Brian De Palma's reputation as a master craftsman of psycho-sexual thrillers and stylish suspense films looms so prominently over his career that his interest in political and social themes are often forgotten. Blow Out (1981) is a marriage of the two, a thriller that spins themes and events from political crimes and scandals into a tense conspiracy thriller steeped in political cynicism, moral corruption and bureaucratic complicity.
John Travolta stars in the film as Jack Terry, a sound technician working on low-budget horror movies. While scouting sounds for a new production, he inadvertently records a car wreck that kills a political candidate and ends up investigating a political conspiracy and cover-up. Nancy Allen, De Palma's then wife and frequent star, plays a part-time call girl who gets caught up in the cover-up and the investigation. The title makes clear the inspiration of Blow Up (1966), Michelangelo Antonioni's film of a fashion photographer who becomes obsessed when he thinks he inadvertently photographed a murder. Blow Out, uses tools of filmmaking in Terry's investigation. The situation, meanwhile, draws from such real-life crimes and incidents as Chappaquiddick, Watergate and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It was a personal project for De Palma, who had been developing the story for a few years. "What I wanted to do in the film is to show how haphazard—as opposed to precisely worked out—a conspiracy is." De Palma was, by his own admission, an assassination buff, which inspired the political setting. While making Dressed to Kill (1980) he became interested in the work of his own sound technician recording wild sounds for new sound effects for the film. After working for over a year on the film Prince of the City (1981), De Palma was suddenly replaced, and some of his ideas for that film were worked into the screenplay, notably a flashback to a police surveillance operation involving an undercover officer wired for sound by Terry.
De Palma originally had Al Pacino in mind for the lead but Travolta lobbied for the role after reading the script. De Palma had directed Travolta in Carrie (1976) and reconceived Terry as a younger man. It gave the actor an opportunity to play against the kinds of roles that made him a star in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). It was Travolta who suggested Nancy Allen, De Palma's wife, for the not-too-bright call girl, and he talked Allen into it. "I never doubted that she could play it but we both agreed that she should follow up Dressed to Kill with something other than a prostitute," De Palma explained in a 1981 interview. "But John convinced both of us that she should do Sally." According to Travolta, who had previously worked with Allen on Carrie, "the chemistry was so good between us, I just knew we'd be perfect together in Blow Out." Other De Palma regulars were cast in key roles: John Lithgow took another sinister part in the reckless, cold-blooded killer Burke and Dennis Franz, who had been in The Fury (1978) and Dressed to Kill, plays a sleazy private investigator. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond previously shot Obsession (1976) for De Palma and Blow Out became the director's fourth collaboration composer Pino Donaggio.
The film was shot largely on location in Philadelphia, with sets built at the Port of History Museum in downtown Philadelphia. As De Palma explained it, "I come from Philadelphia and I wanted to play this sort of contemporary political story against the old conceptions of liberty and independence and truth." The film's major set piece, a surveillance/chase sequence through a Liberty Day Parade (an event created for the story), required over 1,000 extras and 25 stunt drivers and was shot with 11 cameras, including one mounted on a custom-made helicopter rig.
The production faced a serious setback when 2,000 feet of original film negative was stolen from a freight company truck. The footage included an expensive stunt sequence of a Jeep racing through City Hall and crashing through a display window at the department store Wanamaker's and scenes shot in the first days of principle photography. To reconstruct the sequence, the production team had to recreate the parade, and it took two days of filming with over 500 extras. Zsigmond, the film's cinematographer, was unavailable, so his colleague and close friend László Kovács stepped in for the reshoot.
De Palma returned to his favorite cinematic devices, using split-screens and long takes for key sequences and turning to split diopter lenses to stage action in close-up on one side of the screen and long shot on the other side. And he used the Steadicam camera system for the first time on the suggestion of Zsigmond. They even secured Garrett Brown, the creator of the Steadicam, to operate it for the opening sequence, a long take point-of-view shot from a cheap horror film that Terry is working on. Brown, excited to outdo Halloween's (1978) memorable opening, was disappointed to discover he was hired to create a parody of a bad slasher movie, and thus had to be purposely sloppy. He was, however, impressed by how well prepared the entire cast and crew was for the challenge of the elaborate long take. The Steadicam long take became a staple of De Palma's work and ultimately became one of his directorial trademarks.
"[M]ore important than anything else about Blow Out is its total, complete and utter preoccupation with film itself as a medium," wrote Vincent Canby in his New York Times review. The film "is exclusively concerned with the mechanics of movie making, with the use of photographic and sound equipment and, especially, with the manner in which sound and images can be spliced together to reveal possible truths not available when the sound and the image are separated." If Canby's review was cautiously positive, Pauline Kael was utterly rapturous in her piece in The New Yorker. "Seeing this film is like experiencing the body of De Palma's work and seeing it in a new way," she wrote. "It's a great movie." Quentin Tarantino cited Blow Out as one of his three all-time favorite films and cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction (1994) because of his work in the film. During a meeting between the two directors, he told De Palma that he thought the film's final scene "was one of the most heartbreaking shots in the history of cinema."
Sources:
Garret Brown Interview, video interview produced by Susan Arosteguy. Criterion Collection, 2011.
Noah Baumbach Interviews Brian De Palma, video interview produced by Susan Arosteguy. Criterion Collection, 2011.
De Palma, documentary directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow. A24, 2016.
"Screen: Travolta stars in De Palma's 'Blow Out'," Vincent Canby. The New York Times, July 24, 1981.
"Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gadgeteer," Pauline Kael. The New Yorker, July 27, 1981.
Brian De Palma Interviews, ed. Laurence F. Knapp. University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
AFI Catalogue of Feature Films