Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1546034
40 C I N E M O N T A G E B O O K R E V I E W in Vietnam — after he loses his legs? How does Forrest interact with all those past presidents?" Starkey consulted with Ken Ralston, a "visual-effects wizard" and long- time Zemeckis collaborator, and sought a quote from Industrial Light & Magic. Others were tasked with scouring film archives to identify the footage into which Hanks- as-Forrest would be embedded. The town of Beaufort, South Carolina, was picked as the "production center," and adjacent open marshlands could even pass for Vietnam. Other locations would include Georgia, Los Angeles, and, of course, Washington, DC. Even with these issues accounted for and the principal casting completed (in- cluding Robin Wright, "like the angel young Forrest described," as Jenny and Gary Sinise as Lieutenant Dan), Starkey could seemingly only elicit marginal enthusiasm from the studio. He recounts a one-on-one meeting with the head of physical produc- tion, Bill Tadross, that was reassuring but strangely underwhelming: "I opened my copy of the budget, thinking there might be a few questions," Starkey writes. "There weren't any. Bill kept the meeting short. He said I was good to go." Production manager Charles Newirth thought Starkey might be omitting something when he recounted this meeting, but he wasn't. The film went ahead, but that easygo- ing meeting proved deceptive: Near the start date, Starkey received word that $10 million was being excised from the $55 million budget. "I thought that since the scale of the film was so large, our budget was a bargain," writes Starkey, who none- theless began "diving for dollars." Unable to make much of a dent and unwilling to lop off hugely important parts of the story (such as Forrest's run across the country, as was suggested), Starkey resorted to a bit of showbiz sleight of hand. "The only other thing I could think of was to falsify our savings," he writes. "I could cut the number of shooting days — and [ostensibly] save money — by scheduling more material than was possible to complete each day." It was an attempt to defer the issue until it became too late for the studio to do anything about it: Daily costs would routinely reflect "a small amount of bleeding" until they added up to the original (higher) budget and schedule. "Bob asked how long I could pull the rug over their eyes. 'Can you get us back to LA?'" Starkey recalls. "I couldn't be sure, but I thought I could. So that's what we did." (Even after deploying this tactic, the studio still demanded Zemeckis and Hanks accept a reduction in their upfront fees, to which director and star consented.) For fans of "Forrest Gump," this book will be an utter page-turner. For example, Starkey reveals that although the film could not have existed without then-au courant P H OT O : P H OT O F E S T BOX OF CHOCOLATES: Hanks in "Forrest Gump."