'Forrest Gump 2' Would Have Put Forrest In OJ's Police Chase. Where Else Might He Have Turned Up?
A draft script for the sequel was completed in 2001 - but 9/11 made everyone realise it was probably a bad idea
And, to be fair, it sounds like it was
Forrest would have got himself caught up in the OJ Simpson trial and the Oklahoma City bombing and danced with Princess Diana
A sequel to Forrest Gump has been bandied about for years, but it turns out that screenwriter Eric Roth put together a full draft of a script for Forrest Gump 2 - which was quietly shelved after 9/11.
"Literally, I turned it in the day before 9/11,” Roth told Yahoo Entertainment. “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.'"
Roth did share historical times and moments Forrest would have touched on.
“It was gonna start with his little boy having AIDS,” said Roth. "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."
Hilarious. Roth had some other ideas too.
"I had him in the back of OJ’s Bronco [during the famous 1994 police chase during the investigation for Nicole Brown's murder]. He would look up occasionally, but they didn’t see him in the rearview mirror, and then he’d pop down. I had him as a ballroom dancer who was really good, he could do the ballroom dancing. And then eventually, just as sort of a charity kind of thing, he danced with Princess Diana."
Crikey. The whole thing would climax with Forrest sitting outside the Oklahoma City federal building as it got bombed in 1995. Even Tom Hanks would struggle to sell that as homespun and charming.
It's probably sensible that Forrest Gump 2 never arrived to turn Forrest from a lovable oaf who strolled through American history and into some dimwitted angel of death and misery. Still, if he had, what other wildly inappropriate events might he have influenced?
Being elected CEO of Enron
Needing a happy idiot to take the heat for the enormous fraud going on at their company, the high-ups get Forrest in as their fall guy, but he ends up accidentally dropping the company's accounts books into a postbox, which then through some happenstance lands on the Securities and Exchange Commission head's desk. Whoops-a-daisy!
Giving Pitbull the inspiration he needed to assault the charts
In a mirror image of the Elvis scene of the first film, Forrest bumps into the young Armando Christian Perez, who's at a low ebb. "I have music inside of me," Armando weeps to a sympathetic Forrest. "But what should I sing about?" Forrest thinks for a moment, puts his arm around Armando's shoulder, and says: "Bums. Tell the people how much you like bums."
Misplacing a couple of boxes of votes for the 2000 American election
Forrest decides to settle down for a quiet life in Florida, but his conscientious streak leads him to volunteer at a polling station which he hosts on one of his old shrimp boats. Forrest puts a few boxes of voting slips in a lifeboat for safekeeping, but then when he looks around they're gone, floating out to sea because he's forgotten to tie the lifeboat to the ship. Oh, Forrest! George W Bush goes on to beat Al Gore by 537 votes.
Accidentally buying £200 of pay-per-view porn on Ron and Ann Hayward's account
Perhaps while sofa-surfing around the UK Forrest would land with Reddish's kindest residents and, while trying to watch Cartoon Network late one night, managed to rack up an enormous tab on Television X. Easy to photoshop him into that iconic picture too.
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