Forrest Gump confronts the audience with the past 30 years of their history. To get the reader efficiently
involved into that time Winston Groom used a simple and yet brilliant method: He had his title character
participate in striking historical events that almost everyone of the readers automatically assigns to that era.
Forrest does not only fight in the Vietnam War and go to outer space, he also directly interacts with
presidents of the United States, saves Mao Tse Tung's life and meets other historical figures.
This method of involving the reader produced a problem for the creators of the movie: If they wanted to get
the audience involved in the same way - and they surely wanted to do that - they had to find means of
having Forrest Gump interact with quite a few dead persons.
The only possible option the filmmakers had was common: Find someone to play the part of J.F.K., Nixon and
the others. It seemed to be impossible to work with Groom's element any other way. But the new era of
computer-generated effects and high-speed digital data processing has definitely proven one thing: Not
everything is possible, but it can be made possible on the screen.
And so, apparently someone had the idea of integrating Tom Hanks' picture into authentic footage from the
real presidents of the United States. The results of this technique were astonishing and they may have been
the reason why many other stars of American history have additionally been cut together with Tom Hanks
(e.g. John Lennon). It seems that the producers got so fond of having Forrest Gump together with famous
people of American history that they came to bet on one simple strategy: the more - the better.
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