He Carries the Torch, by ‘Gump’

Some runners were inspired by Jim Thorpe, by Jesse Owens, by Roger Bannister, by Jim Ryun, by Joan Benoit Samuelson, by Carl Lewis.

A runner in Saturday’s torch-relay through Los Angeles, which will begin the Olympic flame’s cross-country route to Atlanta for July 19th’s opening ceremonies, Robert Zemeckis’ inspiration was Forrest Gump. All that running Tom Hanks did in the 1995 Oscar-winning film “Forrest Gump” really motivated Zemeckis, who was quite familiar with the movie.

He directed it.

“The more Forrest ran, the more I found myself responding to the way running could become such a spiritual thing,” said Zemeckis, who now runs a minimum of four miles a day.

“We were filming in South Carolina and I had to do my running at 4 o’clock in the morning, because I’d need to be on the set when the sun came up. A trainer came with me, but she rode on a bike behind me while I ran. We could hear alligators crawling away, I’ve got mosquito repellent all over me--there’s 100% humidity--but of course I decide at this point in my life to take up running.”

Without magic legs, it wasn’t easy.

No athlete in school, Zemeckis was a self-described “movie nerd” in his native Chicago, where he was born in 1952; while at Fenger High and at Northern Illinois University, before he transferred to USC’s film school.

He originally shot with an 8-millimeter camera in high school, then later made an award-winning student film that was brought to the attention of directors Steven Spielberg and John Milius, who helped launch Zemeckis’ professional career.

Hit films that included “Romancing the Stone,” the “Back to the Future” trilogy and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” eventually led to the allegory of Gump, a backward, backwoods ‘Bama boy who becomes a football hero, war hero, crustacean king and world-class runner who jogs from coast-to-coast on “magic legs,” once crippled but now tireless.

In the novel, Gump is a 6-foot-6, 240-pound lummox who ends up an astronaut, a movie star and a candidate for the U.S. Senate.

For the movie, the slender Tom Hanks actually had to gain weight to play the part.

“Tom was inspirational,” Zemeckis said. “He had just completed the film ‘Philadelphia,’ in which he plays an AIDS victim. So, he had to tone and bulk up for the role of Forrest, and every day I would see him doing his serious training regimen.

“He also gave me a director’s worst nightmare one day. Do you remember the scene where Forrest has to run 99 yards or whatever, the length of the field, for a touchdown? Well, Tom did his own running in those football scenes. He is really fast. And those weren’t extras he ran through. Those were real linebackers and sprinters that we brought in, real athletes.

“Well, on the day we’re set to shoot the scene, Tom, for the first time on the whole movie, comes up to me and says, ‘Bob, I’m really sick, man. I got the flu so bad.’ And I would have loved to tell him to go home and get in bed, but we had to shoot it that day.

“So, Tom did all that running, sick as a dog.”

Like the show, a runner must go on. Zemeckis will find that out for himself Saturday, rain or shine, when he runs his leg of the Olympic relay, beginning from the corner of Bonnie Brae and Olympic at precisely 11:58 a.m. (No alligators or mosquitoes expected.)

His friend, film producer Frank Marshall, who produced “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.” and dozens of other pictures, had run in a torch-relay before the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and still has his souvenir torch at home. Through his connections with the U.S. Olympic Committee, Marshall paved the way for Zemeckis to follow in his footsteps.

“I just hope it isn’t uphill,” Zemeckis said.

Being inspired by Gump can take one down many roads. In the book, Gump never did carry an Olympic torch through the streets of Los Angeles, but he did carry a naked Raquel Welch down Rodeo Drive. That scene does not appear in Bob Zemeckis’ film.

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Olympic Torch Route

After it arrives in Los Angeles from Greece on April 27, runners will carry the Olympic torch through Koreatown, downtown and Chinatown, then west into Santa Monica and through the South Bay on its way to the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta.

Source: Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games