Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546034
39 F A L L Q 3 I S S U E B O O K R E V I E W screening. "The audience laughed when we expected them to, but for the most part, you could hear a pin drop," Starkey writes. "No one got up to go to the bathroom during the screening." (Perhaps the ultimate measure of a movie's success.) Yet despite this reaction — and despite the filmmakers having seemingly persuaded Paramount to skip the post-screening audience ques- tionnaire — studio head Sherry Lansing had requested the presence of the National Research Group. "Please keep your seats and fill out the questionnaire before you leave the theater," Lansing told the crowd as part of a very public disagreement (or debate) with Starkey. The impasse was broken when Starkey proposed that the cards be completed, but that their results would be read by the filmmakers first. On the way out, Lansing approached Starkey: "One day you will learn that you do not work for Robert Zemeckis. You work for me and Paramount Pictures!" "After everything I had been through on the film, I should not have been sur- prised it had come to this," Starkey writes. "Throughout the making of the movie, I had come to represent all the studio's fears and all the budget overages. I was held re- sponsible for all the problems. How did that happen? Stupid is as stupid does, I guess." In the jaunty, readable, anecdote-packed pages that follow, Starkey details all of those challenges and more — proof that even movies that seem likely to achieve immortality are seldom perceived as such at the time. In fact, the book reveals, Roth's screenplay began its life at Warner Bros., entered turnaround at Columbia Pictures, and finally landed at Paramount, where Lansing and her colleagues John Goldwyn and Michelle Manning "didn't know what to make of it," as Starkey writes. He continues: "It was not a sure bet at the box office by any means, even with Zemeckis and Hanks attached. The studio heads found it difficult to say no but were hesitant to say yes." On the one hand, some of the studio's questions were legitimate, especially in an era when visual effects, incorporated to the degree they would be in this film, were not the norm. "How does a feather fall from the sky and land at Forrest's feet?" Starkey writes. "How do we shoot the scenes with Lieutenant Dan — Forrest's commander P H OT O : P H OT O F E S T APPROACH THE BENCH: Hanks with director Zemeckis on the set. Steve Starkey.