| Blow Out | |
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| Directed by | Brian De Palma |
| Produced by | George Litto |
| Written by | Brian De Palma |
| Starring | John Travolta Nancy Allen John Lithgow Dennis Franz |
| Music by | Pino Donaggio |
| Cinematography | Vilmos Zsigmond |
| Distributed by | Filmways |
| Release date(s) | July 21, 1981 (U.S. release) |
| Running time | 108 min. |
| Language | English |
Blow Out is a 1981 thriller film, written and directed by Brian De Palma. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a movie sound effects technician from Philadelphia who, while recording sounds for a low-budget horror film, serendipitously captures audio evidence of a possible assassination. The supporting cast includes Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, and Dennis Franz.
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While in post-production on a low-budget exploitation film, Philadelphia sound technician Jack Terry (Travolta) realizes that he needs to overdub an actress's scream. After leaving the studio to record potential sound effects at a local park, he sees a car careen off the road and plunge into a nearby lake. Jack dives into the water to help, discovering a dead man and a young woman, still alive, trapped inside the submerged car. He pulls her to safety and accompanies her to a local hospital.
Jack learns that the driver of the car was the governor (and a presidential hopeful); the girl was a prostitute named Sally (Allen). Associates of the governor attempt to whitewash the incident by concealing that Sally was in the car, and they convince Jack to smuggle Sally out of the hospital with him.
Jack listens to the audio tape he recorded of the accident, wherein he distinctly hears a gunshot just before the blow out that caused the accident. He sees a television report that, seemingly by coincidence, Manny Karp (Franz) was also in the park that night and filmed the accident with a motion picture camera. When Karp sells stills from his film to a local tabloid, Jack splices them together into a crude movie and syncs them with the audio he recorded, becoming even more suspicious that the accident was actually an assassination.
Unbeknownst to Jack, Sally and Karp were both co-conspirators in a larger plot against the governor. The gunman, Burke (Lithgow), intended that Sally also die in the crash. He begins murdering local prostitutes bearing a resemblance to Sally, whose deaths are attributed to a serial killer, "the Liberty Bell Strangler."
Jack draws Sally into his own private investigation of the incident. She steals Karp's film of the car accident, which, when synced to Jack's audio, clearly reveals the gunshot that anticipated the blow out. Nevertheless, nobody believes Jack's story, and every move he makes is immediately silenced by a seemingly widespread conspiracy.
Finally, Jack attempts to gather irrefutable proof of the assassination attempt, wiring Sally with a hidden microphone and sending her off to meet a purported media contact. Shadowing her from a distance, he is alarmed to see that his supposed contact is Burke, not the reporter. Sally is the last loose end for Burke to eliminate, and her death will be attributed to the "Strangler." Immediately realizing that she is in danger, Jack attempts to warn her, but Sally and Burke slip out of range and into a large Liberty Day crowd. Jack makes a mad dash across Philadelphia, attempting to head them off and rescue Sally. He crashes his Jeep, though and is knocked out. By the time Jack awakens, Burke has taken Sally to a rooftop where he attacks her. Still listening in on his earpiece, Jack spots them. He hears Sally screaming as he rushes to save her, but he is too late. He arrives just after Burke has strangled her to death and is marking her body with the Strangler's signature bell pattern. Jack takes Burke by surprise and kills him, then, devastated, takes Sally's body in his arms.
Sally's death is attributed to the Strangler, and his to her, completing the cover up of the governor's assassination. Jack is condemned to relive his complicity in Sally's death, which he recorded through the wire, and which he replays continuously over the coming days. He finally punishes himself by overdubbing Sally's final scream into the motion picture on which he was working during the film's opening. The producer is elated at Jack's work and replays it over and over in the mixing booth until Jack covers his ears to keep the sound from tormenting him any further.
After completing Dressed to Kill, De Palma was considering several projects, including Acts of Vengeance (later produced for HBO starring Charles Bronson and Ellen Burstyn), Flashdance, and a script of his own titled Personal Effects.[1] The story outline for Personal Effects was similar to what would become Blow Out, but was set in Canada.[1]
De Palma scripted and shot Blow Out in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his home town.[1] The film's $18 million budget made Blow Out De Plama's biggest budgeted film since The Fury.[1] De Palma considered Al Pacino for the role of Jack Terry, but ultimately chose John Travolta.[1] At least one studio executive suggested De Palma also cast Travolta's Grease co-star Olivia Newton-John in the role of Sally; De Palma refused.[citation needed] Travolta lobbied De Palma to cast Nancy Allen for the role (the three had previously worked together on Carrie); De Palma hesitated at first—he and Allen were married at the time and did not want Allen to have a reputation for only working in her husband's pictures—but ultimately agreed.[1] In addition to Travolta and Allen, De Palma filled Blow Out 's cast and crew with a number of his frequent collaborators: Denis Franz (Dressed to Kill, The Fury); John Lithgow (Obsession); cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Obsession); editor Paul Hirsch (Hi, Mom!, Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Obsession, Carrie, The Fury]; and composer Pino Donaggio (Carrie, Home Movies, Dressed to Kill).
During the editing process, two reels of footage from the Liberty Parade sequence were stolen and never recovered; the scenes were reshot with insurance money at a cost of $750,000.[1] Because Zsigmond was no longer available, László Kovács lensed the reshot sequences.[2]
Thematically, Blow Out almost "exclusively concern[s] the mechanics of movie making" with a "total, complete and utter preoccupation with film itself as a medium in which ... style really is content."[3] In numerous scenes, the film depicts the interaction of sound and images, the manner in which the two are joined together, and methods in which they are re-edited, remixed, and rearranged to reveal new truths or the lack of any objective truth.[1]
As with several other De Palma films, Blow Out explores the power of guilt; both Jack and Sally are motivated to help right their past wrongs, both with tragic consequences.[1] De Palma also revisits the theme of voyeurism, a recurring theme in much of his previous work.[1] Jack exhibits elements of a peeping tom, but one who works with sound instead of image.[1]
Blow Out incorporates multiple allusions both to other films and to historical events. Its protagonist's obsessive reconstruction of a sound recording to uncover a possible murder recall both Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blowup[4] and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation.[5] The film alludes to elements of the Watergate scandal and the JFK assassination.[4] The film also recalls elements of the Chappaquiddick incident,[3] although De Palma intentionally tried to downplay the similarities.[1]
De Palma also explicitly references two of his previous projects. At one point in the film, Dennis Franz watches De Palma's film Murder a la Mod on television. (Originally, the character was to watch Coppola's Dementia 13, but Roger Corman demanded too much for the rights.)[1] A flashback where Travolta recalls an incident where his work got a police informant killed was also taken from an abandoned project, Prince of the City, which was ultimately directed by Sidney Lumet.[1]
Blow Out opened to generally positive reviews from critics,[1] including several ecstatic ones. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael gave the film one of her few unconditional raves:[6] "De Palma has sprung to the place that Robert Altman achieved with films such as McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Nashville and that Francis Ford Coppola reached with the two Godfather films—that is, to the place where genre is transcended and what we're moved by is an artist's vision.... It's a great movie."[7] Roger Ebert's four-star review in the Chicago Sun-Times noted that Blow Out "is inhabited by a real cinematic intelligence. The audience isn't condescended to.... We share the excitement of figuring out how things develop and unfold, when so often the movies only need us as passive witnesses."[4]
Despite positive reviews, the film floundered at the box office due to terrible word of mouth about its bleak ending.[1] Blow Out returned approximately $8 million at the box office.[1]
Blow Out's public reputation, however, has grown considerably in the years following its release.[8] As a "movie about making movies," it has earned a natural audience with subsequent generations of cineastes.[9] In particular, Quentin Tarantino has consistently praised the movie, listing it alongside Rio Bravo and Taxi Driver as one of his three favorite films.[10] (In homage, Tarantino used the music cue "Sally and Jack" from Pino Donaggio's score in Death Proof, Tarantino's segment of Grindhouse
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