REMINDS OF THE STORY BEHIND 'BLOW OUT'
The Criterion Collection posted this photo on its Facebook page today, showing someone holding up a film strip from David Lean's Lawrence Of Arabia. It reminded me of Brian De Palma talking about the formation of the ideas that led to Blow Out. And it seems rather timely, after yesterday's post of audio between De Palma and Noah Baumbach, to post the following link and excerpt from someone who saw and heard Baumbach introduce a screening of Blow Out as part of BAMcinématek's De Palma retrospective in 2011 (it was around this time that De Palma's film was released as part of the Criterion Collection, and included, as one of its bonus features, Baumbach interviewing De Palma about the film).Here's the excerpt from 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Film:
Before the screening of BLOW OUT, Noah Baumbach offered some interesting stories about his experiences with Brian De Palma. According to him, the idea for BLOW OUT came about when De Palma was doing some sound editing. Apparently, in order to separate sound effects on a reel, film was spliced in between each sound. Upon examining a reel closer, De Palma found that cut-up film from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (a film he cites as one of his favorites) was being used as this garbage filler. Therefore, applying this to BLOW OUT, something of great importance (much like De Palma’s discovery of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, in this instance) can be found in between sounds, just like the gunshot within the context of his own film. Also, Baumbach said the scenes within the recording studio in BLOW OUT were also inspired by a real event where De Palma was sick of using the same old sound effects for his films, and wanted something fresh to work with. This is similar to the wind sound effect and the scream in the opening scene. And, if you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that the “need” for this new scream sound effect shows up at the end.