‘Forrest Gump’ is one of those movies that regardless of how many times you’ve seen it, you feel touched and sentimental like you were watching it for the first time.
Last year, Forrest Gump celebrated its 20th anniversary, and maybe we are one year late to honor the celebration, but however we found these pretty cool trivia facts that you might find interesting.
1.With every transition of Forrest’s age, one thing remains the same. He wears a blue plaid shirt in the first scene.
In the ending scene, Forrest’s son, Forres Jr, also wears a blue plaid shirt.
2. In reality, Sally Field is only 10 years older than Tom Hanks.
3. The scene where Forrest sits in the hallway of his school while his mother talks to the principal was inspired by the Norman Rockwell painting Girl with a Black Eye.
4. Tom Hanks’ younger brother Jim Hanks doubled for him in many of his numerous running sequences.
5. Tom Hanks signed onto the film after an hour and a half of reading the script but agreed to take the role only on the condition that the film was historically accurate.
He initially wanted to ease Forrest’s pronounced Southern accent, but was eventually persuaded by director Robert Zemeckis to portray the heavy accent stressed in the novel and patterned his accent after Michael Conner Humphreys (young Forrest) who actually talked that way.
6. When Forrest gets up to talk at the Vietnam rally in Washington, the microphone plug is pulled and you cannot hear him.
According to Tom Hanks, he says, “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.”
7.The line, ‘My name is Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump,’ was ad-libbed by Tom Hanks
8. The girl in the school bus with the red hair is Tom Hanks’s daughter: Elizabeth Hanks.
9.The park bench that Tom Hanks sat on for much of the movie was located in historic Savannah, Georgia, at Chippewa Square.
The fiberglass bench he sat on, since then, has been removed and placed into a museum to avoid being destroyed by bad weather, or possibly stolen.
10. The running scene was inspired by an actual event.
In 1982, Louis Michael Figueroa, aged 16, ran from New Jersey to San Francisco for the American Cancer Society, unknowingly inspiring a line for Forrest Gump’s famous run on the silver screen. “I just put one foot in front of the other,” it goes. “When I get tired I sleep. When I get hungry I eat. When I have to go to the bathroom, I go.”
11.The pair of shoes that Jenny gives to Forrest as a gift were Nike’s 1974 Cortez running shoes.
12.
Jenny’s last name is Curran, but it is never said in the film.
13.The Doors have a total of six songs in the movie, more than any other band.
14.There was no ball in the Ping-Pong matches scenes; it was entirely CGI.
15. According to writer Winston Groom, John Goodman was the perfect Forrest Gump in his mind.
16. Almost all of John Lennon‘s dialogue is from his song “Imagine” (“No possessions”, “No religion too”, “It’s easy if you try…”)
17. Tom Hanks wasn’t paid for the film. Instead, he took percentage points which ultimately netted him in the region of $40 million.
18.When Jenny is throwing stones at the house where she grew up, she suddenly collapses onto the ground in front of the house.
The image of Jenny on the ground is almost identical to that captured in the famous Andrew Wyeth painting, Christina’s World.
19.
Forrest and Dan’s Shrimp Emporium Bubba Gump is now a themed restaurant in 33 locations around the world.
In the U.S., Japan, China, Mexico, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia. There is one in Orlando, Florida, at the entrance to the Universal theme parks there.
20.Every still picture of Forrest during this film shows Tom Hanks with his eyes closed.
