Blow Out - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Blow Out or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Blow Out

[liam]

Jack mentions working on a fictitious movie called "Bordello of Blood", which was actually an unproduced screenplay for an exploitation horror-comedy about a private detective whose investigation leads him to a brothel run by vampires, written by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis in the 1970s, which, despite admiration from John Milius, wasn't produced until 1996 as Bordello of Blood (1996).

[wallace]

Julie Christie and Dyan Cannon were considered early on for the role of Sally, had Jack been played by an older actor.

[victoria]

Nancy Allen envisioned the character of Sally as a little rag doll.

[edgar]

Brian De Palma has said that Blow Out was a very arduous movie to film.

[jessica]

The slasher movie sequence that is being dubbed at the beginning was shot by Garret Brown on his invention, the Steadicam. He was so skilled and fast on his feet with the rig that the crew struggled to keep up with him, Including the focus puller. When the "slasher" holds up the knife in front of the camera and stabs the security guard, that too is Garett Brown holding the knife as this was the only way to get the shot to work.

[manuel]

Personal Effects was the original title of the film.

[kenneth]

The use of a split-focus diopter lens is evident in several scenes, in particular the sound recording scene and the hospital scene. The split-focus lens is attached to the main lens, and it affects only the left or right portion of the main lens' view. This changes the focal distance of part of the image, allowing objects at two distances (in the foreground and background) to be in sharp focus.

[addison]

The idea of a man discovering a crime by listening to a recording is a reinterpretation of Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up (1966), but using sound instead of photographs.

[gerald]

John Travolta and John Lithgow later appeared in A Civil Action (1998).

[ken]

In a January 2019 Q&A at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles, Nancy Allen credited Quentin Tarantino's much-cited love of the film for helping spawn a critical reevaluation in the 90's. Over the years, she said, many writers began to call it Brian De Palma's masterpiece, culminating in its well-received 2011 disc release by the Criterion Collection.

[bernice]

The Liberty Day festivities are based on those of the United States Bicentennial in 1976.

[sophie]

The accident at the start of the film alludes to the Kennedy incident at Chappaquiddick.

[alyssa]

The film alludes to the Watergate scandal and the JFK assassination.

[russell]

One of eight collaborations between composer Pino Donaggio and Brian De Palma including Carrie (1976), Home Movies (1979), Dressed to Kill (1980), Body Double (1984), Raising Cain (1992), Passion (2012) and Domino (2019).

[jeffrey]

Burke was modeled after G. Gordon Liddy, leader of the "White House Plumbers" that became central players in the Watergate scandal.