BLOW OUT Murder has a sound of its own...

Hitchcock. Late 70s, early 80s. The unexpected. Perversion. Sensuality. Crime. The most daring ending ever shot! This movie to me is the absolute DePalma masterpiece, only spoiled in the French version by the dubbing of John Travolta (by a too-famous Gerard Depardieu). A must-see!
 

Directed by: Brian De Palma
Written by: Brian De Palma
Music by: Pino Donaggio

Filming Locations:

• Independence National Historical Park, Pennsylvania, USA
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Released on: 1981 (February 17, 1982 in France)
Running Time: 108 minutes

Box-Office: $ million in the U.S., $ million worldwide
 
 

CAST

Jack... John Travolta
Sally... Nancy Allen
Burke... John Lithgow
Manny Karp... Dennis Franz
 
 
 

SYNOPSIS

Jack is a sound-man who works on "Grade-B" horror movies. Late one evening, he is "sampling" sounds for use on his movies, when he hears something unexpected through his sound equipment and records it. Curiosity gets the better of him when the media become involved, and he begins to unravel the pieces of a nefarious conspiracy. As he struggles to survive against his shadowy enemies and expose the truth, he doesn't know who he can trust.
 
 

INTERESTING FACTS
 

• Blow Out is based on the famous Antonionni movie Blow Up, which it was titled after.  In both movies, an artist witnesses an apparently insignificant even in a park.  But after careful study, he finds out a completely different truth that what it first appeared to be.

 
• Gerard Depardieu dubbed John Travolta for the French version of Blow Out -which unfortunately took quite a lot away from the movie by proving very distracting.

 
• During the editing process, two reels of footage from the Liberty Parade sequence were stolen and were never to be seen again. This meant that the scenes had to be reshot at a cost of $750,000. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was no longer available, so he was replaced by Laszlo Kovacs.

 
• The film crew is visible during overhead shot after Jack crashes through police barricade.

 
• In supporting roles, DePalma regulars John Lithgow and Dennis Franz do their usual good job as villains (Lithgow in Obsession, Franz in The Fury, Sisters and Dressed to Kill)

 
• In this tribute to Hitchcock's suspence style and Antonioni's "Blow-up", Brian DePalma having just finished "Carrie", came through with this cinematic vision of political assassination.

Actress Nancy Allen and director Brian De Palma married in 1979 and divorced in 1984. In August 2001, a 25-year anniversary celebration of Brian De Palma's Carrie reunited the cast of the cult movie.  The following was revealed:

[Nancy Allen] "Brian, John and I had dinner one night while we were shooting the car-crash scene. Afterward, John turned to me and said, "Brian likes you." I said, 'What are you talking about?' I mean, he wasn't flirting with me -or if he was, I missed it. But I certainly was attracted to him.

[Brian De Palma] Nancy had a boyfriend at the time, amd I had a girlfriend. But, uyou know, this wasn't the Victorian era. Did I think she was an attractive girl I might have a future with? Yes!

[Nancy Allen] Brian's not the most accessible person when he's working. I think he likes planning movies more than shooting them; people just get in the way of his vision. After the shoot, Brian was in New York, editing, and he had told me, "Give me a call if you're in the city." So I called him and he asked me if I wanted to have dinner. He was like a completely different person: funny, sociable, a great conversationalist. I was like, I've never met this man before."
 
 

THE MAKING OF BLOW OUT

On-location photos by Louis Goldman.
 

It might seem strange that a work tied so closely to its American setting was first proposed in the pages of a Canadian film magazine, Take One. But early in 1979 (in an issue that also covered his just finished "class project," HOME MOVIES), De Palma used his original treatment for BLOW OUT to again reach out to those hoping for a way into the industry. Readers were asked to submit two scenes based on the treatment, which he was then calling "Personal Effects." Each finalist, the article said, would be given a chance at working closely with De Palma on a full screenplay. But while one young writer apparently did win out, this joint effort -- for reasons that are still unclear -- never took place.

Instead, after a rollercoaster year that saw first his painful dismissal from the crime drama PRINCE OF THE CITY, then his greatest success to date with DRESSED TO KILL, De Palma came back to "Personal Effects" and finished the script himself, changing little from his original concept. (Except, of course, for deciding on a stronger title.) "I based this story," he explained, "on the social events of the last 20 years -- the Kennedy assassination, Chappaquiddick and Watergate. What I've gleaned (from my readings about these political calamities) is that a conspiracy sort of happens by accident. What I wanted to do in this film is to show how haphazard -- as opposed to precisely worked out -- a conspiracy is. What I wanted to show was how some overzealous guy -- in BLOW OUT, it's Burke (John Lithgow) -- goes a little too far at the start and things just grow more and more illogically.

"Also, I spent a lot of time with my sound effects editor, who told me how he collected the sounds for the movies he had worked on. I got to thinking, what would happen if somebody just by accident recorded a murder and what if someone else got a picture of it? If you sync up the two, I figured that you could actually see where the shot was coming from."

Finally, with its emphasis on characterization, BLOW OUT offered a chance to move into new territory. "After DRESSED TO KILL," De Palma said, "I felt that I had pushed the horror/suspense genre as far as it could go. To make another film like that, I would only be repeating myself. The reason I'd wanted to do PRINCE OF THE CITY was because I wanted to make a movie with real characters which was set in a real situation instead of the Brian De Palma world -- one step removed from life where I had been working."
 
 

Before long, he garnered exactly the interest he needed to get this change of direction off the ground. Four years earlier, while making CARRIE, he'd established a friendship with supporting player John Travolta, at the time a rising television star. Since then, Travolta's ascent in Hollywood had rarely been sidetracked, with SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and GREASE establishing him as an icon of late seventies pop culture. What he hadn't yet found, at 26, was a role that would help him make the transition from "youth idol" to "mature leading man." A budding aviator, he'd hoped to develop a suspense drama about a man who steals Howard Hughes' legendary Spruce Goose, and offered the project to De Palma. The bid was unsuccessful, but did lead to a discussion of BLOW OUT, which Travolta asked to read and quickly decided was much more the script he wanted.

This turn of events took the director somewhat by surprise, since he had actually envisioned the role of Jack Terry, BLOW OUT's hardened, analytical soundman, as being ideal for a somewhat older actor. (Al Pacino, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford were apparently each considered.) But upon meeting with Travolta, he discovered a young man fully past the boyish stage of the newcomer he'd worked with on CARRIE.

As it happened, the star even had an idea for casting the female lead of the trusting, but ill-fated Sally Bedina. While De Palma and his wife of one year, Nancy Allen, had already agreed that the time was right -- after three films together -- to work on separate projects, Travolta felt she was absolutely right for Sally. "At first," he said, "when Brian was thinking in terms of Pacino or Dreyfuss, he figured to cast someone like Dyan Cannon or Julie Christie in the part. But with me playing Jack, it really did make more sense to bring Sally's age closer to mine.... And the chemistry was so good between us (on CARRIE), I just knew we'd be perfect together in BLOW OUT. At this point, according to Allen, "logic went out the window and I reacted emotionally. I love John, and I wanted to work with him."
 
 

The script was then brought to producer George Litto, who had worked with De Palma previously on OBSESSION and DRESSED TO KILL. Litto loved it, but suggested a crucial change from De Palma's original drafts, which were set in Montreal. Whereas De Palma's first intention had been to use a Canadian backdrop as a metaphor for America's political climate, Litto felt the relevance should be more direct. As the new location, they soon settled on Philadelphia, which happened to be the home town of both Litto and De Palma, and appealed to them because -- as the director would later state -- it allowed them "to play this sort of contemporary political story against the old conceptions of liberty and independence and truth. We invented the whole 'Liberty Day' theme ... to give it that kind of patriotic air."

It was this opportunity for thematic contrast that would inspire some of the most ambitious visual design De Palma had yet atempted. Production designer Paul Sylbert would help turn the city itself into an integral "character" in the story. "Philadelphia," Sylbert said early in production, "represents liberty. And liberty has always been portrayed as a woman -- the Statue of Liberty, for example. Nancy Allen is our woman in this film. She plays 'liberty violated,' and is in blood red by the end of the film. Keeping this in mind, we're moving the main plot through primary colors that represent America and liberty. I'm using strong reds and blues in this film. It will progress from white to blue to red, growing more intense and ending with an explosion of fireworks."

In September 1980, after getting the go-ahead from Filmways Pictures (which was then reaping the profits from DRESSED TO KILL), De Palma set up a production office and temporary studio at the completed but as yet unused Port of History Museum at Penn's Landing. The budget -- De Palma's largest to date -- was $18 million, and allowed for considerable location shooting throughout late fall and winter, with sets built inside the museum for interior work during inclement weather.
 
 

Ultimately, about 50 Philadelphia exteriors were used, beginning with Travolta's race through the "Liberty Day" parade near City Hall, a scene that involved 500 extras and 25 stunt drivers. Shooting at 30th Street Station also brought a few challenges, including making sure that service to the public wasn't disrupted and, ironically, having to undo the city's efforts at cleaning up before filming, by "restoring" dirt and graffiti to the subway walls. The climactic fireworks display over the Delaware River, delayed by snow until the end of the shoot, prompted complaints from residents whose sleep was disturbed for several nights.

Finally, the title sequence, shot at Wissahickon Creek, required constructing a temporary dam and, according to famed director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond (on his second teaming with De Palma after OBSESSION) was something of a logistical nightmare. "There we were in the middle of winter and there was this huge canyon and we were shooting a frog in the foreground and the river beyond and the trees and bridge above, and Brian just walked up and said, 'Light it. I don't care how long it's going to take. Light it.' He's just that kind of guy. 'Light it!'"

In the end, the creek proved too shallow for shooting all of the car's crash into the water, which had to be finished months later in a tank on a Burbank Studios soundstage. Nancy Allen, who was claustrophobic, remembered this as "the hardest thing I ever had to do. I would have to say, emotionally, I was really out of control in that scene. I was hysterical.... I became obsessed. I had to prove to myself that I could do it. I said, 'If I can do this, maybe I won't be afraid of it anymore.' Which, of course, is not the case." Travolta helped by teaching her "buddy-breathing" and making sure all stunt equipment was secure. De Palma, as well, spent hours underwater in scuba gear, a feat the crew later jokingly rewarded with a director's chair inscribed "Fins De Palma."
 
 
 

In the meantime, two past behind-the-scenes collaborators -- film editor Paul Hirsch and composer Pino Donaggio -- were already beginning their own contributions. Hirsch, De Palma's editor throughout the seventies, had returned after a hiatus spent cutting THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and began assembling footage in New York midway through the Philadelphia shoot. Donaggio, whose actual scoring wasn't to start until the film was edited (his "love theme" for Jack and Sally would be arguably his most poignant creation), had already read the script and came to the set while on a visit from Italy. De Palma, he told a reporter, was a "dream" to work for, "because most directors think in terms of 20-second periods, which doesn't give you much space to fill. Brian seems to think in terms of music. He leaves spaces, he gives you a lot of room. It's difficult not to take advantage." For his part, Hirsch complimented De Palma's skill at paving the way for his own work by thinking each film through before production, thus speeding up the process.

No amount of planning, however, could have prepared them for what lay ahead in the eleventh hour. In May 1981 (two months before BLOW OUT's scheduled release), a New York delivery van -- carrying negative footage about to be shipped to L.A. -- was robbed of two boxes containing the entire parade sequence. "I just went crazy when I heard," said De Palma. "When I heard about it on Monday (I only wish they'd told me right away, when it happened on Friday), I found out where the truck had stopped and looked on the street and all around it to see if the robber just didn't dump it when he saw it wasn't anything he could sell easily. Of all the different boxes -- a total of fifty in all -- the boxes that were taken were of the most expensive scenes we shot."
 
 
 
 

A reward was offered, but none of the anonymous leads called in to the production office proved fruitful. With $750,000 in negative insurance, the sequence was restaged from scratch in early June. Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs filled in for Zsigmond (who had moved on to another picture) and extras were dressed in winter clothing to match the rest of the film. Asked whether he thought the thieves had stolen this footage deliberately, De Palma said he was absolutely sure this wasn't the case, and that the whole incident -- like the conspiracy at the heart of the film -- was just "a very haphazard accident."

Yet for all these difficulties, the atmosphere on the set was, by all accounts, very productive. Like Travolta, who stressed in interviews that BLOW OUT gave him his first chance to play a role without falling back on his "star" image, Allen had high marks for her husband's sometimes controversial method of working with actors. The part of Sally, which she said she based to a degree on Judy Holliday, had not impressed her at first. "When I read the script, I asked Brian, 'Where's the character? Where's the challenge? There's no character here.' But the challenge was being able to make the role anything I wanted it to be. Brian is the ideal director for performers who like control over their work. He never imposes characters on his actors. He gives you the bare outline, that's all. The rest -- filling in the spaces, adding color and shading -- is up to the actor." She felt the situation was much the same with Travolta's Jack Terry. "The character was very cynical, over the hill, beaten down. Very dark. (But John) brought heart and soul to it and a warmth that didn't exist on the page. You didn't give a damn about the guy as written, he was very self-serving."

As Travolta had foreseen, his onscreen chemistry with Allen brought a dimension of warmth to their scenes that made the hints of unfulfilled romance all the more tragic. This was sometimes aided, Allen later recalled, by improvisation. "The structure never changed, but the dialogue did. The scenes in the hospital and the railway bar, John and I made up our own. John would always do something that would take the movie by surprise. We shot the bar scene a million times, in which Jack asks me to stay and help him investigate the crime. For instance, when I ask 'OK, you're a sound man. How'd you get that job?' -- in the script John's character responded with a speech explaining how. But in one of the takes, John just shrugged and said 'I don't know,' and gave a pause before going into the speech. You can see my look of 'What? What's he up to now?' That's the take Brian kept. Then during another shot in the scene John suddenly leaned over without warning, when the camera was rolling, and whispered something in my ear. We both love to eat and he said, 'If you stay I'll buy you an ice cream.' Which got me to laugh, since it was one of John and my secrets."
 
 

For his part, De Palma found reliance on the strength of his actors to be a healthy progression for his career. "I started BLOW OUT," he said, "with the intention to flush out my characters more. At times I've felt that my characters were trapped inside the design of the film. I'm so concerned with the relationship of the camera to the action and how the camera transmits the action to the audience that this will always be a major part of my films. But I feel I have to suppress that concern somewhat.

"When you know how to run, to shoot the action stuff, which I can do if I want to, the tendency is to get ahead of yourself. Basically, I want pictures to move. I want things to happen. But in the films I make in the future I want to move a little slower, build up the story even more. I haven't allowed myself that in the past because of my own cinematic impatience; however, I don't think that in BLOW OUT I will be accused of form for form's sake."

Sadly, as would prove to be the case time and again, this is exactly what happened in much of the critical community. On its release in late July, BLOW OUT was greeted by a few commendatory reviews, most notably from Pauline Kael and Rolling Stone's Michael Sragow. But the general reaction of critics who had pounced on DRESSED TO KILL was much the same this time around. Andrew Sarris, as usual, listed the "privileged moments" he felt De Palma had taken from BLOW-UP, THE CONVERSATION, and of course the films of Alfred Hitchcock, all of which he maintained were infinitely superior. In addition, he accused the director of suggesting that all women are "hookers and bimbos, and deserve to be punished for their sinfulness and stupidity." This view was compounded by a publicized incident in which writer Harlan Ellison walked out of a Writers Guild Film Society screening of BLOW OUT, claiming that the film had "consciously and gratuitously debased the human spirit."

The public's reaction wasn't much better, with many viewers disturbed (as was surely the intention) by the epilogue in which Jack, having failed to save Sally from Burke's cover-up scheme, dubs her death scream onto the soundtrack of his producer/boss' exploitative slasher film. It's a moment that sometimes polarizes even De Palma's admirers and, according to the director, was met with immediate disdain by Filmways executives. Feeling that within the context of the character he and Travolta had created -- a man whose efforts at ensuring justice have twice led to the death of an innocent person -- De Palma saw this ending as perfectly logical.
 
 

"Sure it's a crazy thing to do," he said, "but I don't think Jack really knows what he's doing at the end. And I also think it has to do with the whole idea that all of those very critical events can be reduced to dirt in the end. That this whole thing can be reduced to just an effect in a movie is essentially what does happen. I don't think (Jack's) ever again going to try to prove anything. I think his is a hopeless situation. I think when you have a truth that does not fit in with what people want to accept, you are an odd man out and you will be driven crazy or totally ignored or killed. I really believe that."

Yet whether audiences concurred with his vision or not, its bleakness didn't endear them to the film, which soon disappeared from summer movie screens, with a domestic gross of only $9 million. Producer Litto later regretted not fighting harder for a fall release, believing the film's chances might have been better in a season not consumed with mindless escapism. "When the footage was stolen," he said, "we had the perfect cop-out. We could have said, we cannot complete on time. But we were too damned efficient." (Still, this plan did nothing to help the film Sidney Lumet ultimately made of PRINCE OF THE CITY, which -- bearing similarities to BLOW OUT in both the element of wiretapping and the guilt of its main protagonist -- came out that fall and suffered largely the same fate.) For his part, Travolta maintained that the financial instability of Filmways, which soon went bankrupt and lacked the funds even to fully promote the film, was also to blame.

Whatever the reasons for BLOW OUT's financial failure, its consequences were immediate. "No one would answer my phone calls," De Palma later recalled. "That Brian De Palma is a powerful director is an illusion of Hollywood. Don't be sucked in by that. It's Tinseltown out here. Everything is sort of coated and unreal. When you make a movie like BLOW OUT and the movie makes 20 cents, you're verboten. Forget it. Despite Pauline Kael, despite anybody. You can't get a job.... I have a certain corrosive vision of society which seems to not be very commercial. I try not to let my vision corrode the movies to the extent that they become so dark that nobody wants to see them. I did that in BLOW OUT, and nobody really cared. The system goes on."

Most devastating of all was the effect this period may have had on his relationship with Allen. By late 1983, the marriage had ended, with some indication that the years of media hostility had taken their toll. "A lot of people were attacking me through my wife," he later told Esquire. "And it caused a lot of problems. My wife was being attacked because she was Mrs. Brian De Palma. I've been through that before. I'm used to it, but she wasn't. I've answered all those questions over and over, but when they start focusing on your wife and she gets hurt, it ends up affecting you. It can bring a lot of pressure to a marriage."
 
 

But in time, his career at least would rebound. After a "near miss" in which he signed on, then dropped out of making FLASHDANCE for Paramount (a movie he simply couldn't believe in enough to go through with), he accepted an offer from Universal and Martin Bregman to direct a remake of SCARFACE they were developing with Al Pacino. The result, to be covered in this site's next section, wasn't quite an incredible box office success on its release in December 1983, but its growing cult popularity did in time help repair the damage done to his standing within the industry. Oddly enough, Travolta was also considered for a part in SCARFACE (in the role played by Steven Bauer). But this, as well as FIRE -- in which Travolta would have played a performer modeled after sixties rock star Jim Morrison -- never panned out, and the actor's career soon began its own downward slide.

In recent years, as luck would have it, BLOW OUT's reputation has increased a little among movie buffs, due in part to the open admiration shown for it by Quentin Tarantino, who championed Travolta's performance and convinced the star to take a chance on his "comeback" role in PULP FICTION. Yet even now, full recognition is still overdue. Whether or not it ever comes, one thing's for sure: nothing has deterred De Palma's individual voice in American film. "There's no doubt to me that BLOW OUT was never taken seriously," he told writer Michael Bliss in 1983. But, as he later maintained, "you've got to realize that when you've made a movie that may be commercially disastrous, it may also be the best work you've ever done." Two decades later, more than a few fans are in complete agreement.