There Was A Forrest Gump Sequel That Got Scrapped Because Of 9/11 And It Was Basically The Saddest Movie Ever (Little Forrest Had AIDS)
I’m not the biggest Forrest Gump fan personally, but it’s undoubtedly one of the greatest movies of all time. I mean it’s literally #16 on IMDB’s Greatest Movies of All Time list. And I’m not sure if this was a well known fact that there was a sequel written, but screenwriter Eric Roth sat down for an interview and dished out all the details about the script.
As for why he scrapped it – he finished it on September 10th, 2001.
“Literally, I turned it in the day before 9/11,” Roth told Yahoo Entertainment in an interview (watch above). “And Tom and I and Bob got together on 9/11 to sort of commiserate about how life was in America and how tragic it was. And we looked at each other and said, ‘This movie has no meaning anymore, in that sense.’”
There were some funny moments in it, like Forrest being in the back of OJ’s Bronco and him ballroom dancing with Princess Diana.
“I had him in the back of O.J.’s Bronco,” Roth said of the infamous 1994 car chase involving O.J. Simpson. “He would look up occasionally, but they didn’t see him in the rearview mirror, and then he’d pop down.
There was also like, two of the saddest things ever:
1) Forrest’s son has AIDS.
“It was gonna start with his little boy having AIDS,” said Roth, who recently earned his fifth Oscar nomination for co-writing last year’s hit musical-drama remake A Star Is Born. “And people wouldn’t go to class with him in Florida. We had a funny sequence where they were [desegregation] busing in Florida at the same time, so people were angry about either the busing, or [their] kids having to go to school with the kid who had AIDS. So there was a big conflict.”
2) The woman who helps him find his calling in life gets blown up in the Oklahoma City bombing WHILE HE’S SITTING ON THE BENCH NEXT TO IT.
“He meets on a bus a Native American woman and finds his calling, as a bingo caller on a reservation. And the big event in that, which you could see was diminished only in tragedy, I guess, because it’s the same tragedy, but every day he’d go wait for his Native American partner. She taught nursery school at a government building in Oklahoma City. And he was sitting on the bench waiting for her to have lunch and all of a sudden the building behind him blows up. … So when 9/11 occurred … everything felt meaningless.”
Jesus Christ Eric! That’s some heavy shit. No wonder he was wary of releasing it after the biggest American tragedy ever. A child with an incurable disease and one of the other biggest terrorist attacks ever.
Kind of need them to bring this back. Not that I wanna see children have AIDS and women blow up. I meant for the OJ stuff.
(via Yahoo)