Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 7, 1995 TAG: 9505050047
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You know, a devotee of Gumpisms, Gump cuisine, Gump music.
I disagree with those critics who see the movie "Forrest Gump" as a paean to ignorance and stupidity. Instead - with the majority - I view it as an ode to goodness and innocence, ill-regarded as the latter may be in real life.
Watching the movie again this week on video reaffirmed my attachment to it, though with a bit less emotion than the first showing engendered, and with a wish for a little more of the tartness that characterized Winston Groom's novel.
What really came as a surprise, though, was my fascination with a half-hour documentary on "The Making of Forrest Gump" that is included on the laserdisc version of the movie.
The special effects are awesome, if a little worrisome in their implications.
As everyone knows, the movie places Forrest "inside" several sequences of historical motion-picture footage, making him appear to interact with such real figures as George Wallace, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
We know he wasn't really there, of course, and as skillful as those sequences were, movie and video viewers can see that Tom Hanks is an insert.
Other special video effects were even more intriguing because they were completely invisible, at least to the untrained eye.
Two examples:
nLt. Dan Taylor, who meets Gump in Vietnam and later re-encounters him in civilian life, loses the lower portion of his legs in the war. Throughout most of the movie, actor Gary Sinise appears really to have lost part of his legs. Using computer graphics, the lower half of his legs were erased and the background filled in. Even when you see how it's done, the cinematic amputations are completely convincing.
nOne of Gump's many accomplishments is as a table-tennis player. Hanks appears to perform amazing feats of precision Ping-Pong paddling - keeping two balls ricocheting off a wall in one scene and playing a lightning-fast round against an expert in another. The trick was that both scenes were shot without any Ping-Pong ball at all. The balls were added later, generated by computer.
In both cases, the special effects are so smooth, so seamless, so convincing that many viewers thought Sinise really is an amputee and that Hanks is a world-class Ping-Pong player. We didn't have a clue as to how the amputation effect was done, or - what is really scary - that the Ping-Pong balls were special video effects.
While watching the documentary and delighting in the skill of those who manipulated the images, I started to worry about the implications of that technology.
Hollywood has long been convincing us that tiny sound stages are limitless deserts, roiling oceans and far-flung planets. But these new computer effects are in a class of their own.
In a world where what we see may be no evidence of reality at all, should we worry that somewhere a Winston Smith - from George Orwell's "1984" - is altering the records of the past in a way that only our memories can detect?
When we cannot believe our eyes to tell us "truth," how will we decide whom to trust?
Naturally, the technology that allows a filmmaker to remove the legs of an actor in a piece of fluffy entertainment is available to other photographers as well. Newspapers and television news operations could do much the same kind of manipulation that director Robert Zemekis used so effectively in "Forrest Gump."
Editorial writer and long-time friend Elizabeth Strother pointed out that with that capability comes a challenge for journalists to convince the reader that we will use that technology responsibly. You have to believe that we won't trick you with a computer-generated or manipulated image passed off as "reality."
An ever higher ethical code is demanded of us - gatekeepers of the mass of information that is news today and history tomorrow. Those standards are already in place here and at most newspapers in this country.
The trouble is, in the increasingly complex world of information distribution - particularly via home computer - all of us are going to have an increasingly difficult time determining the trustworthiness of our sources.
Newspapers have taken our share of abuse on that subject. A lot of people don't trust journalists, believing we have been manipulating information for our own nefarious purposes throughout history.
Fortunately, though, an even greater number of people - judging by our readership - seems to believe that journalists work under a system of ethics that encourages us to be as accurate and faithful to fact as we humanly can.
The majority of readers must trust us.
"The Making of Forrest Gump," however, may be all the evidence any of us needs to realize that in the future it is going to be much more difficult to sort reality from fiction, truth from lie.
by CNB