Why Forrest Gump Took Almost A Decade To Finally Make It To The Big Screen

But Finerman wasn’t just the wife of a Hollywood executive, she knew the entertainment industry inside and out. After starting her career at The Movie Channel and moving onto Universal Television, she became vice president of production and development at Steve Tisch Productions. When she read the galley copies of “Forrest Gump” in 1985, she and director Robert Zemeckis were compelled by its unconventional narrative style that blended comedy and pathos.

Zemeckis and his star, Tom Hanks, were so convinced in the film’s quality that they took pay cuts to ensure the production’s viability. At the time, Paramount wanted to trim the film’s $50 million budget. The Orlando Sentinel reported that the studio requested Tisch and Finerman cut their salaries by $10 million, and Zemeckis and Hanks cut a deal of their own, banking on the film’s success:

“Under the original deal for ‘Forrest Gump,’ Zemeckis and Hanks had contracts that called for the star to be paid $7 million and the director to earn $5 million. The salaries were the highest single budget item in the movie, and Hanks and Zemeckis agreed to, in Hollywood parlance, ‘defer’ a portion of their fees in return for a formula-based share of the box office. If the movie had not been a success, they might have ended up with much less than their original salaries.”