The 1993 sex comedy Tom Hanks was accused of ripping off in ‘Forrest Gump’: “He copied many of those mannerisms”
Even though he was no stranger to the sex comedy, having made a couple of them in his younger days, Tom Hanks was accused of ripping another one off to win his second consecutive Academy Award.
It sounds strange, since it was a movie that few people had heard of and even fewer had actually seen, but that’s barely scratching the surface of strangeness. The title character in Forrest Gump required a unique performance, to put it lightly, but it may not have been as unique as you might think.
Hanks has revealed that he picked up the titular lad’s instantly recognisable and widely imitated cadence from Michael Conner Humphreys, who played the younger version of the character. Instead of having the untested actor copy his voice, the leading man opted to place the shoe on the other foot, creating one of modern cinema’s most distinctive brogues in the process.
For Forrest’s equally distinctive method of running, he attributed that to his DNA, sharing that it was simply the way certain members of his family sprinted, calling it “a stupid Hanks thing.” To that end, when the Oscar winner required a stunt double for certain scenes, including his jog across America, the honours went to his brother, Jim.
However, depending on who you want to believe, that wasn’t Jim Hanks’ only contribution to Robert Zemeckis’ phenomenon. The siblings weren’t especially close, with Tom staying with his father when their parents divorced, while Jim remained with their mother, but they reconnected in the early 1990s, just in time for the youngest of the clan to put those familial sprinting skills to good use.
In 1993, the younger Hanks played his first leading role in a feature film, initially auditioning under the pseudonym of Jim Matthews to avoid any cries of nepotism before he was cast in Buford’s Beach Bunnies, a forgotten caper that sees him playing a shy and awkward lad whose old man offers a $100,000 bounty to the first of his fast food employees to sleep with Jeeter Buford and cure him of his fear of women.
What does that have to do with Forrest Gump? At first glance, fuck all, but claims were made that Jim’s simple-minded, mawkishly innocent, and doe-eyed protagonist was plagiarised. “You only have to look at Jim Hanks to know where Forrest Gump came from,” Jim Miles insisted. “What we’re told is that Tom had seen the video which Jim was in, and he copied many of those mannerisms; he’d seen it two or three times.”
“He liked the way Jim had portrayed a backwards simpleton, and he took those characteristics and absorbed them into Forrest Gump,” the self-styled film historian claimed. “And when the time came to make Forrest Gump, he called upon his brother Jim to act as a double and to stand in for him.” It’s all hearsay, but if you watch them side-by-side, then there are certain similarities.
Maybe that’s because they’re both Hanks men, or maybe the superstar older brother really did rip off a family member to drive him toward back-to-back Oscars glory. Then again, if that was genuinely the case, then you’d suspect that Jim, the less successful of the two by a considerable margin, would have kicked up a fuss about it at least once in the last 30-odd years.
