Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  It would be an understatement to say we were grateful at that moment. On the outside, we simply took three steps forward in the hospital room and sat, our hands clasped in each other’s hands, our bodies huddled close around Ella’s bedside. But on the inside, we were kneeling before an altar, wordless in our gratitude, cheering far harder than any ten-minute standing ovation, our arms upstretched to heaven in thanks.

  Within a few days, we were able to take Ella home. She was in a lot of pain at first. Anytime she coughed or sneezed, her chest expanded, and she cried. A slew of appointments followed. Gradually she healed. She started to grow faster. When she was ten, we took her to the cardiologist and he said to Ella, “Well, we have good news and bad news. The good news is you’re all healed. The bad news is I won’t get to see you anymore, and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you.”

  In 1992, Moira and I had three wonderful little children, and after Of Mice and Men came out, I said to Moira, “I’m really going to go for this film business thing. I’m going to put all my energy into it.” Moira agreed. She started to audition less and less and focus more on the kids. I parted peacefully with my New York agent and signed with Bryan Lourd at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), a global powerhouse of a company and one of the top agencies in Los Angeles, and I hired a publicist and personal managers at Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. I wanted to surround myself with a team of people who could get me to the right folks in the movie business.

  In fall 1992, my agents set up a general meeting for me to sit down with Steven Spielberg. As a director and producer, Steven was already legendary, having pulled off a string of blockbusters including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Steven asked me what I was doing, and I told him about Of Mice and Men, and he said, “Oh, I’d love to see it. Will you show it to me? Just bring it over to my house. I’ve got a screening room there. We’ll watch it together.”

  And I said, “Uh . . . uh . . . uh . . . of course.”

  We set up the screening. Just outside the theater in Steven’s house, he had a little lobby with a popcorn machine and a candy counter. His wife, Kate Capshaw, joined us, and we all grabbed some popcorn and sodas and sat down to watch Of Mice and Men together. It was surreal. Steven and Kate were both very gracious, and they loved the movie. Afterward, we stood outside their home, saying our goodbyes. Kate gave me a little hug, and Steven turned to me while I wracked my brain. Think, Gary, think. I was desperate to ask Steven one brilliant question. But all I could muster was, “Steven, how do you know where to put the camera?”

  He chuckled and said, “I just watch a lot of movies.”

  So simple. So profound. To become a great filmmaker, you must study the greats. You learn and steal from people you admire. Over the years I had endlessly studied the actors I admired: Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman, Marlon Brando, and many others. Steven took the last sip of his soda and added, “Oh, and, Gary, based on what I just saw in Of Mice and Men, you should definitely keep directing.”

  Directing.

  Hmmm.

  Driving away from Steven Spielberg’s house, I mulled over his advice and couldn’t help but notice my mixed feelings. I felt so thankful for my time with Steven and Kate, yet I thought back to those early days in high school when I was hanging out in the Glass Hall with my bandmates, trying so hard to fit in and look cool. As a grown-up, I knew that directing held many more possibilities for me. But I also knew my real love had always been acting. Acting had pulled me up out of that difficult time in high school. It had given me a direction and purpose, and acting had held my close attention for so many years. As I headed home to Moira and the kids, I held out hope that acting—not directing—would come through again, even though no acting opportunities were anywhere in view.

  Of course, I couldn’t have known that just over the horizon was an amazing opportunity, one that would open a new world for me—and not only in acting.

  Incidentally, after completing Of Mice and Men, I haven’t directed a movie since.

  CHAPTER 8

  Big Movie Years

  In 1993, my agents called with an offer to play the lead role in a big ABC miniseries titled The Stand, based on Stephen King’s epic postapocalyptic novel. I jumped at the chance. Stephen had originally wanted to turn his novel into a movie, but his book was so long, with so many characters, that in the end a four-day television miniseries (eight hours total) proved the best way forward. The miniseries format ruled the networks then.

  The project would involve a huge, one-hundred-day shoot—twenty-five days per two-hour episode (to put that in perspective, years later when we did CSI: NY, we shot each one-hour episode in eight days). Shooting for The Stand would be like shooting four back-to-back movies. Dozens of actors would be involved, many well-known, including Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Ed Harris, Kathy Bates, and even basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It felt great to get offered something this big right after Of Mice and Men.

  We shot the miniseries mostly in Utah. Stephen King was on the set from time to time, and even played a small part in the movie. I didn’t get to know him well, but anytime we talked, he was very encouraging. Laura San Giacomo played a role in the movie. I remembered uneasily how I’d cut her part completely out of Miles from Home, but it was good to see her again, and she held no hard feelings.

  Molly Ringwald was very sweet and we worked well together. Several of her well-known John Hughes movies were made in Chicago, so we often talked about my home city. In 1993, email was just beginning to become popular, and Molly introduced me to it. Every day, Molly emailed her father, who was blind, and his computer would read back her words to him. This fascinated me.

  Rob Lowe and I share a birthdate—March 17, St. Patrick’s Day—so during the shoot we celebrated our birthdays together at a restaurant in Salt Lake City. Rob is hilarious. He did many dead-ringer impersonations, including a perfect nervous-looking Christopher Walken. Rob had worked with Chris onstage, and he told me how Chris would constantly look out at the audience while he delivered his lines, instead of looking at the other actors. When Rob asked him why he did that, Chris replied (and here Rob delivered his best impersonation complete with head bobs), “Well, they know I’m here. And I know they’re there. I think it would be rude to ignore them.” It was hysterical.

  The Stand cost more than $28 million to produce, and it was well promoted, received good reviews, and ended up winning a few Emmy Awards. I was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award. We finished shooting in June, and I returned to California, where another call came, this one for an audition in a Paramount picture to play the part of a wounded Vietnam veteran. The movie’s working title was simply the name of the main character: Forrest Gump.

  From the start, I wanted this role. Any project that dealt with the Vietnam War interested me, due to the work I’d done in the 1980s with Vietnam vets, in addition to my close connection with the Vietnam vets in my family. The innovative director Robert Zemeckis, who’d had a string of hits, including the Back to the Future movies, Romancing the Stone, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, would helm the film. The project, based on a 1986 novel by Vietnam veteran Winston Groom, was already set to star Tom Hanks, and the screenplay was adapted by Eric Roth, another wonderful writer. I knew it stood a chance of being a terrific project all around.

  But I didn’t get the role at first. I auditioned in a conference room at Paramount Studios. Wendy Finerman was producing the movie, along with Steve Tisch, Steve Starkey, and Charles Newirth. Wendy had secured the rights, and it had taken her a long, nine-year-journey to make the film a reality. Wendy was present at my audition, and she’ll tell you today that she knew immediately I was the right actor to play Lieutenant Dan Taylor. But the wheels of Hollywood can turn slowly, and after I auditioned it took some time before I heard anything.

  In the meantime, I kept auditioning for other movies. That’s what
you need to do in Hollywood—always keep going. You never know what will or won’t materialize. I auditioned for Little Buddha with Keanu Reeves and for the Western epic Wyatt Earp with Kevin Costner. Both movies were big, expensive projects. Keanu was coming off a string of hot hits, including the Bill & Ted franchise and the action thriller Point Break. Kevin had exploded in popularity with Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves, Bull Durham, Robin Hood, JFK, and The Bodyguard. I kept phoning my agents, asking if anything was happening with Forrest Gump, but they’d say things like, “Well, they’re considering a lot of different things right now. You’re still on the list, but it isn’t finalized yet.”

  I would have been happy to land the roles in either Little Buddha or Wyatt Earp, and I kept my fingers crossed, hoping something would happen. Meanwhile, Moira and I both auditioned for Tall Tale, a Disney movie starring Patrick Swayze. They offered Moira and me the roles of the mother and father, and the idea of acting with Moira in a movie was really appealing. Simultaneously, I learned I hadn’t gotten the part in Little Buddha. They’d liked my screen test a lot, but the part ended up going to singer Chris Isaak, who was just starting to break into the movies. I also learned I’d been passed over for Wyatt Earp, although I was told I’d been in the final mix.

  I was all set to say yes to Tall Tale when the phone rang. I’d landed the role of Lieutenant Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump. It would mean I’d need to turn down the Disney movie. Did I still want Forrest Gump?

  It’s a funny thing about movies—how do you ever know what’s going to be a hit? Disney has been known to produce some wildly popular movies, and Tall Tale featured Patrick Swayze, who’d done very well. Would working with Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump prove a better choice? Moira and I talked it over. We decided I needed to place my bets with Forrest Gump—plus, I really wanted to play the role of the Vietnam veteran—while she took the role of the mother in Tall Tale. So Moira took the kids to Colorado to shoot the Disney movie, while I flew to Beaufort, South Carolina, to work on Forrest Gump.

  Life is full of ironies. If I had landed the roles in Little Buddha or Wyatt Earp—roles I had desperately hoped for at the time—then I wouldn’t have been able to do Forrest Gump. Little Buddha turned out to be a box-office disappointment. Wyatt Earp received mixed reviews and floundered in the wake of the similarly themed movie Tombstone, released six months earlier. Tall Tale was fun, but didn’t earn back its budget (although Moira was great in her role) and has largely been forgotten today.

  And then there was Forrest Gump.

  Beaufort, South Carolina, is near Parris Island, where the East Coast Marine Corps boot camp is located. It’s hot, humid country known for its bayous, shrimping industry, and antebellum architecture. I arrived in early September 1993, to prepare to begin shooting. Before leaving Los Angeles, I was fitted for a long-haired wig for Lieutenant Dan’s “lost and angry” phase, and I needed to come to the set with scruffy facial hair. In Beaufort, we did all the makeup tests and wardrobe fittings first, getting our looks down for each section of the film. To prepare for shrimping scenes, we took a day trip out to sea on a shrimp boat to watch the deckhands drag their nets for shrimp. We did some work with a dialect coach to get the accents right and also went to Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island to do a little weapons training for the Vietnam scenes.

  I wanted to give my all to the character of the wounded Vietnam veteran, so I began reading the 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography Fortunate Son by Lewis Puller Jr., a United States Marine Corps officer who had been severely injured when he stepped on a booby trap bomb. Both his legs were vaporized, and he lost his left hand and nearly all of the fingers on his right. Puller was the son of the most decorated marine officer in the history of the Corps, Lieutenant General Lewis “Chesty” Puller. Like Lieutenant Dan, Lewis Puller returned from Vietnam and struggled with many demons, including alcohol abuse, the difficulties of living with his injury, and the isolation he felt as a veteran of an unpopular war. He worked hard to overcome his challenges, became a lawyer for the VA, and even ran for Congress at one point. But just a few months before Forrest Gump opened, Lewis lost his battle with those demons, taking his own life on May 11, 1994. I was very sad to hear of his passing. Reading his remarkable book and knowing his story helped motivate me. They became important parts of my preparation for the character.

  Prior to shooting, Bob Zemeckis, Eric Roth, and the cast had two or three sessions where we read through the script. The actors Bob had assembled were terrific: Sally Field as Mama Gump, Robin Wright as Jenny, and Mykelti Williamson as Bubba. During these sessions, we would read the script and Bob and Eric would fine-tune as we went along. At one point we got to the section in the script where Forrest says he’s going to start a shrimping business. In this version of the script we were reading, Bubba had only mentioned his fascination with shrimp one time. So Bob stopped the reading and asked Eric, “Why does Forrest decide to go shrimping? Bubba’s barely said anything about it.” The two of them looked at each other, and that’s when they decided that all Bubba should ever talk about is shrimp. So whenever you see Bubba in the movie, what is he talking about? Shrimp! And of course, Forrest Gump, in honor of his friend Bubba and his love for shrimp, carries out Bubba’s dream of starting a shrimping business.

  Later, just before we began shooting, Bob and I were at a restaurant, and it popped into my head that during the scene where Forrest Gump pushes Lieutenant Dan across a busy New York City street and they almost get run down by a yellow cab, Lieutenant Dan should stop and bang on the hood of the car and shout, “Hey, are you blind?! I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” This was a funny homage to Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1970. Bob loved the idea, and even took it a step further by underscoring the scene with Everybody’s Talkin’, the iconic song from the movie.

  The first scene we shot was the scene were Forrest comes piloting into the harbor in his shrimp boat. When he sees Lieutenant Dan waiting for him on the pier, Forrest gets so excited he jumps off the boat and swims for his former platoon leader. The shrimp boat runs in circles by itself and eventually crashes into the dock. All went well during that day’s shoot, and we rounded out the week by shooting some of the other long-hair scenes, the rest of the shrimping scenes, and Lieutenant Dan screaming at the heavens during the hurricane. For that I was stuck up in the rigging of the shrimp boat all night. To create the hurricane, the boat was docked with crew members pulling it up and down with ropes on either side to make it rock back and forth. Heavy water cannons were positioned in different areas around the boat that shot water up at me while giant Ritter Max fans were turned up full blast to create wind. On top of that, they had a DC-9 jet engine set up to blow like crazy while I hung on for dear life and screamed, “You call this a storm?! Blow, you son of a b**h! Blow! You’ll never sink this boat!” Luckily, I didn’t have to shoot the next day. After a night of that, my voice was shot.

  I then shaved and took a short break from shooting in order to head into the woods for four days with other actors in Lieutenant Dan’s platoon to train with a technical advisor named Dale Dye, a decorated Vietnam veteran. Captain Dye had served in the United States Marine Corps, and he’d trained the actors for Platoon, as well as serving as technical advisor for many other military-themed films over the years. He put us through our paces. I’d pictured Lieutenant Dan much like my brother-in-law Mac Harris. Both Mac and Lieutenant Dan focused tightly on their military careers, and both wanted to be the best platoon leaders they could be. While Mac had gone to West Point, I wanted Lieutenant Dan to have a slight southern accent, so I decided that he had gone to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI).

  For four days we lived in the woods. At night, we needed to maintain silence. It grew pitch black, and we couldn’t have lights. We slept in the dirt and maintained a constant guard. Days were hot and muggy. Snakes slithered by us. Rats scuttled past. Mosquitoes were relentless. We couldn’t bathe. It rained on us, we
stayed wet, we stunk. All this was designed to give us a taste of how it felt to be in a platoon in the jungle. It also gave me the opportunity to lead my men. I learned how to navigate, read maps, plan missions, and take care of my platoon.

  On the last day in the woods, Captain Dye sent us on a mission. I needed to quietly lead my platoon several kilometers to another part of the forest where we were ordered to attack a base they’d set up. The maps tell you where there’s a hill or water or trail. We started the mission, and everything progressed fine. Then we came out of a tree line into an open area, and everything suddenly erupted. Boom! Boom! Boom! We all hit the dirt. I went down right on top of an anthill. Captain Dye and his crew from Warriors, Inc. had planted a bunch of charges in secret to simulate mortar explosions and artillery. We carried real rifles, loaded with blanks, and my platoon started firing back. It was my job to get them under control and move them out of the open into the cover of the forest. We did that, but as a result my navigation plan got out of whack. I was lost in the woods, which was exactly what Captain Dye wanted, since real missions seldom go exactly as planned. We ended up traversing a waist-deep creek, and eventually we made it to the area we were supposed to attack. There, Captain Dye and his crew were waiting in ambush for us, poised as the enemy. We got the snot knocked out of us. On our way back to base camp, Dale and I walked together, and he gave me an evaluation. Even though some things had gone wrong, he gave me a pretty good grade. And years later, he gave me a good pat on the back, saying I could have made a fine soldier. The shower I took my first night out of the woods was one of the best showers I ever had.

  The next morning we were back on the set, filming the Vietnam sequences. We shot all the marching scenes, all the rain scenes, and then the scene on the base where Forrest Gump and his good friend Bubba first meet Lieutenant Dan. Forrest and Bubba are “replacements”—soldiers sent into an established unit to take the place of others who’ve been wounded or killed. Lieutenant Dan meets Bubba and Forrest and gives them a few terse lessons on how to behave in the field. The meeting is the first image viewers see of Lieutenant Dan. He’s on his way to the outhouse, toilet paper in hand, wearing only boxer shorts and flip-flops. The shot was made strategically, because we wanted viewers first to see Lieutenant Dan standing on two good legs. Those legs would soon be gone.