Body Double
Short description
Jake Scully is a struggling Hollywood actor whose claustrophobia has cost him a role in a low-budget vampire horror film. He also finds his girlfriend with another man, leaving him without a place to stay. A fellow actor, Sam Bouchard, offers him the use of a luxurious hillside house while Sam is away. Alone there, Jake passes the time watching a woman named Gloria Revelle through a telescope as she performs an erotic dance at her window each night. When he witnesses her murder, he sets out to find out who was responsible, a search that draws him into the adult film industry and into the company of porn actress Holly Body.
Brian De Palma directed, produced and co-wrote the film with Robert J. Avrech, following Scarface in 1983 and preceding The Untouchables in 1987; it is the eleventh of the twenty-four features he has directed. Craig Wasson plays Jake, with Melanie Griffith as Holly Body, Gregg Henry as Sam Bouchard, Deborah Shelton as Gloria Revelle, Guy Boyd and Dennis Franz in supporting roles. Around sixty performers and seventy crew members are credited.
Made for about ten million dollars and released in October 1984, the film returned roughly nine million worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 6.8 from about forty-five thousand votes, and on TMDB 6.7 from around nine hundred sixty. A critics' rating of 6.1 from forty-one reviews places it somewhat below the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Brian De Palma initially planned for this to be the first Hollywood film to feature scenes of real, rather than simulated, sex. The studio did not support this idea.
- Initially, porn star Annette Haven was approved for the role of Holly Body. However, after Columbia Pictures executives saw the kinds of films she appeared in, they decided to replace her with Melanie Griffith.
- In one scene, Jake Scully watches a music video by the new wave band Vivabeat – "The House Is Burning (But There's No One Home)."
- The film is replete with allusions to Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958) – plot-related: the idea of a false witness, a double of the victim, a scene of surveillance of the main character; visual – a circular camera movement in the scene where the heroes kiss on the beach, a change in the hair color of the fake Gloria, etc.
- Bret Easton Ellis's novel "American Psycho" contains a number of allusions and direct references to the painting "A False Body" (1984), as it is the favorite film of the book's protagonist, Patrick Bateman.
- When a film producer asks Jake Scully about the films he has starred in, he replies: "I was in 'Hart to Hart,' it was pretty good." Craig Wasson, who plays Jake Scully, actually starred in the eponymous series in the pilot episode.
- In the apartment of the future ex-girlfriend, a poster of Victor Fleming's classic film "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) featuring the Tin Man can be seen hanging on the wall.
- The high-altitude chase sequences are staged as a reminiscence of Colin Higgins's comedic thriller "Foul Play" (1978).
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
