Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker

by Stephen Galloway

  Lansing was haunted by many of these things. She had been shattered by Kennedy’s death, and indeed had stayed home for days trying to process the assassination. She had seen racism up close in Chicago, some of it directed toward herself as a Jew, some of it toward the black friends she had made at the Lab School. And she had lost friends to AIDS in an industry more afflicted by the disease than any other. “That was the epidemic of our time,” she said. “It gave this film a contemporary quality that made its historical parts undeniably relevant.”

  Forrest had been developed by Warners, but the studio had lost faith in the material after being unable to get it off the ground, and felt it bore too much of a resemblance to 1988’s Rain Man. Eager to get hold of a Paramount action screenplay, Executive Action, Warners made a rare deal: it offered $400,000 and agreed to trade the two scripts.

  One of Lansing’s top priorities became finding a director to join the movie’s producer (Wendy Finerman) and its star (Tom Hanks), both already in place when she started her job. Barry Sonnenfeld seemed perfect to direct. A former cinematographer, he had had a big hit as a director with Paramount’s The Addams Family. He loved the script, but there was a snag: he wanted to direct the Addams sequel, and the movies were on a scheduling collision course. When The Addams Family’s producer, Scott Rudin, pressed him to shoot that picture first, “he had to make a Sophie’s choice,” said Lansing. “He didn’t want to turn over those characters to someone else, and his fee for the sequel was three times what he would have been paid for Forrest.”

  Sonnenfeld reluctantly stepped aside, and Lansing looked for a replacement.

  “The script went around to any number of directors,” said Hanks. “Some weighed in and said, ‘Here’s what I would do,’ or ‘If I’m going to get involved, this has to be the nature of it.’ But all of that interest never graduated to anybody saying, ‘I’m doing this. I want to make this movie.’ ”

  Then Finerman, who had bought the rights to the story when nobody else thought it could work, took it to her friend Penny Marshall, an actress turned director who had worked with Hanks on 1992’s A League of Their Own. Marshall said she was interested.

  Privately, several studio executives had doubts. They warned Lansing that Marshall was too disorganized for a picture of this scale and had no experience with special effects, which would have to be handled with extraordinary care, in ways that had never been done before. In any case, Marshall herself seemed unsure. While she dawdled, Robert Zemeckis pounced.

  After a slow start as a writer-director, both helped and hurt by being one of the two writers on a rare Spielberg failure, 1979’s 1941, Zemeckis’s career had moved into high gear with a series of mighty hits, including 1985’s Back to the Future and 1988’s semi-animated Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

  “I remember reading the script on an airplane,” he said. “It’s so rare that I read a screenplay and just keep turning the pages, wanting to find out how it’s going to resolve. I saw that there were flaws: Forrest would imagine these little characters—Curious George would come alive from his books—and there were cartoon creatures, like angels popping up on his shoulder. There was an element of animation, and I said, ‘All this has got to go.’ The screenplay needed work, but the bones of a really magnificent movie were there.”

  Lansing had come close to working with Zemeckis on Fox’s Romancing the Stone and was eager to sign him now.

  “He was exceptional,” she said, “because he could handle the technical aspects at a level beyond almost anyone else and was also masterful with the actors. He was someone who always completely believed in what he was doing and wanted to push himself into untested territory.”

  It was still unclear whether Sonnenfeld had fully relinquished the film, and Marshall had never given a firm yes or no. Now Lansing pushed Sonnenfeld to commit to Addams while nudging Ovitz to ease his client Marshall aside, and then arranged for Zemeckis to meet Hanks in a Century City hotel.

  “I had just done [1993’s] Philadelphia, and I weighed about 115 pounds,” said the actor. “I was a guy coming in who had just been through a pretty extreme physical and emotional movie experience. But two and a half hours went by in the blink of an eye because we were feeding off each other’s ideas. Bob begins a conversation as soon as you start working on a film, so that on the day when you’re shooting, and it’s 120 degrees and the trucks are all rented and there’s helicopters in the sky and you’re in Monument Valley and you only have eight hours, you cannot be confused as to why you are there.”

  At the end of their meeting, Zemeckis called his agent, CAA’s Jack Rapke, and put him on speakerphone. “He said, ‘Jack, I’m here with Tom Hanks, and we’re going to do this,’ ” recalled Hanks. “What that means is, you are now officially making the film.”

  With Zemeckis and Hanks committed, Lansing gave the green light.

  Gary Sinise was chosen to play Forrest’s war colleague, Lieutenant Dan Taylor; Sally Field was cast as his mother (despite being only ten years older than Hanks); and Mykelti Williamson was hired as the shrimp-loving Private Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue. That left only the all-important role of Jenny Curran, the woman Forrest loves at a distance, who provides the emotional through-line for the film.

  When Jodie Foster turned down the role, Lansing agreed to screen-test a very pregnant Robin Wright, who had come to fame with 1987’s The Princess Bride but had never become a full-fledged star in her own right. Zemeckis shot her entirely from the waist up so that her stomach would not show, and she won the part.

  After working on the screenplay with Roth and assembling his cast, the director set up shop in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he expected to start shooting within weeks. Then everything came close to collapse.

  “The budget had come in at $40 million,” said Lansing, “and that was the amount we expected to pay. This was before the Viacom takeover, and I was careful to have Stanley and Marty Davis sign off on it because that was a high number at the time and we had no financial partner. But the costs started multiplying. Bob’s producer, Steve Starkey, broke it down and said it was going to come in at $50 million.”

  Her hesitation turned to genuine concern when the special-effects house Industrial Light & Magic told her that whatever money had been allocated for effects—critical to this story, where Hanks would materialize in real-life footage of Kennedy and John Lennon—was only half what was needed, if that. It was the dawn of computerized effects, and Lansing was expecting a movie that would use them with more originality and realism than ever before. But it was impossible to accurately gauge what they would cost.

  “I’d gotten board approval based on the $40 million budget, and then this different number came in,” she recalled. “I said, ‘I can’t go back. It’s too much.’ ”

  She was still new at Paramount, without a track record, and she faced a dilemma: should she support a director who was known for spending liberally, or place a lid on the budget, alienating him but satisfying her bosses?

  Goldwyn had given her a warning. He had been driving across the lot in a golf cart with producer Frank Marshall, just after Marshall had worked with Zemeckis on Roger Rabbit. “He said, ‘Let me tell you something: it’s going to cost way more than you want, but you’re going to get a great movie,’ ” Goldwyn recalled. “I said, ‘What do you mean by way more?’ He goes, ‘I’m just telling you, open the checkbook. But it will be worth it.’ ”

  Lansing clung to the belief she was still a producer at heart. But she also craved Jaffe’s approval and knew he was seething over Gump’s escalating expenses; what she did not know was that his irritation was fueled by the pressure from the secret Viacom talks. She decided the budget must come down.

  “I wanted to scream, ‘I’m not a suit! I’m a producer!’ ” she said. “But I couldn’t.”

  With Zemeckis already in South Carolina, where preproduction on the movie was under way, she called his agent, Rapke, to tell him the budget would have to be slashed by as
much as $10 million.

  Rapke was sitting calmly in his Century City office, enjoying the week after putting the final touches to his client’s Gump deal, when his assistant told him Lansing was on the phone.

  “It was a pretty nice day, and then there’s all these dark clouds,” he said. “No one can deliver bad news better than Sherry. The call went, ‘Hi, honey. How are you? Everything’s going to be great, but you know, the budget is too high and we’re going to have to make some cuts. And if we can’t get them resolved, we’re not going to make the movie.’ ”

  The agent tried to process what she was saying. A whole production was gearing up to shoot across the country, and it was too late to pull the plug without paying millions of dollars in prior commitments. And yet the studio was telling him it might all be over.

  “But you’re three weeks away from photography,” he said.

  “I know,” Lansing replied. “But that’s what we’ve got to do.’ ”

  The dark clouds were looming closer. Rapke considered calling Zemeckis’s lawyer and getting him to intervene; then he thought of hashing it out with his CAA colleagues before taking any drastic measures. Only after weighing all that did he decide to call Zemeckis directly at the production office.

  “I said, ‘I’ve got to get ahold of Bob, it’s urgent,’ ” he recalled. “He gets on the phone, and I report the conversation, and he’s devastated. He said, ‘What do I have to do for people to believe in me?’ and ‘Why am I even in the business?’ He was really rocked. I’m sure this wasn’t the only movie they did this on. It was, ‘Get the filmmakers invested. Get them really creatively and emotionally invested. Get them hooked. And then, at the proper time, renegotiate the deal.’ ”

  He was experienced enough to know there must be pressure coming from a higher level, and so he did not entirely blame Lansing. “This wasn’t a decision made unilaterally by Sherry—there’s an institution there,” he said. “But I honestly thought it was their standard operating procedure.”

  In South Carolina, the more Zemeckis thought about it, the angrier he became.

  “We were forty-eight hours from turning on the camera,” he said. (Others remembered it being three weeks before the shoot.) “And we got these calls, saying: ‘Figure out a way to slash $5 million or $10 million out of the budget or we’re shutting the show down.’ Was I angry? Excuse me? About being told to take millions out of the movie before we started shooting? Absolutely. It’s horrible to do that. Looking back, I don’t know if I would have made the movie solely for the back end. I probably would have passed. But now I was so in love, I had no choice.”

  Rapke reminded him that he hadn’t entered the film business for money alone, though privately he was just as upset as his client. He knew Zemeckis well enough to know it would be a terrible mistake for him to pull out of a project for which he felt so much passion.

  “I said, ‘There’s only one reason to continue, and that’s because this can be great,’ ” he said. “ ‘You’ve always been about the material and never about the economics.’ ” Zemeckis reluctantly agreed, and continued to prepare the film.

  Meanwhile, Rapke searched for other solutions. He asked Lansing if he could take the movie away from Paramount and give it to another studio. She refused.

  “It was inconceivable to me,” she said. “This was one of my favorite scripts, and I was willing to take the wrath and the anger to keep it. That’s when the fighting started. I wasn’t going to give away a great script because they couldn’t make the movie for a reasonable price.”

  Rapke huddled with his CAA partners, looking for other options. He tried to find additional outside financing, but nobody bit. And as he battled over the money, the tension between the filmmakers and the studio grew thick enough to cut.

  “There was a donnybrook going on,” said Hanks. “There was blood in the water. Bob had fought those kinds of battles before on the Back to the Future films. For Bob, it’s a very long express train that needs to run [in one piece], and you just can’t go and say, ‘Well, take out that car and knock off that caboose.’ There was a substantial budget battle that went on, and true fisticuffs with the studio.”

  Time was running out. Three weeks had fast become two, and two weeks soon became one. After days of talks, both sides finally decided to compromise. CAA agreed that the director and star would each take 50 percent of their up-front fees—Hanks was getting $6 million and Zemeckis $5 million—in exchange for a larger share of the profits and an agreement that the studio would reimburse the money they had given up once the picture was in the black. At the same time, Lansing persuaded Jaffe to meet the talent halfway, slashing only $5 million from the budget instead of the full $10 million.

  “I went to Stanley to get his approval for an extra $5 million,” she said. “He wasn’t happy, but he agreed. I was concerned the budget was running out of control, but I never wanted to hurt the movie.”

  The revised deal would make Hanks and Zemeckis millions when Forrest became a blockbuster. But Lansing never regretted it: it was fair that the players should benefit in success, just as she and Redford had done on Indecent Proposal.

  “I’d deferred everything to make Indecent Proposal, and Redford deferred a lot, too,” she said. “If you’re making millions and you don’t defer, why should I think you believe in this movie? We all shared in success. That was a high-class problem.”

  She signed off on a final budget of just under $46 million—halfway between the $40 million she had planned to spend and the $50 million Zemeckis’s team wanted.

  Even then, the difficulties continued. With no money to film a sequence in which Forrest takes off on a marathon run across the country, requiring a multi-location shoot, Zemeckis called Hanks to discuss it.

  “I was alone,” said Hanks. “The family wasn’t with me there, so we were just making a little food. I said, ‘How are you doing, Bob?’ He said, ‘Well, not very good, Tom.’ He said, ‘Look, I cannot make a movie called Forrest Gump without the guy who’s playing Forrest Gump as my soul mate on the film. I will listen to everything you have to say. We will work in total, absolute concert, and when the film is done you can sit over my shoulder and I will show you every frame of footage.’ He was essentially saying, ‘We are going to make this film together or we’re not going to make this film at all.’ [Then] he said, ‘It’s come down to this. The run has been budgeted at $1.6 million. I think we should split that.’ I said, ‘OK.’ It was that simple, and my agent thought I was insane.”

  During the shoot, the two men and producer Starkey effectively ran a shadow operation alongside the main shoot, vanishing each weekend to various parts of the country with a tiny crew in order to film the bits and pieces that would be stitched together into a bigger sequence.

  “We shot on Sundays with a splinter unit,” said Zemeckis. “We got on a plane and flew to all these different states to shoot different sections of Tom running.”

  “We worked twenty-seven straight days in a row,” added Hanks. “We’d have a regular workweek, and then late Saturday or Sunday morning I would go get in a helicopter that flew me to the airport and would fly on a plane to either North Carolina or New Hampshire, then be back at work on Monday morning. It was brutal.”

  Zemeckis’s exasperation grew as he raced to complete his movie, and his relations with the studio went from frosty to icy. Concerned, Lansing sent Manning, her production executive, to keep an eye on the show, but Zemeckis could not stand the thought of seeing a studio representative, even one he deemed an ally. Shortly after her arrival in Beaufort, he tracked her down in a local restaurant and berated her as crew members watched through the window.

  “Bob finds me there and drags me out,” said Manning. “He’s screaming at me, ‘Don’t fuck with my movie!’ ”

  She begged to be allowed to go home. “But Sherry said, ‘You have to stay,’ ” Manning recalled, noting that even when she was allowed to head home, she had to go into quasi-hiding, te
rrified that Jaffe would find out she was no longer in South Carolina.

  Jaffe also clashed with Zemeckis when the director asked for a few hundred thousand dollars more to film the climax of the running sequence in Monument Valley.

  “Everybody at the studio was pissed off,” Zemeckis explained. “Stanley Jaffe said, ‘Shoot in Griffith Park. It doesn’t matter.’ He was screaming at me, saying, ‘You don’t realize how much stress you’ve put on us from New York,’ where corporate headquarters was. I said, ‘I think I do,’ and he said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

  In fact, the stress was enormous, as Jaffe was being buffeted between Redstone and Diller, uncertain of his future or the studio’s. Finally, he agreed to pay for the shoot, but “Tom and I had to put up an insurance bond ourselves,” said Zemeckis.

  “It was very, very tense,” said Goldwyn. “Zemeckis hated us. He hated everybody. But he really hated me and hated Sherry.”

  Even when the movie was edited and about to be screened for a test audience, Lansing and Zemeckis butted heads, this time almost comically.

  “Bob was adamant the audience shouldn’t fill out preview cards,” said Lansing. “And I was adamant that they should. When the lights came up and the research guys fanned out to distribute the cards, Bob raced down the aisle after them. And I raced down the aisle to stop him. We collided in the middle of the theater. I kept saying, ‘Keep the cards! Keep the cards!’ And Bob was yelling, ‘I’m not having cards!’ ”

  The situation was so absurd that the audience started laughing. Then one man rose to his feet.

  “He shouted: ‘I don’t know what your problem is,’ ” said Goldwyn. “ ‘I’ve just seen God and his name is Forrest Gump.’ ”

  —

  The film was a sensation when it opened on July 6, 1994. Gump-isms became part of the parlance of the day, and “Life is like a box of chocolates” entered the vernacular.