Blow Out (1981)

Starring: John Travolta, John Lithgow, Nancy Allen, and Dennis Franz
Grade: A+

Strangely enough, I have always been a huge fan of Blow Out‘s movie poster too. I can’t explain why. It just works.

Summary

Jack Terry (Travolta) is a sound technician for low-budget horror films. The opening of the film shows a large sequence from one of the slasher films he’s working on, Co-Ed Frenzy. In the sequence, we see bunch of different college women in a sorority doing a variety of different things from having sex, to studying, to dancing, to masturbating, to showering.

By the time the killer goes to stab the girl in the shower and the actress screams, we cut to Terry sitting next to a producer because they are watching the unfinished film. Terry laughs because of how poor the scream was by the actress. Producer Sam (Peter Boyden) is actually surprised that it’s her real scream because he thought Jack dubbed it, though Sam admits he hired her for her tits and not for her scream. Jack wants to move on, but Sam gets serious with him, asking him how long they’ve been working together. Remembering how they met on Blood Bath and subsequently worked on Blood Bath II, Bad Day at Blood Beach, Bordello of Blood, and now Co-Ed Frenzy, he realizes it’s been almost two years. Now, Sam is calling out Jack for his recent laziness in producing some of the sound on the film and wants him to take a little more initiative, including small things like the sound of the wind. Obviously, the scream needs to be changed as well. As Jack readies some things in his office, he turns on the television to see that a recent poll taken shows the nationwide support Governor George McRyan would get if he ran for president. Apparently, if there were an election today, he’d win with 62% of the vote compared to the current president’s 23%, though the president’s campaign manager Jack Manners (Maurice Copeland) is interviewed and argues that he’s had to make tough decisions, but his new policies will change the public’s support because they see it greatly helping the economy. Going back to news anchor Frank Donahue (Curt May), he states that many in Congress are expecting McRyan to declare his candidacy for president and it could happen at the “Liberty Day” kickoff celebration dinner. Liberty Day is a big holiday in Philadelphia, but this year is special. It’s been 100 years since the Liberty Bell was last rung. To honor it, there will be a big parade on Saturday down Market Street, and it will end at Penn’s Landing where there will be a spectacular display of fireworks. In addition, a full-size replica of the Liberty Bell has been made out of pennies donated by school children from every state in the union and it will be brought out after the fireworks.

Later that night, Jack goes out to record wind noise on some bridge. A couple notices Jack as he starts to record their conversation from afar, and the girl is creeped out by it and forces the man to leave with her, even though he didn’t really care. Jack continues to record more noise from the natural elements around him until he hears a car blowout in the distance. He sees the car and it crashes into the creek below him. He springs into action and swims underwater to potentially save whoever is inside. Under the bridge, an unknown figure is seen, and he escapes without being seen by Jack. Underwater, Jack sees the driver is dead but is able to break open the window with a rock to save the woman, Sally Bedina (Allen). At the hospital, a cop questions Jack about everything that happened. Jack says he heard a bang before the blowout noise of the car. The cop thinks the bang that he heard was just an echo, but Jack explains his job as a sound man and he’s confident in what he heard. He continues telling the cop what happened, but the cop is annoyingly uninformed. He is even surprised to hear that Jack pulled Sally from the car, despite that being the whole reason Jack is there. Did nobody brief this moron? Anyway, Jack goes to see Sally and the doctor tells him that she was lucky to avoid any major injuries, though she is currently sedated. Once Jack goes over to her, she’s out of her bed and still loopy. Jack introduces himself to her, they flirt a little bit, and he helps her back onto the bed. He asks her out sometime when everything clears up and she accepts. Because she’s still heavily sedated though, she wants to go tonight and gets upset when Jack has to leave. She also hates hospitals and wants out. To try and get her to stay put, he agrees to get her clothes and everything for them to go out that night. Exiting the room and entering the lobby, Jack sees a myriad of cops and a frenzy happening. Something isn’t right.

He overhears the cop he talked to earlier speaking with Lawrence Henry (John McMartin), an assistant and friend of McRyan. Henry wants to speak to Jack and Sally, but Jack tells him that she’s sleeping and to make it quick with him because he wants to go home. Jack goes to another cop and asks what happened. Apparently, the guy in the car with Sally was McRyan. The guy was on his way to being the next president and now he’s dead. Plus, Jack witnessed the whole thing. Henry takes Jack into a private room. Once he confirms that Jack was the one who pulled Sally out of the car, he tells Jack that he wants him to forget he ever saw her, so they can avoid embarrassing McRyan’s family. He doesn’t see how he can hide it because he already told the police about how he saved Sally, but Henry assures him it’s been squared away with the police. He just wants Jack to talk to her to make sure things are good. Jack isn’t sure, but Henry forces his hand because the news that McRyan was cheating could be devastating to his family. Reluctantly, Jack agrees to go through with it, so Henry helps Jack and Sally exit out the back unseen. Jack drives Sally, who is still in her hospital gown, to a motel and lays her in bed. Staying up, he takes his sound equipment out of the car and listens to the tape he recorded of the incident while staying in her room for the night, imagining himself back at the scene as he does it. It only confirms his suspicions of a gunshot. Meanwhile, some mysterious man who we later know as Burke (Lithgow) elsewhere in the city, breaks into a mechanics’ workshop and does some alterations to a car inside. The next morning, Sally wakes up Jack with coffee. He fell asleep in the chair with his headset still on, and he quickly explains his job of recording sound effects for movies, which is why his equipment is all over the table. Sally starts to talk about how she does makeup and has a dream to do it for the movies one day. Jack tells her that he recorded her accident last night when he was working, and he wants her to listen to it because he thinks her tire was shot out by someone. She thinks he’s crazy, but he wants her to check it out.

Jack tells Sally that she will hear two sounds. The first is a gunshot and the second is a blowout. She hears the noise but can’t decipher anything concrete.

Jack changes the subject to ask what she was doing with McRyan, but then she gets all defensive and readies herself to leave. He brings up going out for a drink like they talked about, but she says it’ll be some other time. Once he mentions how he saved her life so it’s the least she can do, she agrees and tells him to call her at her friend Judy’s place. Sometime after, Jack goes to work. While in his office, Sam runs in and turns on his television to show him how the news got video of McRyan’s crash. Local photographer Manny Karp (Franz) was there at the scene and sold his footage of the crash to some magazine. They go to him being questioned by a bunch of reporters, and Karp talks about how he was there to test out a new high speed film stock good for night shooting. He heard the car starting to skid and turned to film the whole thing. He said he didn’t see anyone else in the car. Jack immediately runs out and buys a newspaper from a newsstand that has the exclusive pictures Karp sold, skipping out on the auditions he was supposed to sit in on. Grabbing the keys to the office for animation, Jack goes in and studies the photos, cutting out specific ones that led up to the crash into the creek. He takes his own closeup pictures of them and puts them in a container, as he’s starting to conduct his own investigation of some sort. He tries to run out of the building, but Sam stops him and brings him into his office to check out three actresses’ screams. All three are on the couch, and Sam points at one after the other so they demonstrate their scream for him. Unimpressed, Jack tells Sam to keep looking. Jack goes to a film deposit place he frequents, but the worker there is very busy. Jack asks the worker to help him as a personal favor, so he tells him to come back after midnight. Next, Jack calls Sally to finally have that drink. Hearing that she’s going to the train station, he goes to meet her there. She’s in a hurry and her train leaves in 20 minutes, so it takes a bit of convincing once Jack gets there and they agree to a 10-minute sit-down.

At the small place they have a drink at, Sally talks about how important the face is because it’s the first thing someone sees and how it relates to makeup. Jack plays into it and acts as if he can’t tell she was wearing make-up and she buys it completely, explaining how this is the “No Makeup” look and it took two hours. He has her demonstrate how she would fix someone’s makeup if they had a broken nose but when he starts smiling at her, she realizes that he wasn’t actually interested, and he did this so she would miss her train. He tells Sally that he didn’t want her to go because he liked her, and she was already leaving. Not necessarily floored with him because she barely knows him, he invites her to ask about anything, so she asks how he got a job in sound. Jack talks about how as a kid he would fix radios, made his own stereos, and won all the science fairs. This led to him going to the army, where he refined his skills in communications. Following this, he worked with the police for a while in the Kean Commission. The Kean Commission were a group of politicians that got together to try and stop police corruption. Jack walks around certain details when she asks further and he tries to change the subject back to the movies, but Sally insists she wants to hear about what happened with the police. Getting dead serious, Jack explains how he wired their best undercover cop Freddie Corso. One of Freddie’s cases was to set up a corrupt police captain who was trying to shake down a mob guy. Jack’s job was to rig a wire for him to record the conversation, so he strapped the wire to Freddie’s waist. In a flashback with Jack narrating things, we go to the scene where Jack and his partner are in a car listening in on Freddie’s job. Tailing the car that Captain Kennedy, Freddie, and the mob guy are in, Kennedy is revealing everything that can put himself away. Unfortunately, Freddie gets nervous and starts to sweat. Because of this, the battery in the transmitter shorted and started to burn a hole in him.

He has the car pull over to act like he needs to go to the bathroom, but Freddie instead goes into the building to rip the wire off. The mob guy goes in to check on Freddie. Seeing this in the other car, Jack wants to go in to help because he knows the battery is burning a hole in Freddie, but his partner tells him to stay put because it will blow Freddie’s cover. Jack sees the mob guy exit the building, getting into the car, and leaving. So, Jack runs and finds Freddie was hung with the wire and killed. Freddie died because of Jack’s equipment, and he still feels guilty of it to this day. Going back to the present, Sally feels for him. Jack changes the subject to Henry speaking to him to cover up the whole thing, and Sally says Henry spoke to her too. That’s why she is leaving town. Henry gave her money to disappear for a couple of months. Jack is starting to come to the conclusion that they are covering up much more than Sally being with McRyan. He knows that tire was shot out. He mentions Karp’s photographs and how he synced it up with his audio recording and invites her to see both of them together. Jack is confident that she will come to the same conclusion that it was no blowout. He asks her to stick around for a couple of days because he really thinks she can help him with this thing, but she’s not sure because she’s in enough trouble as it is. Still, Jack wants to clear his conscience of this and see this through. Once he does, he suggests they can even leave town together. Smiling, she says she’ll think about it. Following this, the mysterious Burke looks at a photograph of Sally on a bed. He spots a woman that looks like her, steals an ice pick from a fish market, chokes the woman from behind, tackles her into a construction site, kills her, and carves her up further with the ice pick.

Yeah, Jack is right. This cover-up goes much deeper than just Sally.

My Thoughts:

We say it about a lot of films but Blow Out not being a mammoth success at the box office is a travesty. It’s not only one of the best films of 1981, but it’s also one of filmmaker Brian De Palma’s best and one of star John Travolta’s best. Blow Out is a bleak thriller that works as an ode to the intricacies of filmmaking and what can come of history-changing political conspiracies and events like the Zapruder film, Watergate, or the Chappaquiddick incident. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for the darkness to win as much as it does, but the shocking realities of De Palma’s memorable mystery is what makes the daring narrative ahead of its time and deserving of its continued critical praise over the years.

John Travolta gets a lot of flak for the productions he agreed to be a part of and how his star waned for a variety of different reasons but Blow Out is unfairly considered to be among the examples as to why he went through this career downswing. Yes, this movie bombed with audiences, but keep in mind that Staying Alive was a huge success at the box office. Are we going to equate the amount of money made as a barometer for success/failure? Of course not! At Cinema Loco, we are here to discuss the art of film, television, and everything in between and how good they actually are regardless of its on-paper success. Though it sometimes aides an argument with how much money something makes, it still all comes down to how good the storytelling and all of the elements of the production as a whole is. There are plenty of box office blockbusters that are trash, and critical bombs that are actually good. Though it wasn’t popular with mainstream audiences at the time, Blow Out is outstanding. There is a reason that critics adored it, and many revered filmmakers still praise it to this day. Inspired by the legendary Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, De Palma changes the focus from photography to audio recording and gives us what could be a first in terms of the history of movie protagonists, a sound engineer for low-budget horror films. John Travolta is phenomenal as Jack Terry, as he suddenly finds himself in the middle of this cover-up that reaches up to the highest level of government in America. With only the help of the incredibly naive Sally, Jack is practically working alone in trying to figure out the truth of Governor McRyan’s inexplicable “blowout” because he knows there’s more to it. Part of it is his redemption, as we learn early on how his work with the police on the Kean Commission led to the death of Freddie Corso because of his equipment screwing things up. Very rarely will you think about the sound guy that hooks up the wire for informants in movies, but that changes here with a frantic performance by Travolta.

The outcome of Jack’s work with the police results in him being haunted every day, as evidenced by his notable change in energy when describing the flashback story to Sally. With this McRyan thing brewing, he can’t let it happen again. With this situation being even bigger and seeing how he can make up for things by doing something about it, he becomes obsessed with the plot at hand, especially because it could threaten his life. As an expert in sound, he knows he heard a gunshot, but no one wants to hear him out on the matter and they refuse the possibility, as everyone who should be in line to help Jack is more interested in moving on. Jack is intelligent and confident on the realities of his situation, and it’s refreshing. He knows he’s going to be referred to as a conspiracy nut if he doesn’t have damning evidence. The problem is that he’s the only person who can get this evidence and piece it all together because there’s not a single soul who wants to pursue the case further including Mackey, the cop who gives Jack so much shit that you’d think he was in on it. In a great scene showing the uphill battle someone like Jack would be facing in a situation like this, Mackey instantly tells Jack that he gets conspiracy people like him all the time and how he’s saying nothing of worth, calling everything an accident and referring to Jack as an “ear witness to an assassination”. Granted, a cop like Mackey in a major city probably does run into conspiracy people all the time, but it’s his job to sift through them to see if there’s any sort of truth involved to worry about. His refusal to do so incenses the viewer, as we know Jack’s hunch has weight to it because no one knows sound like him. He’s a literal expert in the field but someone like Mackey doesn’t think it matters at all. Despite being a cop, Mackey stands in the way as yet another obstacle for Jack when he should be listening to him. He has to be practically begged to look into it further, and it’s hard not to see this scene as a realistic one.

As much as people want those in law enforcement to be like the ones they see in the movies that go above and beyond to help those in need, most are normal people who do their jobs and would rather call it a day anytime they have an out. It’s a pessimistic outlook on life, but it’s quite realistic when you factor in everything and the turns in which the story goes. Really, it’s like 75% of the point of Blow Out. It’s preying on the fact that this is genuinely how people react to stuff like this. They pass it off as some crazy person spewing nonsense. It’s like when Frank Donahue wants Jack to come on the news to talk about it because he thinks there is truth to what Jack has been saying. Plus, he somehow knows about Jack telling the cops he heard the tire being shot out. Donahue also knows that Sally was in the car too and no one is talking about it, so he wants Jack to reveal his information for his 8 million viewers. Unfortunately, but also realistically, Jack immediately dismisses the idea because he doesn’t think anyone will believe it, especially without the evidence. In this specific scene, I do have to give credit to Travolta for doing such a great job in his performance because he’s able to convey Jack’s cynicism in the moment, as this scene just followed the moment where he finds that his tapes are erased (which only furthers his theories that there is a powerful force that doesn’t want this information getting out), but also Jack still wanting to believe Donahue’s thoughts on the matter. The problem is still the reality of how the public perceives things. This is the genius of the villain in Burke. He knows law enforcement will think of Jack as a crackpot if he spouts all of this stuff to them and delivers a blank tape to the police, which is why he snuck into his office and erased Jack’s tapes right before he sent one to Mackey to prove himself. Mackey was already begrudgingly hearing out Jack beforehand and couldn’t be less interested in what he had to say, so this just confirms his wrongful suspicions. Mackey didn’t even check McRyan’s tire for the bullet hole because “everyone else says it was an accident” and dismisses Jack, despite him bringing up the valid points of (1) none of the cops possessing the tape, (2) they didn’t check the tire, and (3) they didn’t speak to Jack when he was actually there.

Instead of analyzing these crucial points that Jack is bringing up that could add serious weight to his claims in the eyes of those that can actually help, the real issue is revealed in that Mackey still has a personal problem with Jack himself because of his work for the Kean Commission. Even though it has nothing to do with what’s happening at that moment, Mackey has the audacity to say that Jack put a lot of “good cops” away, even though Jack’s whole job was ending police corruption. At that point, the viewer can see this is a lost cause and so does Jack, which is why he goes to grab his tape upon his exit. Though Mackey tells Jack he doesn’t like him, it’s not going to stop him from doing his job and he will have it sent to the lab to check it out. Unbeknownst to both of them however, Burke already erased the tapes at this point because as I stated before, it would stop Jack in his tracks with those in law enforcement who don’t believe him to begin with. Regardless, Jack accepts Mackey’s “help” in the matter and also suggests that he take a look at the film he made from Karp’s photographs. If they get Karp’s original film, he’s adamant that the gunshot will be clearer. When Mackey argues that Karp is selling it to magazines and questions why he would give it to the cops, Jack has to point out something that Mackey should already know: IT’S EVIDENCE DIPSHIT! Mackey’s only defense to this is that he can’t find Karp, as if this just lets that son of a bitch off scot-free. Jack reminds him it’s his job, and Mackey gets defensive because of it. Well, fuck dude, you’re terrible at your job! He threw in the towel just because he can’t find the guy? He’s withholding evidence! There isn’t a single thing Jack said to him that was wrong, but Mackey doesn’t want to do anything about it because he’s busy and feels like the answer of things being an “accident” are good enough. On top of all that, Mackey continues his agitating responses by stopping Jack from walking away with the tape out of frustration by threatening to have him arrested for withholding evidence!

Where’s that energy for literally everyone else? Well, that’s the police in a nutshell. This is why I love Travolta’s Jack Terry. At this point, it’s not even about McRyan or politics (“This isn’t for him! I know he’s dead!”), and though what happened in his past has inspired him to pursue this further, the real motivation is what motivates anyone who fights for the less fortunate. Though Mackey doesn’t want to hear it, Jack is right in arguing, “If they can get away with this and kill McRyan, who’s next?”. That’s the real question. The powers behind the scenes can continue to do heinous things and influence the outcomes they want if everyone lets it go unchecked and don’t bother to do what’s right because they don’t want the job. Here, they are gifted a golden opportunity because there was just enough evidence left behind for someone to stand in there way with Jack Terry’s recording. He just wants to expose it but someone like Mackey, who really represents the public in a way, shuns the whole thing just because Jack doesn’t have an answer yet as to who “They” is. It’s too early in his investigation to have an answer to every question, and being a cop, Mackey should know this better than anyone. Sadly, he uses this argument to try and make everything Jack brought to his attention as irrelevant. It’s annoyingly true to life. All of these developments leave Jack and Sally with a very difficult decision that Jack states rather bluntly, “You can be crazy or dead. Either will do”. They can either be referred to as crazy together if they show Karp’s original film with Jack’s recorded audio on the news, with the expectation being that they will be called conspiracy theorists (but alive ones), or they will be killed because they are unknown figures to the public and are the only people who know what happened, so the people behind the scenes will kill take them out to tie up the last of the loose ends. It’s scary but not out of the realm of possibility. That’s for sure.

Making Jack a sound engineer is such a unique storytelling device, and it allows for a series of intriguing visuals to set Blow Out apart from its peers in the genre. Unless you’re a sound man yourself, not many people realize the details involved in the job, but Blow Out does a great job at dramatizing the career for the audience to show how important the role is to making movies, with many scenes in which Jack cuts film and mixes audio to recreate the McRyan crash while studying it tirelessly to prove to himself and others that there is something bigger at play here, with certain elements of the story being similar to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. For the record, I would argue Blow Out is the superior movie by a slim margin, but I digress. These scenes succeed at showing not only what a sound man can do, but also why it makes Jack well-equipped and skilled enough in his abilities to have a chance to pull this thing off, even though he’s fighting this battle almost alone. One of Brian De Palma’s biggest attributes as a filmmaker is how striking the visual composition of his movies can be, as even his most forgettable film can have memorable and lasting imagery. Blow Out is yet another example of De Palma at his best with hair-raising sequences like the overhead shots of Sally stealing Karp’s film after hitting him with the bottle or Jack in his office, the slow-motion race to save Sally, the fireworks display in the background of the emotional finish in a payoff that is arguably one of the finest of the decade, and the beauty of the contentious continuous shot of Jack searching through his tape collection before he realizes everything was erased. The sense of paranoia and the rising tension felt within that scene alone, as it gets faster and faster while being complimented by Travolta’s frenzied response, is palpable. Truth be told, it might be one of my favorite shots of all time. Say what you want about the content of De Palma’s films in terms of story, but his mastery and artistry in creating innovative spectacles out of the most mundane of scenes is pure cinema and seems to be a lost art in a lot of movies today.

Without going into specifics, I cannot praise the ending enough. It was pure poetry. Along with the music being this seamless compliment to the action, Travolta played the moment perfectly, and the emotions captured in those final scenes stay with you to your very core. It’s magnificently done all around. Sometimes people watch a great movie, but there is an ending that just sours everything. On the other hand, the opposite can happen just as often. In Blow Out‘s case, it was already a great movie to begin with, but the ending turned it into something transcendent in a cinematic, “live forever” type of way.

Nancy Allen’s Sally is a tough role to play without pissing off the audience, as her simple-mindedness tests your patience. Then again, she does eventually win the viewer over because of her innocence (despite her not-so-innocent job beforehand), as well as the fact that she just doesn’t want the headache of pursuing things further. It’s not until Jack’s persistence and how important uncovering this corruption is, as it led to someone dying, that she does decide to take it further. Well, it’s that and the fact that Karp was willing to leave her dead for the payoff while underpaying Sally at the same time. Jack has to explain to Sally how she played a role in what’s happening after hearing all the details and how her life is at risk too, which is why she needs to help and get that original film from Karp to prove Jack’s theory. Though her role in this is small, it’s pivotal to both of their survival. Sally is a sweet person to her core, but she needs someone to lean on, which is where Jack steps in. With that in mind, Allen does a good job of what the role is asking of her, as her naivety makes Jack that much stronger as a hero. He’s doing 90% of the work, but he just needs someone to aid the last 10% because this personal mission cannot be done alone. That’s why they’re such a great match for each other, and also why he’s so personally affected by the outcome of it all. Though they flirted a bit, the story doesn’t take a romantic angle, and it doesn’t need to. This is just one man trying to stop something awful and him asking the only person who can possibly help to do so. Sally was perfectly fine in skipping town and putting everything behind her, but she only relents because of Jack’s insistence that they need to do something and because they can both be killed if nothing is done. He just wants for her to believe in him for a short amount of time, just so they can make a difference. That is all that’s needed to lead us to the conclusion of the movie, and their friendship makes the ending mean that much more. I can’t commend De Palma enough for how he gets there, especially because it took balls to go in the direction he did for that time period.

Though I could be looking into things too much, was Sally the only one offered money to skip town? She mentions how she was offered money by Lawrence Henry, but Henry doesn’t offer Jack anything in their lone scene together when he asks Jack not to say anything. Are we supposed to believe that Henry just trusted this stranger to not mention anything about this crash with no benefit to himself? Had Henry paid Jack off or least offered the money and Jack refused it, this would make a little more sense, but we are given no reason to believe Henry offered Jack money like he did to Sally. If he didn’t and its presented as is, Jack’s efforts are Henry’s fault entirely. Besides this lone exception, everything that happens in the narrative is like clockwork and all the loose ends of every detail are explained thoroughly, especially the key facts that Sally doesn’t know what Donahue looks like and Jack not having time to make a copy of the original film, just his tape, leading us to the conclusion we get.

The supporting cast plays their roles well. For some reason, John Lithgow is just great at playing crazy bad guys. Burke being this contracted killer who just goes by his own rules is an interesting development. It’s right from the start too. He speaks with Jack Manners over the phone and even he chastises Burke for killing McRyan because they only wanted incriminating pictures to mess up his campaign. Burke says what happened was indeed an accident, but he still sees that the objective was achieved. It’s also interestingly noted that they declined Burke’s original plan, but Burke went through with it anyway. This guy cannot be stopped. He’s crazy but kind of a genius, explaining to Manners that he changed the tire to make it look like a blowout and how he erased the tapes to make Jack look crazy. On top of all this, this mad man decides he needs to kill Sally, but to cover this up too, he comes up with the devastatingly brilliant, albeit evil, plan of killing similar looking women in the area to make it look like there is a serial killer performing a series of related sex killings. Even Manners cuts ties with the dude after hearing it all in the phone call because of how unpredictable Burke is. Still, it works, and the “serial killer” is referred to as “The Liberty Bell Strangler” by the news. This is the work of a true mastermind, and credit goes to De Palma’s screenplay for coming up with so many of these expert ideas to beef up the narrative further. The added bonus of the twist involving Sally’s work with Karp and how they make money off of putting rich men in compromising positions for photographs to make money was yet another example of how clever the screenplay is and how inventive certain parts are to get the characters where they need to be to strengthen a new layer to the drama unfolding. With this in mind, Dennis Franz’s slimy portrayal of Karp played a crucial role in this, especially with his holding out on the details to Sally until she confronts him about it and how he tries to influence her decision by telling her why things happened the way they did and how they can make money off. Then, there’s him subsequently using the same exact argument to almost comedic effect as to why she can’t go public with it.

Raw, real, beautifully directed, very well written and thought out, and possessing an ending of a lifetime, Blow Out would be one of the most influential movies of its time had it been seen by more people. Thankfully, plenty of filmmakers have seen it and see it for what it’s worth, a cinematic experience that it is one of the best of the decade. In hindsight, John Travolta picked a great production to be a part of here and he should not regret it for a second.

Fun Fact: Al Pacino was considered for the role of Jack Terry.