Yikes, this could have been woeful.
Drill Sergeant: “Gump! What’s your sole purpose in this army?”
Forrest Gump: “To do whatever you tell me, drill sergeant!”
Drill Sergeant: “God damn it, Gump! You’re a god damn genius! This is the most outstanding answer I have ever heard. You must have a goddamn I.Q. of 160. You are goddamn gifted, Private Gump.”
See, it’s entirely possible to view Forrest Gump as a misunderstood genius.
After all, he did graduate from college, launch an incredibly successful shrimp company, shrewdly purchase shares in some fruit company Apple, inspire the lyrics for ‘Imagine’, help create the beloved ‘Have A Nice Day’ logo, uncover the truth about the Watergate scandal, teach Elvis how to dance, and use his gifted military mind to save countless lives in Vietnam.
Not bad for someone that happily jumped off a boat into the ocean, without any regard for what would happen next.
Anyway, while Forrest did have some bright ideas, we’re delighted that a rumoured sequel to the six-time Oscar-winning film didn’t happen too because the plot sounds like it would not have been a good idea.
Screenwriter Eric Roth, who nabbed one of the film’s haul of Academy Awards, had actually filed a completed script for the sequel and it sounds absolutely awful.
An old interview with Yahoo has been unearthed and the sequel would have been a loose adaptation of Gump & Co., the sequel to the original novel that Forrest Gump was based on.
The film would have tracked Forrest’s adventures through the 1980s and much like Robert Zemeckis’ beloved film, Forrest would have been present at some of the era’s biggest cultural and historical moments.
In Roth’s own words:
“It was gonna start with his little boy (Forrest’s son – played by Haley Joel Osment) having AIDS. And people wouldn’t go to class with him in Florida.
“We had a funny sequence where they were [desegregation] busing in Florida at the same time, so people were angry about either the busing, or [their] kids having to go to school with the kid who had AIDS. So there was a big conflict.”
It appears that the film would have seen Forrest interacting with O.J Simpson during the infamous moment when he fled from the police.
Aside from this, a scene where Tom Hanks’ beloved character dances with Princess Diana was also included.
“I had him in the back of O.J.’s Bronco,” said Roth. “He would look up occasionally, but they didn’t see him in the rearview mirror, and then he’d pop down.
“I had him as a ballroom dancer who was really good, he could do the [rotation] ballroom dancing. And then eventually, just as sort of a charity kind of thing, he danced with Princess Diana.”
The history of Hollywood is brimming with films that never got made and are stuck in production hell but it appears that the sequel was never made for more tragic reasons; the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attack.
“He meets a Native American woman on a bus and finds his calling, as a bingo caller on a reservation. And the big event in that, which you could see was diminished only in tragedy, I guess, because it’s the same tragedy, but every day he’d go wait for his Native American partner.
“She taught nursery school at a government building in Oklahoma City. And he was sitting on the bench waiting for her to have lunch and all of a sudden the building behind him blows up. … So when 9/11 occurred … I think we felt that everything felt meaningless.”
You can watch Roth’s whole interview here.
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