Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  During the shooting of the Vietnam scenes, I invited on the set my brother-in-law Jack Treese, who’d been a combat medic in Vietnam. The costume designer had issued me a set of dog tags. But when Jack was in Vietnam, he’d made a set of rosary beads out of string and rope and hung his dog tags on it. Jack let me wear his actual dog tags and rosary in the movie. Jack wasn’t Catholic, but he told me that in Vietnam he wanted all the help he could get.

  We shot the battle scenes on Fripp Island in a forest near a golf course. The greensmen brought in all kinds of jungle foliage to make it look more like Vietnam. It was almost comical. On one side of a tree line, golfers were teeing off, and on the other side, we were staging a battle and blowing things up.

  When we shot the main battle sequence where all hell breaks loose, everyone was tense on set. The special effects team spent the whole day setting up charges and squibs (the little explosions you see when bullets hit the ground). The pressure’s really on an actor in this type of scene, because you need to nail it in one take. If you mess up, another entire day is required to get it all set up again.

  Everything was choreographed and rehearsed. At least eight cameras were set up and running. Bob Zemeckis called for action. The charges started to explode. We were supposed to wait for a cue, but with so many bombs going off we couldn’t hear our signal. Bubba went for it anyway and screamed, “Run, Forrest, run!” And Lieutenant Dan yelled at everybody to pull back. Explosions burst everywhere. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! We played along and kept going. But we were slightly off on our timing. Bob was ticked at us because we almost missed our cue. Fortunately, the scene worked anyway, so in the end Bob was happy.

  During the main battle scene, Lieutenant Dan is blown up and his legs are severely mangled. Several of his soldiers are killed. With his platoon under fire, Lieutenant Dan is on the radio trying to call in an air strike. Forrest runs in, trips over him, and sees the lieutenant is badly wounded. Forrest picks him up and carries him to safety out of the jungle. As Tom Hanks is running with me slung over his shoulder, a rocket-propelled grenade is fired toward us. It blows up the tree next to us, and we fall. Tom grabs me by the scruff of my fatigues and drags me the rest of the way out of the jungle while I fire a .45 revolver at the enemy. While I’m firing, the .45 jams, so we need to do another take. Captain Dye started giving me crap about it, saying it was my fault. I was hot and tired and beat up and not in the mood, so we got in each other’s faces. My brother-in-law Jack was filming with a little handheld camera, and he caught some of the hullabaloo on tape. Captain Dye and I were both just releasing tension, so however it looked we held no hard feelings between us.

  Several times we needed to reshoot the scene where Tom carries me out of the jungle. As Tom ran, my inner thigh bounced up and down, up and down, up and down, on top of his shoulder. We shot take after take, and when the day’s shooting was over, I started to stand up and suddenly collapsed. All that bouncing on Tom’s shoulder resulted in a football-sized bruise on my leg. I could barely walk. Fortunately, all the Vietnam scenes were finished, so I headed back to Los Angeles (where all the rest of my scenes were scheduled to be shot) and had three weeks off while others went to shoot in Savannah and elsewhere before my shooting resumed. This was good because up next were the scenes where Lieutenant Dan’s legs are gone.

  The special effects team had designed several ingenious ways of making the camera see me as if my legs were no longer there. In a hospital scene, my legs are covered in a blanket. Forrest comes in with an ice-cream cone for me, and I toss it in a bedpan. A medical guy comes in and says, “Time for your bath.” He pulls the sheet off where my legs should be, but my legs are gone. He then picks me up and sets me in a wheelchair. People often ask me if my legs were down inside the gurney—and they were. But when I’m lifted out of there, the rest of that scene was shot using an old technology known as blue screen. I wore stockings made out of blue screen material on my legs; then the special effects guys in postproduction removed my legs and painted in the background, frame by frame.

  For the wheelchair scenes, the special effects guys had created a wheelchair that I could sit in while bending my legs underneath me. I needed to be limber for those scenes. But I still had this huge welt on my thigh. I could hardly move my leg, much less bend it underneath me. For those three weeks in L.A., I went for physical therapy every day, trying to get my leg limber again. Fortunately, by the end of the three weeks, my leg was back in shape.

  I finished shooting my scenes earlier than some of the other actors. Then, right before principal photography ended in December 1993, I was called back to the set to reshoot one of my scenes. Lieutenant Dan’s ancestors are shown fighting and dying in every major war America has ever fought in between the Revolutionary War and World War II. I’m dressed up differently to play each “ancestor,” and the scene plays out like a montage, with the camera never cutting away and getting closer and closer to my face as the scene progresses. For the scene of World War II, I die on a little sandy beach (made to look something like Iwo Jima), and they’d discovered that when I’d fallen over during the initial shoot, the set had shaken underneath me, ruining the shot. On the very last day of shooting, actress Robin Wright was shooting her final sequences on the roof of an apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard in the Westwood area of Los Angeles. It’s the scene where Forrest’s love interest, Jenny, contemplates suicide, and they were shooting at night. They called me in about midnight to reshoot my sandy-beach death scene. They had built a little beach set on the apartment building’s rooftop. About two in the morning, we shot the final scene with my falling down on the sandy beach again. That was the last shot of Forrest Gump. We held a celebration, and all was a wrap.

  Paramount held a small screening right before the release for all the cast and insiders. There are a lot of scenes that don’t feature Lieutenant Dan, so I was able to sit there almost like an audience member, watching it in its entirety for the first time. At the end, the credits rolled, and we all had big smiles on our faces. We didn’t know exactly how it would play to audiences, but I think we all knew we’d put together an excellent movie. I told Bob and Tom how great it was, how fortunate I felt to be a part of it. The movie felt satisfying. Moving. Inspiring. It just sat right in our guts.

  Before the movie opened, we started the press junkets. That’s when you plant yourself in a hotel for a couple of days, and all the press from around the world flies in and stays at the hotel. Each actor stays put in an individual room, and you do interview after interview, saying similar things in each. It can get repetitive, but on June 17, 1994, something broke up the monotony. Bob Zemeckis, Tom Hanks, and I, along with some others, sat in a conference room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and watched on TV as O. J. Simpson’s white Bronco rolled through Los Angeles. Just before the movie came out, Paramount had put up billboards all over Los Angeles, all saying a single word—GUMP. It was a brilliant promotional gimmick, and got people all over town wondering, What’s a GUMP? I wondered if O. J. had driven by any of those billboards and asked himself that same question.

  Forrest Gump came out on July 6, 1994, and was an instant box-office smash hit. I couldn’t tell you exactly why the film worked to the degree it did, but it played to a lot of different emotions, covered a lot of territory, and had lovable characters at the center of it, anchored by Tom as Forrest and Sally Field as his mom.

  Right after the movie opened, Mykelti Williamson and I went overseas to help promote the movie in Munich, London, Vienna, and other cities. He and I had become good friends during the filming, and in our free time we’d played a lot of golf on Fripp Island. Alligators had crawled out to sun themselves on that course, but no alligators were on the courses in Europe. We headed up to Scotland from London one evening to play at the famed Turnberry course. The idea was we’d play three rounds at Turnberry, two the next day, and one the following morning before heading back that afternoon to continue more press engagements. It was a couple of hours
’ drive from London to Turnberry, and we had a driver, so Mykelti and I drank champagne in the back of the Rolls-Royce, and I eventually nodded off. Next thing I knew, Bubba was screaming at the driver, “Watch out! You’re going into the ditch!” The driver had nodded off too. I stayed awake for the rest of that drive. We played a couple great rounds in Scotland and finished up the press junket. Everywhere we went, people seemed to love the movie.

  About three weeks after the movie’s release, I was back in America and took my family up to a waterpark in Big Bear for vacation. As we splashed around in the pool, a bunch of older kids splashed near us. Suddenly one yelled, “Hey! Lieutenant Dan!” The kids had seen the movie and swarmed me, asking questions and wanting autographs. I wasn’t used to being recognized, but from then on, it seemed like anywhere I went—from grocery stores to restaurants to waiting in line at Starbucks—people called out, “Lieutenant Dan!” I started to sense that something big had transpired in my career. People didn’t know my real name yet, but I’d crossed a line from “actor” to “recognized actor.” That would require adjustment.

  One day I came out of our house in Pasadena to get the newspaper. A speed bump lay in front of our house with a sign that read “bump.” Somebody had painted the b into a g so it now read “gump.” That felt a little strange—the idea that strangers knew who I was and where I lived.

  One day a policeman knocked on our front door. “Mr. Sinise,” he said when I answered. “We’ve had some break-ins in the neighborhood lately. I’m just checking to see if you’ve had any problems.” When I said everything was fine, he pulled from behind his back a screenplay he’d written, held it out, and added, “Um, I was wondering if you could read this. I think it would make a great movie.” I tell ya, when the police are bringing scripts to your front door, it’s time to move. Moira and I soon found a house to rent in Malibu.

  When Forrest Gump crossed the $100 million mark, Paramount sent gifts to the cast and producers, an Apple computer each—a nod to the scene where Forrest invests in “some kind of fruit company.” When the movie crossed the $200 million mark, Paramount sent another gift. I’ve forgotten what it was now. When it crossed the $300 million mark, Bob Zemeckis called and said Steven Spielberg wanted to take Moira, me, Tom, and Tom’s wife, Rita Wilson, out to dinner to celebrate. I wasn’t typically palling around with high-powered Hollywood rollers, so it felt good to be included. A couple of days later, Paramount sent another gift—a giant replica of the park bench featured in the film. The base was made from concrete, and it must have weighed 450 pounds. Luckily, my front porch was strong enough to accommodate it.

  Forrest Gump garnered a long list of awards, including thirteen Academy Award nominations and six wins, including a win for Best Picture. I received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

  The film won three Golden Globes, three People’s Choice Awards, and three wins from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, including one for me for Best Supporting Actor. It received one win at the Screen Actors Guild Awards and three nominations, including another one for me.

  The film also received a Writers Guild of America Award, and two Saturn Awards. And that’s only scratching the surface. Today, the film is preserved by the Library of Congress in the United States National Film Registry for being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Any number of phrases and quotes from the movie have found their way into today’s cultural lexicon, from “Life’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get” to “Run, Forrest, run!”

  Personally, Forrest Gump proved to be more than just a big award winner. The next few years became an incredibly energizing and fruitful period in my career, thanks in big part to Forrest Gump—although not solely. In 1994, The Stand ended up as the highest-rated miniseries on TV. It came out two months before Forrest Gump came out, and then Forrest Gump was the top movie of the year—and I’d had prominent roles in both, so my agents were now calling me with more and more film possibilities. Significantly, the role of Lieutenant Dan introduced me to the Disabled American Veterans organization, and I began volunteering and doing public service announcements for them, along with volunteering for a few other military charities from time to time. Little did I know how Lieutenant Dan would resonate with our veteran community, but in the 1990s, my volunteer work was still scattered. Mostly, I focused on my acting career—and it was running strong.

  Right after Forrest Gump wrapped, Ron Howard was set to shoot a movie titled Apollo 13 about the historic 1970 explosion on the NASA spacecraft headed for the moon and the subsequent mission to get the astronauts safely home. I read the script and loved it. Tom Hanks was set to play Commander James Lovell, and I was called in to audition for whichever of the other three astronaut roles I wanted.

  The role that appealed to me most was of astronaut Ken Mattingly. Ken was initially supposed to be in the spacecraft, but a week before launch, one of the backup pilots contracted the measles from one of his kids. Ken hadn’t had the vaccination, so they didn’t want him in space with the possibility of contracting the disease, and he was replaced by astronaut Jack Swigert, ultimately played by Kevin Bacon. In real life, Ken became a big part of the rescue mission in the control room, trying to figure out how to get the guys back from space, and I liked that twist. Usually I’d need to get a callback from an audition, but Tom had vouched for me, and when Ron came to the premier of Forrest Gump, he met me in the lobby and said, “Really great job. I’m glad I cast you.” And just like that, I was set to be in Apollo 13.

  To prep for the movie, Ron, Tom, Kevin, Bill Paxton (who played astronaut Fred Haise), and I went to space camp in Huntsville, Alabama. We spent time with astronauts Jim Lovell and Dave Scott (commander of a later space mission to the moon) to absorb the story of the doomed flight. Then we went to NASA’s mission control center in Houston and flew on the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker training plane to simulate zero-gravity conditions. The plane flies up to forty-five thousand feet, then quickly drops for twenty-five seconds before leveling off and climbing again. For those twenty-five seconds, everything floats inside the aircraft.

  They call these climb-and-drop maneuvers “parabolas”—and we were set to do forty of them, one right after another. We all wore flight suits with two pockets on the chest. In each pocket was a little plastic barf bag. When the time came for the first parabola, the plane plunged, and we unstrapped ourselves from our seats. Sure enough, we all flew around inside the padded walls of the plane, gliding through the air like we were swimming in space. Ron Howard experienced these parabolas along with us. Everything was going well, but by the time we got to forty, Ron piped up and asked if we could do another ten. Unfortunately for me, at forty-two I needed my barf bag. I rode out the remaining eight parabolas with a green face.

  The extra ten parabolas weren’t all about fun and games. Ron was sincerely trying to determine if he could put cameras and a set inside the plane and shoot the weightless scenes in the zero-gravity conditions. Our ten extra maneuvers convinced him it could be done. NASA supported the project and approved the request. So for two weeks, the astronaut-actors shot all their weightless scenes up inside the plane in twenty-five-second intervals, incredibly difficult to do. All my scenes happened down on the ground with the final moments shot with NASA flight director Gene Kranz (played by Ed Harris) in Mission Control, which was re-created back at Universal Studios.

  Apollo 13 came out on June 30, 1995, and it was a big hit, garnering stellar reviews and eventually bringing in more than $350 million worldwide. It was nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two, along with a host of other awards. Kevin, Tom, Ed, Bill, Kathleen Quinlan (who played Jim Lovell’s wife), and I won a SAG together with the rest of the actors for Outstanding Performance by a Cast.

  When we finished shooting Apollo 13, it was an explosive time in my career, and I was asked to play the lead role in Truman for HBO. I didn’t know much about Harry Truman before t
he project, but the script was based on the Pulitzer-winning book by David McCullough, so I read that, then started poring over source material, reading more books, and watching documentary film footage. I spent hours in the archives of the Truman Library in Kansas City, studying his speeches.

  After Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in office toward the end of World War II, Harry Truman took over as president. He made the difficult decision to use the first atomic bomb, the only world leader ever to use nuclear weapons in war. Truman later desegregated the military, implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe after World War II, recognized Israel as a state in 1948, and created the Truman Doctrine—a major policy designed to counter the rise of communist Russia’s ideology and expansion (in many ways marking the start of the Cold War). He led the nation during the Korean War.

  Two big questions I had were how was I ever going to look like Harry Truman, and how could I age from early thirties to late sixties within the scope of a movie? I needed to create a believable impression of a historical figure, and plenty of pictures of Truman still exist. The producers hired Gordon Smith, a Canadian makeup artist, to design a full prosthetic, silicon-gel face for me—from scalp to chin—as well as hiring Benjamin Robin and Russell Cate to apply the hair and makeup. (Ben would go on to do several movies and TV shows for me in the coming years and became a dear friend.) For this production, special wigs were made, and I needed to shave my head because Truman had little on top. (Right after Truman, I shot a part in Albino Alligator, starring Matt Dillon and Faye Dunaway. If you look closely, you see my hair is barely coming in from when I shaved it last for Truman.) It took four hours each morning to get me into the prosthetic, hair, and makeup, and another hour each night to remove it all. We’d shoot for twelve to thirteen hours in between, six days a week, for thirty-five days total. At one point, well into the shooting schedule, we were shooting in the replica of the Oval Office at the Truman Library. It was nearly seven o’clock on a Sunday morning, and after weeks of such long days, I looked around the room and saw the crew was dead tired. I was exhausted myself. In the makeup trailer, while getting my prosthetic makeup removed, the producers came in to discuss the call for Monday. I stopped them and said, “I think we are going to take a day off tomorrow. Everyone is completely out of gas. These hours are killing us. Time out. I’ll be taking a break tomorrow.” The producers left immediately to stop printing the call sheet for the next day. When I eventually emerged from the makeup trailer to go home, the crew was standing outside and broke into applause. Word had gotten out that we were taking a day off. Yes, Truman proved a grueling project, but it was a great story and well worth it.