Making movies is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get.
There’s another quiet truth embedded in Starkey’s account—one every filmmaker learns the hard way if they’re paying attention. This is why you always find the budget for your unit publicist and your unit still photographer. These are not accessories. They are historians. They are storytellers working in real time, inside the pressure cooker, capturing the moments that never make it into the script but define the life of a film.
As someone who once carried a card in IATSE Local 600, that truth lands hard. The work is relentless. Long days, impossible light, one shot—sometimes one frame—to get it right. Publicists and unit still photographers live in the margins of production, but they’re in the thick of it, shaping how a film is remembered long after the last wrap drink is poured.
Starkey’s book is proof of that labor. Without those images, without that access, without people embedded deeply enough to understand what mattered in the moment, Forrest Gump would still exist—but its history would be thinner. Less human.
That’s what makes On the Set of Forrest Gump feel essential. It honors the process, the people, and the invisible work that turns a movie into a legacy. I can’t wait to read it—not just as a fan of the film, but as someone who knows exactly how much sweat, faith, and unseen storytelling it took to make those memories last.
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