Blow Out
All actors and roles (10)
Short description
Jack Terry records sound effects for low-budget horror movies. One night, while taping ambience near a bridge for his current project, he witnesses a car plunge into the river below. He dives in and pulls a young woman, Sally, from the sinking vehicle, but the driver, a state governor campaigning for the presidency, is already dead. When Jack later listens back to his recording, he picks out a sound that the police dismiss: a gunshot, audible just before the crash. His search for proof draws him closer to Sally and puts him in the path of people who want the incident treated as a simple accident.
Brian De Palma directed and co-wrote the film with Bill Mesce Jr., with George Litto producing. It was De Palma's ninth feature as director, following Dressed to Kill and preceding Scarface. John Travolta plays Jack, Nancy Allen plays Sally, and John Lithgow and Dennis Franz appear among a credited cast of fifty-two. Made for a reported eighteen million dollars, it returned about twelve million worldwide.
On IMDb the film holds 7.4 out of 10 from roughly seventy-five thousand votes, matching a 7.4 on TMDB across a much smaller sample of about seventeen hundred. A critics' score of 8.1 from fifty-nine reviews places professional assessment noticeably higher than that of general audiences.
What's left behind the scenes
- Initially, director Brian De Palma chose Al Pacino for the role of Jack Terry.
- During filming, John Travolta suffered from chronic insomnia.
- During the editing period, two reels of film containing footage from the Freedom Parade scene were stolen. They were never found. It took another $750,000 to reshoot these scenes. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was already busy with another project at the time, and was replaced by László Kovács.
- In the French version of the film, John Travolta was dubbed by Gérard Depardieu.
- The car accident alludes to the scandal known as the Chappaquiddick incident, which effectively ended the political career of Senator Ted Kennedy, brother of the late President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy (the middle of the three Kennedy brothers). On July 19, 1969, returning from a party hosted by one of his friends on Chappaquiddick Island off the U.S. Atlantic coast, Ted Kennedy lost control of the vehicle, and the car he was driving plunged off a bridge into the water. With him in the car was Mary Jo Kopechne, Robert Kennedy's secretary, with whom he had attended the party, although he had a wife and children at home. The senator managed to escape from the car and fled the scene without calling the police, later attempting to establish an alibi. His companion drowned. Thanks to his family connections, Ted Kennedy avoided prosecution but was forced to abandon his dream of becoming president forever.
- Some of the music from 'The Pier' was borrowed for the film 'Planet Terror' (2007).
- The commercial failure of the film affected John Travolta's acting career, who played the main role in it. He stopped being considered for roles in serious projects. On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino was so delighted with this film that he cast Travolta in one of the key roles in the drama "Pulp Fiction" (1994), which largely contributed to Travolta's return to the top of cinematic success.
- The underwater filming of the aftermath of the car accident took place in a huge tank in California. Nancy Allen (who played Sally) suffers from claustrophobia, so the scenes in the submerged car were not easy for her.
- The slasher film sequence at the beginning of the movie was shot by Garrett Brown himself, who used his own invention, the "Steadicam" (which allows operators to shoot with a handheld camera while walking without the inevitable shaking). Brown acted so confidently and quickly that the rest of the crew barely kept up with him. When one of the slasher characters holds a knife in front of the camera and strikes the guard, Garrett himself was holding the knife, because there was no other way to shoot the scene.
- The scene in which the car goes underwater required the construction of a dam over 18 meters long and 4.5 meters high to ensure the water level was high enough. 7 days were spent filming this scene. After filming, the filmmakers had to dismantle the dam to return the stream to its usual bed – this was insisted upon by environmental activists.
- The parade scene for National Freedom Day (celebrated on February 1st) was filmed with 11 cameras plus one mounted on a helicopter. The filming involved 1,000 extras, 25 stunt drivers, as well as fire trucks and police cars from Philadelphia.
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