston Red Sox, 10-6 at Fenway Park in Boston.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Seattle Mariners, 5-4 at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Rafael Palmeiro and Brady Anderson hit home runs. (Cough, steroids, cough cough.) In a "Battle of the Juniors," Cal Ripken went 1-for-4, and Ken Griffey went 1-for-3 with an RBI.

* A doubleheader was split at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. The Pittsburgh Pirates won the opener, 3-1. The Atlanta Braves won the nightcap, 4-2.

* The Florida Marlins beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-3 at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. Greg Colbrunn singled home the winning run in the bottom of the 10th inning.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 6-2 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit.

* The Colorado Rockies beat the Chicago Cubs, 7-1 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Houston Astros beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 7-6 at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis.

* The Minnesota Twins beat the Toronto Blue Jays, 5-4 at the Metrodome in Minneapolis.

* The Milwaukee Brewers beat the Kansas City Royals, 4-3 at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Texas Rangers, 13-4 at The Ballpark (now Choctaw Stadium) in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas.

* The San Diego Padres beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 5-2 at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. Tony Gwynn did not play.

* And the Montreal Expos beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4-2 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.