The Gump boarding house took two months to build on private land beside the Combahee River. Only a handful of rooms were finished inside, it was never built to code, and it was pulled down when the shoot ended. The bench arrived the same way. The production carried it into the north side of Chippewa Square in Savannah, and when the production left, the bench left with it.
19
places on the route
Six states and the District of Columbia — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Greenbow, Alabama is invented, and the crew hardly went to Alabama at all. Principal photography ran from August to December 1993, and most of the film's Alabama sits within an hour of Beaufort, South Carolina: a Main Street, a school, a chapel, a shrimp dock, a hospital front and a jungle, every one of them playing somewhere else. The places that appear as themselves are the ones he runs past. Two of those have taken the film's name since, and you can find both on a map: Forrest Gump Curve, at mile 1.2 of a ticketed mountain road in North Carolina, and Forrest Gump Point, at mile marker 13 on U.S. 163 in Utah.
Seventeen days of the schedule were set on one 8,000-acre property on the Combahee River, and most of what the Gumps own in the film is carpentry. Dan Rogers of the South Carolina Film Commission gave the list to the state information site SCIWAY: the boarding house, Jenny's farm, the oak, grandma's trailer, the mailbox and the school bus stop, an oak alley, a pecan grove, an 1860s plantation kitchen, police dog kennels, and the rice fields of the Mekong Delta.
So Vietnam was built here first, 45 km inland from the islands where the rest of it was shot. The house came down when filming finished. The entrance is still visible from Combahee Road, the land is private and stays private, and the marker on our map is the road rather than the house.
The same square in a stereoscopic view dated 1856. Cropped from one half of the stereo pair.
Photo: Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views, New York Public Library · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The bench stood on the northern edge, on Bull Street, and most of the film is told from it: the feather, the box of chocolates, one stranger after another sitting down beside him.
There is no bench in the square, and people come looking for it anyway. What is there is a square laid out in 1815, live oaks, planting beds, and James Oglethorpe on a plinth in the middle, facing south.
Savannah History Museum
The bench on display at the Savannah History Museum, roped off, with its own label.
No filming here. This is where the bench went: six hundred metres west, in the old Central of Georgia Railway station on Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, roped off, with a label explaining what it is doing indoors.
Main Street plays the whole of downtown Greenbow, 35 miles north-west of Beaufort. The barber shop, the train coming through, the run down the street. Visit Beaufort says the shopfronts have kept their set dressing since.
The storm drain that catches the boy's leg brace is here as well. That comes from Frank McClure, who lives in Varnville and sent it to SCIWAY, so it is a neighbour's knowledge rather than a production document. It is also the kind of thing only a neighbour would know.
The principal takes out a chart and shows Mrs Gump where her son falls on it. That office is 53 km inland, in a school that closed and was restored as an arts and civic centre, the Colleton Center, at 494 Hampton Street.
Jenny sings for a room of men in what the film gives as a truck stop. The room is a family seafood restaurant twenty minutes from downtown Savannah, on the bank of the Ogeechee, run by the Love family since 1949.
They date their own part in it: Paramount picked the place in October 1993. They still serve dinner to three hundred people at a sitting, on a deck over the river where alligators and the occasional manatee turn up.
Bayou La Batre is Beaufort
Lucy Point Creek, between Lady's Island and Coosaw Island
Bayou La Batre is a real town on the Alabama coast, and the film never went there. The Jenny works a tidal creek 7 km east of Beaufort.
The dock and boathouse that play the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company are on the Coosaw Island side. Marie Lawson, whose family ran it as Coosaw Marine, told SCIWAY so, and Explore Beaufort SC says the same about the dock without naming an owner. Hurricane Matthew destroyed it. It has been rebuilt.
Forrest and Lieutenant Dan pray for shrimp in the Four Square Gospel Church, which is a white clapboard Presbyterian chapel standing on its own among pines, with a portico and a small spire. It was built around 1833 and it is the only antebellum building left in McPhersonville. It went on the National Register in 2002.
USCB Center for the Arts, 801 Carteret Street, Beaufort
The hospital Forrest endows is the front of the arts building on the University of South Carolina Beaufort campus, downtown, 800 m from the Woods Memorial Bridge. Nothing about the building was touched. The sign over the door was changed to Gump Medical Center digitally.
College, the war, and the Mall
Bovard Administration Building, University of Southern California
Forrest's football years and his graduation from the University of Alabama were shot in Los Angeles, on a campus that lets crews in on one firm condition: nothing on screen may identify the university or name any of its buildings. So the brick tower with the arched entrance is Bovard, in the film it is Alabama, and that is by contract.
The ambush, and the lagoon where Forrest carries the wounded out one at a time. This is a state park 21 km east of Beaufort with five miles of beach, a saltwater lagoon and a maritime forest, and it takes more than a million visitors a year, which makes it the busiest park in South Carolina.
It did not look tropical enough. More than twenty palmettos were planted for the Vietnam scenes.
The lighthouse in the middle of the park has nothing to do with the film. It was built in 1859, destroyed in the Civil War, and rebuilt in 1875 in interchangeable cast-iron sections so that it could be taken apart and moved, and in 1889 the sea forced them to do exactly that. It stands 1.3 miles from where it started.
The rest of Vietnam, including where Forrest first meets Bubba and where he meets Lieutenant Dan, is a golf course on the next island south, 3 km away. The Lowcountry tourism commission is blunt about the rest: the mountains and the taller palms were added afterwards.
Fripp Island is a private gated community. You get on it as a guest or not at all.
Forrest is pushed on stage at an anti-war rally, the microphone is cut, and he finds Jenny in the crowd. Paramount's own account of the effects work puts it at two days of shooting with about 1,500 extras, rearranged between takes and copied until they filled the Mall.
The pool is 618 metres long and shallow enough to walk the length of, which is how the two of them meet in the middle of it.
The reporters catch up with him on a bridge, over a river a sign identifies as the Mississippi. It is the Beaufort River, 30 km from the boarding house set. Nothing about the bridge was dressed except that sign.
It is a swing span, and it still turns for boat traffic, one of the few working swing bridges left in the state. Every year the Run, Forrest Run 5K goes over it.
Forrest Gump Curve, Grandfather Mountain
The switchbacks on the road up Grandfather Mountain.
Five seconds of film, on the switchback where the crowd of followers first appears behind him. The mountain named the corner after it and put it in the mile-by-mile guide to its own road: mile 1.2, between the Wilson Center and the Mile High Swinging Bridge, picnic area just before.
English Wikipedia puts this shot on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Grandfather Mountain. The mountain says otherwise, and the mountain owns the road. The curve is inside the nature park, past the ticket gate, and it is not the Parkway.
The man running is Jim Hanks, standing in for his brother, who was working in South Carolina that week. It was a clear Saturday in October 1993. Walking and running on the road are not allowed. You drive it.
Another piece of the run is the road that leads down to Antler Hill Village and the winery, 90 km south-west of the curve on the Vanderbilt estate.
Biltmore keeps count of its own film work, which is how we know the rest of it. The western view over the Lagoon turns up in The Swan in 1956 and again in Being There in 1979. A carriage crosses the red brick Bass Pond bridge in The Last of the Mohicans. Richie Rich shot inside, in rooms left largely as they were, family portraits and all. Hannibal used the Lodge Gate, the façade of the house, and the Antler Hill barn before anyone restored it.
Photo: U.S. Coast Guard · Public domain (US federal government work) · Wikimedia Commons
The turn. He runs out along the wooden walkway, reaches the tower, stands there, and comes back. The walkway is a plank deck on granite piers and it is still exactly that.
The tower went up in 1858 at the water's edge: twelve feet of granite, twelve feet of brick, cast iron lantern on top. The light was automated in 1971 and the last keeper left. The Coast Guard boarded up the keeper's house in 1980, the town leased the site to keep it open, the historical society restored the house, and in June 1998 the Town of St. George took ownership of all of it. The lighthouse committee's own history of the station mentions the film once, in a single sentence near the end, after the paperwork.
Grounds open sunrise to sunset all year. The museum in the keeper's house opens from Memorial Day to Columbus Day. Neither charges.
Forrest Gump Point, U.S. 163
US 163 looking south towards Monument Valley at first light.
Mile marker 13, on the Navajo Nation, north of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park and 3,500 km from the walkway in Maine. The road runs dead straight at the Mittens, drops, and rises again, and he stops on the rise and says he is tired.
The Utah Office of Tourism publishes the coordinates to six decimal places, then spends a paragraph asking people not to stand in the middle of the highway for the photograph, because the traffic on it has injured and killed some of them. There are pull-offs. Use the shoulder.
Glacier National Park, Montana
James V. D'Arc, in a history of filmmaking in Utah published in 2010, lists Glacier National Park among the places this film used. We have not been able to read the passage and found nothing else that says so, so there is no marker for it on our map.
The hotel stopped taking guests in 1989 and spent the sixteen years after that working almost full time as a film set. This film is on the list of what was shot there. What it shot is not written down anywhere we could reach: the sentence naming it goes to a privately run location site, no scene is given, and the magazine article cited beside it has gone off the web.
The building came down across 2005 and 2006. A group of public schools stands on the site now, named for Robert F. Kennedy, who was shot in the hotel kitchen in June 1968.
Other films left a better record at the same address. Every interior of the Beverly Wilshire in Pretty Woman is this building: the lobby, the Embassy Ballroom where Barney teaches Vivian which fork to use, the presidential suite with the penthouse set built inside it. Se7en took the bungalows on the grounds and named no scene either. And Leonardo DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale works the Ambassador in Catch Me If You Can, filmed three years before the demolition began.
The hotel's own record names the film but no scene. It stands in for somewhere else, not for itself.
