Forrest Gump’s Proud Dad

The “house that Forrest Gump built” in Magnolia Springs, Ala., was sold earlier this year. That’s the house writer Winston Groom bought with part of the reported $500,000 Warner Bros. paid him for the movie rights to his 1986 first-person book about a low-IQ country boy/man.

Since then Groom, 51, moved to Point Clear, Ala., where it’s easier for him to find a tennis game. Paramount (which got the film in turnaround from Warner Bros.) finally released the movie and now some folks in Mobile plan to honor the writer with a tickertape parade in October (after the summer heat passes) and a civic banquet to aid a local retarded-support group, and a proposal to name a new city-county complex the Forrest Gump Building.

“Damn,” Groom says, “if they do it I will come.”

Clearly, life for the writer has become like a box of his own chocolates--he never knows what he’s going to taste.

And right now Groom is tasting a lot of different chocolate:

* The Paramount movie, starring Tom Hanks, continues as one of this summer’s box-office successes, grossing more than $140 million in four weeks.

* Pocket Books, a division of Paramount, has gone into a 10th printing of the 1986 “Forrest Gump” book, which is on several bestseller lists.

* “Gumpisms: The Wit and Wisdom of Forrest Gump,” an 88-page quickie collection of aphorisms by Groom/Gump, is in its fourth printing.

* An audio version of the book read by Groom has been brought out and three of his earlier novels will be reissued by Pocket Books.

And there’s more.

There’s Groom’s next book, a nonfiction history, “Shrouds of Glory,” an accounting of the last big Confederate army campaign in the Civil War to attack Chicago.

And now he is about to do something about his unlikely hero, Forrest Gump. Groom and his wife, Anne Clinton, have headed to a retreat in the North Carolina mountains where, with his new tape recorder (“the best one I could buy, the kind detectives use”) he’s working on a sequel, taking Gump and his son from the late ‘80s to the present. “And that will be it. There will never be a ‘Forest Gump 5 or 6,’ ” he says.

The former Washington Star writer has seven books to his credit; his first, the 1978 Vietnam novel “Better Times Than These,” was followed by the nonfiction “Conversations With the Enemy” with Duncan Spencer.

“My wife and I,” he says of his Gumpian experiences, “are still trying to figure out what just hit us.”

Question: How did “Forrest Gump” get from Warner Bros. to Paramount?

Answer: When the book was in galley proofs, Warner Bros. and Steve Tisch bid for it with Wendy Finerman shepherding the deal. I wrote the first three script drafts and then Warners put it into turnaround and Paramount picked it up with Tisch and Wendy.

In writing the scripts, I tried to stay close to the book, and that was a mistake.

When Paramount got involved the writing was turned over to Eric Roth. Wendy and Paramount kept me in the loop through the various versions that followed. We kept them factually and historically on the track, like assuring them that Bubba, who is a black soldier in the movie, no way would have been playing football for Bear Bryant at Alabama in those days, as they had him in at least in one version.

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Q: When did you first see the movie?

A: I couldn’t make the Hollywood premiere because I had a terrific assignment, researching and writing about the top 10 vacation resorts in the Southeast for a travel magazine, so an old fly fisherman friend of mine, Milton Brown, got Paramount to throw a party for me in Mobile, taking over the Carmike Theater for one night in early July. I invited a whole lot of people to see it.

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Q: What was your reaction to the movie?

A: I felt disembodied for the first 10 minutes seeing my work in two dimensions and hearing my words on the lips of actors. Then I just started to watch it like everyone else. It’s a good movie. At one time I heard some sobbing in the audience but I was so busy watching the show I didn’t look around to see who it was. You understand, this was not a hostile audience.

The stars of the movies had signed a framed one-sheet poster of the movie and wrote notes to me and it was presented to me that night. I told the audience I’d have to build a new house just to accommodate the one-sheet.

Right after that someone offered me $2,000 for each signed first edition of “Gump” I had. I told him I only had 10 copies and eight were going to Bob Zemeckis, the director, and the cast. I kept two for my kids.

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Q: The word gump is an old slang term for a stupid or foolish person. Is that how Forrest got his name?

A: That’s news to me. Many years ago I shopped at the Gumps store in San Francisco and for years they kept sending me their catalogues. The name sort of stuck in my head.

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Q: Most of your writings have been serious, about Vietnam or Southern corruption. Then there’s “Forrest.”

A: Well, “Forrest” was humorous, but serious in its own way. My first book was serious but had humor. Another book, “Only,” was a look at the world through the eyes of an old sheep dog. That was fairly humorous.

I like being funny. I was editor of the humor magazine at the university.

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Q: What university was that?

A: Alabama, of course. There’s only one university in Alabama when you say the university. In my lizard brain days, that’s what I wanted to be, an editor, but I got my mind changed because nobody hired me after college. I applied to Newsweek and Esquire and they told me I needed experience. Eventually I went to work as a writer for the Washington Star.

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Q: The book “Gumpisms” is an obvious spinoff from the movie. How did that come about?

A: I was off Florida fly-fishing for a couple of weeks. When I got back my agent said Paramount had an idea about a book of Gump sayings and they were giving me four weeks to do it and I had already used up two.

“How can I write that in two weeks?” I said.

“If you want the money, you will,” was what my agent said.

I had a date in New York to do the audiobook reading of “Forrest,” so I took a train and got a compartment, had meals brought in, and by the time I got to New York half of “Gumpisms” was done. Then on the train back I wrote the rest. Remember, I grew up with great-aunts and great-grandmothers in the South sitting on a porch in the summertime telling stories.

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Q: Now you’re ready to do a sequel to “Gump.”

A: I was reticent to do it. I told Pocket Books I had to see the movie and think about it. Then, finally, I came up with an idea for the sequel and with the book ending in the ‘80s I was left with only (a few) years of current history. So I settled on Big Forrest and Little Forrest. The boy is going to grow up ashamed of his stupid daddy. A generational thing.

I’ve bought only two new things since the movie came out. One is a fancy tape recorder. Worse thing in the world for a writer is to think about something great and then not remember it. The other thing I bought was a stereo set after Paramount sent me a copy of the soundtrack.

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Q: Did you find the movie true to the book?

A: I think so, in this way: It’s true to the character of Forrest. Movies can change characters, but Bob Zemeckis kept the dignity of Forrest. I wasn’t delivering any messages other than showing that a man doesn’t have to be rich or smart to be dignified.

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Q: Did you know a Forrest Gump?

A: No, but my daddy sort of did. He died this year at age 87 and was a lawyer in Mobile. A few years ago, I was living in New York and would come down in the winter to warm up. On Sundays we would have lunch. At one of these lunches he reminisced about this fellow he once knew, an older man who was slow-witted but whose mother had taught him to play the piano. His story struck something inside me and then I saw a “60 Minutes” show about idiot savants. After Daddy left I started making notes and by midnight I had the first chapter of “Forrest Gump.”

I called my agent and told him to get me a deal. I wrote the first draft in six weeks, working without a net, no notes or outline. The book literally wrote itself. I have a cousin who is a big psychiatrist in Alabama and I asked him if someone with an IQ of 65 or 70 could do the things I had Forrest doing and he said he could do it all physically. He said the reader would have to suspend reality and allow the character to accomplish what I wanted.

ABC did a show here and they had some retarded people see the movie about Gump. They all seemed to love it. And that’s important that they knew I wasn’t making fun of them.

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Q: How about the other characters? Was there a Lt. Dan, a Bubba, a Jenny?

A: As a writer, I make up lies. Writing is all about invention. Truman Capote once said to me, “Make it up, it’s all a bunch of crap.” This, you understand, is foreign to what a journalist does.

Lt. Dan is probably me since I was an officer in Vietnam. If there’s any autobiographical stuff in this it would be Lt. Dan. He and Jenny were philosophic characters. They became bitter; I didn’t. You know, Hollywood invented the embittered Vietnam character. None of my Vietnam buddies are that way.

As for Bubba--listen, everybody knows a Bubba.

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Q: Was “Gump” your first experience with a Hollywood movie?

A: An HBO movie was a few years ago, based on my book “As Summers Die.” It was one of Bette Davis’ last movies. I worked some on the script. I went out to Hollywood and people there were fighting and growling.

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Q: It wasn’t a satisfying experience?

A: A movie is fun to work with to a point. But a time comes when you have to say no to what they are doing with your work, but writers don’t always have a chance to do that. It’s part of the game. Out there they talk about making a $50 movie which in their parlance means $50 million. They act nice to you but won’t give up control.

My friend, the late writer Jim (James) Jones, was like God to me. When Jim first saw the screen version of his “The Thin Red Line,” he was in Paris and went by himself. He started to hoot and holler at what had been done to his story, so loud they had to call for the gendarmes to throw old Jim out.

I have heard all of the stories about making movies in Hollywood and they all sunk in. Sunk in to my old lizard brain.