Vietnam veteran and world known American author Winston Groom, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Forrest Gump” seems to have no love lost for the Hollywood establishment. In the sequel to the book which is entitled “Gump & Co.” The first line is “don’t let those Hollywood people make a movie about your life because they will always screw it up.” The truth about the Academy-Award winning film is that things simply didn’t quite capture the real truth about Forrest, Jenny and Lieutenant Dan Taylor. Yes, Forrest and Jenny had a son and yes, Forrest and Dan Taylor did go into the shrimping business. The truth is though that in the book Forrest and Jenny never got married. Jenny came to realize that Forrest was in capable at that juncture of raising a son. Lieutenant Dan did get artificial legs after the war, but they weren’t made of titanium in a space ship like the movie leads you to believe. The truth is Dan is still a cantankerous, bitter old man which he is through most of the movie. Dan never got married and remains a bachelor throughout this book as well.
Instead of positive things always happening to Forrest what you ended up with was a lucky situation in which Forrest screwed up. One of the most important characters in the first book was a Mr. Trible, who helped Forrest learn the ropes of business. The movie itself makes no mention of Mr. Trible. It is serious omissions of characters that put doubt in Winston Groom’s eyes as to whether or not there will be a sequel. Hollywood producers have been trying for years to get Groom to come to terms with them, but until recently contacts and terms have broken down. If a sequel ever does come expect Forrest to be involved in the thick of the Jim Bakker, Iran-Contra and New Coke fiascoes. There is a very funny scene in the book where Forrest meets the actor Tom Hanks in a nightclub in New York City as Forrest has been working for Ivan Boesky, a man who was later convicted of one of the largest insider trading scandals in history. Tom Hanks would be talking to himself in the movie if a sequel does come to metabolize.
Paramount appears to be the company who would be in charge of this and as of summer 2007 Groom and studio heads were talking again. Another ex-factor of course would be securing the services of Tom Hanks, which is something that he has been rather tepid to commit to. The screenplay has actually been written for the sequel for years, but Groom probably doesn’t want to see his work mauled again by the Hollywood crowd, no matter how big the check. According to Dark Horizons producers Steve Tisch and Wendy Finerman have started to take a look at the script again in order to boost talk about an overall struggling movie industry. According to teen hollywood Gary Sinise has also been talked to of course about the Gump sequel. Groom being an avid military historian as reported in several biographical sources would probably want the proper respect given to his books which do deal with important historical events like Desert Storm. There is some veiled political commentary in this sequel, but again it is too tough to quite get a feel for what perspective the author is writing from if he does have an agenda.
Sources:
Franklin, Garth. “Gump Sequel Back in Action” Dark Horizons.
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news07/070307h.php
“Gump Sequel Planned” World Entertainment News Network.
http://www.teenhollywood.com/d/144170/1014/gump-sequel-planned.html
“Winston Groom Biography”
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4380/Groom-Winston.html
