Episode 106: The Conversation & Blow Out

1974's The Conversation (another Gene Hackman conspiracy thriller) and 1981's Blow Out both center around protagonists who hear something they shouldn't. Some of the equipment and techniques used in The Conversation were reportedly also used by the Nixon administration. And the murder in Blow Out seems loosely based on Chappaquiddick...

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the 1974 film "The Conversation" and the 1981 film "Blowout," both directed by American Neo noir directors. "The Conversation" follows Harry Caul, a paranoid surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman, who uncovers a conspiracy involving a director's wife and lover. The film's pacing and character development are criticized. "Blowout" stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a sound technician who witnesses a car accident involving the fictional Governor George McRyan. The film explores themes of conspiracy, *ssassination, and the dangers of uncovering secrets, with a plot twist revealing the couple in the car were the *ssassins. Both films reflect real-world conspiracy theories and surveillance practices.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Conspiracy theories, American Neo noir, The Conversation, Blowout, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, surveillance, audio recordings, paranoia, *ssassination, political conspiracy, Watergate, Chappaquiddick, Hollywood films, suspense.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host. Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I want to talk about the 1974 film, the conversation and the 1981 film, blowout. Both of those films involve protagonists who have heard something that they shouldn't, even if they don't completely understand the depth and the breadth of why they've heard something that's dangerous, or why they're being followed, why somebody's after them, now that they've heard this thing, even if they don't understand how the puzzle pieces fit together, a conspiracy is afoot. They have heard something that indeed they should not have they weren't they were never meant to know. They've gotten into forbidden knowledge, and now they're in trouble. So if you enjoy this kind of American Neo noir, mystery thriller type of film or just a good old fashioned conspiracy movie, stay tuned.

Searching for your next great read? The kind of book you can't put down? Check out Sara's award winning biography, Decoding the Unicorn on amazon.com. Now back to the show.

I'll start first with a conversation. And pardon my voice, I had to go and get a throat lozenge because my allergies are doing something. And it's like, of course, of course. Murphy's law dictates that this is what's going to happen. I finally have a free hour where I can sit down, pull all my notes together and get the microphone charged up and record this episode. And that's when my allergies are like, are you though? Are you going to have a sneezing attack, a coughing fit? Is your laryngitis going to flare up? And I'm like, please don't do this. Please just cooperate anyway. I have some water in this laws engine. I'm going to try to talk around it as best as I can. The conversation is a 1974 American Neo noir mystery thriller. It was written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He started kicking around ideas about this and getting some drafts of the screenplay put together back in the 60s, but it was the success of The Godfather that gave him the resources he needed to go ahead and finish it. And another thing that's interesting about this is that the film was nominated for, like, Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Sound. But of course, when it came out in 1974 which is the same year that the Godfather Part Two was released. The Godfather was the godfather. Part Two was the one that actually won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. So it was a bit like Coppola was competing against himself. The Conversation also has a bit of a cult following to it. There are some people who are just rabidly in love with this movie. To be honest with you, I can't say that I loved it, and was definitely not the worst film that I've ever watched in my life. That is for darn sure. I just found the pacing to be slow. There were times when I was just sitting there like, okay, okay. And also, I felt like, in order to make sure that the audience knew that the main character is paranoid and obsessive and married to his job, he kind of like drives a straight pin with a sledgehammer. It's like, Dude, we get it. Like, we understand your protagonist doesn't have a life. He's married to his work and he's obsessive. We got it. Let's move on. For me, I love German expressionist cinema. I love film noir. Which film noir came from German expressionist cinema, and then American Neo noir, which in turn, came from film noir. My favorite American Neo Noir is Angel Heart. So in a way, I think unconsciously, whenever I'm watching something else from the American Neo noir genre, I compare it to Angel Heart. I just I find that movie to be so good, the pacing, the cinematography, the setting, the dialog, the way that Mickey Rourke just deconstructs before your eyes. It's good. It's really good. And so for me, the pacing of the conversation was not as good. And so I'm just going to warn you, if you haven't already seen it, first and foremost, with any any episode I do where I'm reviewing a documentary, a movie, whatever it is, go and watch it for yourself. Don't let me spoil it for you. Make up your own mind. I assume, if you stick with me, that you're fine with spoilers, because in order to talk about the movies and their relationship to conspiracy theories and conspiracy culture, if so facto, I have to spoil the film for you. But it just Oh, my God. To me, it was like, come on. Now pick up the pace. We get it, we get it, we get it. So there were times that, to me, it felt a bit dull and plotting. Other people feel that that helps to build the suspense. It helps to build the tension. But for me, there were times I was like, checking my watch and looking at my phone, like, okay, let's, let's move this along. Now, essentially, the plot is this. There's a character named Harry call played by Gene Hackman. You may remember that not long ago, I published my episode about the domino principle, which also stars Gene Hackman in a conspiracy related film. This time around, he's Harry call, a surveillance expert who lives in San Francisco, and I guess by surveillance expert, it's almost like a dressier, flashier way of saying private investigator, except this guy really has some bona fides in the industry, and he particularly specializes in making audio recordings. It's like he is a professional eavesdropper, I guess you could say so he and his team are hired by this client, known as known, sort of known, obliquely, as the director. This man named the director, hires him to eavesdrop on a couple he doesn't know why. All he knows is that he has this directive from the director to eavesdrop on this young couple, and they just walk more or less in circles, kind of just, kind of just out and about socializing with each other in Union Square. And there's background noise, of course, because there's music, there's like somebody banging on a Bongo drum, there's people talking all around them, and it's like they've chosen deliberately to meet and to talk in a highly public place. You don't necessarily get that at first blush, but it becomes more obvious later in the film, like they have deliberately picked a public place as opposed to just having this meeting in private somewhere there, as I said, there's a bunch of background noise, ambient noise and so forth. But Harry, being this consummate professional, he's able to filter down the noise and try to get the audio recordings in as good a shape as he possibly can. We also learn that Harry is private. As I mentioned, he's married to his work, and he's, like, obsessive about his work. Doesn't really have much of a personal life. He does have kind of a part time girlfriend that's played by Terry gar but it's more like a sex thing, like, periodically, he'll show up at her apartment, have a booty call in and leave. They don't even really have much of a relationship, because she talks about herself and her life and her dreams, and he just kind of sits there like okay, and won't offer anything to her about who he is and what he wants. However, we do learn that he had been living in New York. He's now in San Francisco, so he's moved to the completely opposite coast, but he had been living in New York, and he was on a surveillance job that resulted in three people being killed. It was like the information that he provided to the client was taken as a way to facilitate the death of these three other people. So he's not only paranoid and obsessive about his work, but he also has this paranoia about the things that I did cause people to die. We learned that he's religious. He goes to confession. And there's this real fear of like, okay, on the one hand, this is a job. I'm being paid to do. It I want to compartmentalize. But then on the other it's like, I cause people to get killed. Like, what am I really doing here? The work that I'm doing as a surveillance expert has an inherent danger to it, and I'm tired of pretending that it doesn't he goes to give the recordings and then get his money, which is going to be like $15,000 from this nebulous director. However, when he shows up at the place of business where the director works, or is the head honcho, we don't know. We presume He's the director of this organization. He's met by Harrison Ford, who's a man named Martin stett, and he's like the assistant or the right hand man of the director, and Martin pretty much tells him, like, we'll make sure that you get your money hand over the recordings to us and butt out. But Harry is particular. He is, after all, this consummate professional at the top of his game, and he's like, No, I was hired by the director. I wasn't hired by you. You need to be the one to relay the message to the director. You're just a middleman. You're not somebody that I'm going to give these recordings to and wait to get paid. I will only turn the tapes over to the man who actually hired me. I will accept. Payment from him, and I will give him the tapes, but I'm just going to turn the tapes over to you. And Martin makes a comment, like, you don't know how dangerous this material is, you need to get rid of it. You need to give it to us. We'll make sure that you get paid. And then you need to butt the hell out, because you really don't know how dangerous this information is so of course, there you go like that. That cools everything right off, doesn't it? When somebody tells you you don't know how dangerous this is, that's only going to whet the appetite. So he goes back and and is listening over and over and over and over again. And there's this one spot where he can't quite make out what the couple is saying, because he's listening to what he can hear. And there's nothing that isn't pretty benign, pretty banal, and he's like, dangerous. This is dangerous. I don't care anything that's dangerous. So finally, after he's cleansed the audio, he can hear the couple talking more clearly in this one part that had been difficult, and he hears them say he'd kill us if he got the chance. So he freaks out, and at that point, he realizes that he's being followed.

He goes to this convention, and this was another part that that really made me think I ought to record a podcast episode about this, because he goes to this convention, and they have all kinds of doodads and surveillance tools that would have been cutting edge for the mid 70s. I remember one of the devices was you could call a phone number, but it was basically like, you call most of the phone number you hit a particular digit on the phone before you dial the last number, and then it automatically turns that person's phone into a surveillance device so the phone never rings. They don't know what you've done. And then you've got a way that you can listen whatever room that telephone is in the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room, you then have a surveillance device to listen to everything that goes on in that room. I just remember thinking like people will be so tempted to say the surveillance equipment that was on display in this movie, it's just fiction that wasn't anything that really existed at that time. But I'm kind of like bullshit, you know, if you're allowed to put something in a Hollywood movie, you can bet that the government that the military industrial and military intelligence complexes had something way more advanced than anything that Hollywood was allowed to talk about. We see that, for example, with the Internet. DARPA had the internet before John and Jane Q Public had ever heard of such a thing. When people were like, the internet, www, dot, emails, what the hell is this? This is never going to catch on. This is crazy. When people were still nay saying it, and it was new and it was wacky, they already fucking had it. So to me, as I'm as I'm watching Harry go through this surveillance Expo, I'm like, you can fucking bet that the government had stuff that was way more powerful than anything Harry and his comrades are looking at at this surveillance Expo. I'm just fucking saying that part gave me the creeps, that that was one of the creepiest parts of the whole damn movie. To me was like, just think about what they had even back then. You know, it feels primitive by today's standards, because you're talking about a time that was 50 years ago, but you can bet, you can bet they had advanced shit back then, and you can bet that what they have now dwarfs anything that we can imagine. We can also, I think, extend this out to AI, look at the things that we are allowed to do in the public with artificial intelligence, if we have access to it, as John and Jane Q Public, you can imagine what the military and industrial and military intelligence complexes, what the governments of the world and the billionaires of the world soon to be trillionaires, let's face it, you can imagine what they fucking have access To. It must be mind blowing. So even though Harry is paranoid and career obsessed, he also has the tendency to do some weird and lax things. For one thing, he's living in an apartment, and there's this scene at the beginning where he goes in the apartment and he's got, like, extra locks on the door and an ADT alarm system, and he finds the mail has been dropped through the mail slot or whatever, and there's this gift wrapped bottle of liquor where the landlady has read his mail, figured out that it's his birthday, and is broken into the apartment to put this gift wrapped bottle of liquor inside. And he calls her, and he's like, how did you get in here? How did you know it was my birthday? Because you don't have any information to know that. And then, how did you get in? I have extra locks and alarms to make sure that nobody gets in. And apparently you walked right in with this birthday present and left it here. And she tells him that, well, I had keys made like you can't just put extra locks on there where the landlady can't. It in because what if there was a fire? What if there was a security breach? Like, you live in an apartment house, you're only going to get just so much privacy, dude. And I'm thinking the same thing. I'm like, if you're paranoid about privacy and security, why in the fuck would you be living in an apartment house that landlord or landlady has the ultimate right to do whatever they fucking want? So like, why would you do that? I did think that was kind of odd. And then after this security Expo, there's drinking and drugging and hanging out with the boys, and they have this party, like an after party at Harry's workshop. His workshop is weird because it almost looks like an abandoned indoor basketball court. There's like cages and locks and weird shit around and a lot of concrete and open space, and so it's a weird place. But he takes people, not only like colleagues from the expo, but call girls back to the workshop. Who does that? You've got all this sensitive security, security information, and you have top of the line electronic equipment, and you're going to bring randos back into that space. That's stupid. He winds up having a one nighter with a call girl who he just met. And of course, what happens the tapes are stolen. Who didn't see that one coming from 10 miles down the road? So he spends the night with this call girl, and he's having like flashbacks and weird memories and almost like PTSD, and she takes the tapes that were supposed to go to the director. He gets a call from Martin stett, aka Harrison Ford, who is the director's assistant. And Martin is like the director cannot wait any longer, like he got tired of whatever game that you're playing. So we now have the tapes. Of course, Harry figures out that the call girl was a plant, the director or the assistant, whoever, one, one of the two of them hired this hooker to come in and seduce him and then take the tape so that the director could have them. Harry is further tasked with showing up to the office, because he also took some pictures. He primarily did audio surveillance, but he also took some pictures. So it's like, if you want the money that we owe you, then you need to come and see the director in person and bring the photos. After that, we're done. So when he gets to the office the director, this nebulous director, is revealed as Robert Duvall, not a surprise, right? Because he was in The Godfather. And the Godfather Part Two certainly kind of in the in the mix of Coppola's casting. John Cazal was also in the conversation in kind of a minor part, anyway, so he gets there, and Robert Duvall is revealed to be the director. They give him the money. They don't try to stiff him on the money. That was one of the things. Of the things that I was wondering about, is it was like, after all this is said and done, is he going to put himself through the ringer and then not even get paid for doing this? But he learns that the woman that he surveilled in Union Square is the wife of the director, or at least that's what he thinks. He presumes that this younger lady is the director's wife and is involved in an affair, and he assumes that the director is going to use this information not to start a divorce, but to do murder. Because, remember, there's the line, he'd kill us if he got the chance. And he thinks, oh my god, like they're they're having an affair. He's had me surveil It and Prove It, and now he's going to kill them. So he he hears that they have this plan, like, one of the things that they say on the surveillance tapes is that on so and so day they're going to meet at so and so motel in room, whatever. And he goes and books the hotel room that's directly next door, because he assumes that the director is going to break in, murder them both, and then maybe he can stop it from happening.

He tries to do this, but is not successful. He does overhear some kind of argument, and then he goes outside to the balcony, and he sees like, it's hard, it's almost hard to describe, but it's like a frosted glass window or a frosted glass pane. And he sees like hands and a big smear of blood on this pain. So then he knows something has happened, and he assumes that that what it is is that the director has come in, and he is murdering his wife, and the man that she's cheating with, Harry breaks into the room. But he doesn't find anything like the bed is not rumpled, he's not finding blood smears. And he goes to that frosted window, but there's nothing there. He looks in the bathtub and like, right? But there is a moment of tension, you know, right before he looks in the bathtub, he's like, grabbing the shower curtain, and you're like, oh god, there's going to be a body in there, but there's nothing. It's completely clean. The toilet even still has that old paper strip that they used to put on, I don't think they do that in any of the hotels anymore, but it even has that paper strip across the lid that's like sanitized for your protection. There's nothing in the toilet either, for whatever reason he flushes the toilet and it backs up like it it backs up, it's clogged, and it starts overflowing with blood, which of course, freaks him out as as it would anyone.

But we don't know at that point, is this real, or is it an hallucination? Is this something that he is picturing in his mind. It reminded me of the shining and the visions that Danny would have of like the elevators opening and flowing blood all down the hallways. So it's like, what kind of a murder took place in there that they clogged the toilet with blood? Like, what in the hell blood? Because it wasn't like bloody toilet paper or bloody rags that they tried to flush. It was just blood. And I'm like, Well, what in the hell did you do exsanguinate Somebody over the toilet? I didn't get it. I'm just gonna be honest with you, that was a detail that was lost on me. I was like, I don't get what supposedly happened here. And I also didn't know when I was watching it, if it was watching it if it was real or if it was something that was happening in Harry's imagination. Anyway, nevertheless, Harry goes to confront the director. Instead, he discovers that Harry's wife is alive and unharmed. Also her lover is alive and well, he sees a newspaper headline that says that the director has died in a car accident. And so you're, you're sitting there as the viewer, like, Okay, wait a minute. Did he hallucinate everything that was going on in that motel room? Or, what the hell? Because if the guy died in a car accident, did the wife and the lover coordinate the car accident? Did they actually murder him in the hotel what happened here? It is a bit nebulous, to be honest with you, but Harry pieces together that the couple actually murdered the director. It's like he starts picturing in his mind's eye what they really did in that hotel room. He thinks that they lured the director there to have a confrontation with him, and while he's talking to his wife, the lover comes up from behind him with a plastic bag, smothers him, and then they kill him. Somewhat of a struggle, somewhat of an argument ensues, which he heard on the other side of the wall, and then they murdered the director. The kind of sort of twist ending is that Harry had misinterpreted what he heard on the tape, because he listens to the recording, he'd kill us if he got the chance. And he's thinking that they're having this love affair, and they're scared that if her husband knew then, then he'd kill him. He interprets it as if he finds out that we're sleeping together, he'll kill us. We can't give him the chance to kill us because he will. But rather, what they're actually saying is he'd kill us if he got the chance. That's really how the line is delivered. Will he kill us if he got the chance. The man is really telling the woman it's okay for us to murder him, because he'd do it to us if he could. So that's when Harry realizes that he has misread the entire situation, that it wasn't the director planning to murder the couple, and the couple were afraid of him. The couple planned to murder the director. Back at the apartment, Harry's playing his saxophone. He gets a phone call from Martin stat Harrison Ford's character, telling him, don't investigate. And he plays into the phone he plays a recording of Harry playing his saxophone, and it was like, what before the phone rang when he was sitting there playing the saxophone. It was like the tune that he was playing. So it proves that he's been bugged, not in the past, but he like they have a way of listening to him right then and there. He freaks out and pretty much destroys the apartment down to the studs when when he's done tearing things apart, it looks like a hurricane went through there. He's searching for bugs, for listening devices, for anything that could have been planted there. He can't find anything. So the movie ends with him sitting alone. In this torn up hurricane war torn hell hole looking apartment, playing a saxophone. And we assume that if you've torn everything else up and you didn't find a bug anywhere else, it's bound to be in the saxophone, right? Like with the one place you didn't check is probably the place that it is if you didn't see anything. Now let's get into a little bit before we move on to blowout. Let's get into a little bit more conspiracy theory and conspiracy conspiracy theory culture. One of the things that Coppola later said was that he was shocked that some of the same surveillance and wire tapping equipment that's featured in the movie had actually been used by members of Nixon's administration to spy on political opponents. Prior to Watergate and Coppola came to believe that one of the reasons why the conversation kind of gained a cult following and it got as much attention as it did, was because of that, because it it bore a little too much similarity to reality, particularly with all the information that came out in and around the Watergate burglary. Now, yes, of course, I know I am remiss I still haven't done anything about Watergate and the whole concept of how much did Nixon know that was going on. Was it all a setup to get Nixon out of office? There's some really juicy tidbits there, for sure, and I do want to get into all of that, but it is intriguing that you have this paranoia conspiracy thriller about a man who hears something that he shouldn't, and then Coppola is saying like, well, actually, some of the same surveillance and wiretapping equipment that's featured in this film was actually being used by the Nixon administration. I just don't find that to be coincidental. I really don't that final scene where Harrison Ford's character plays the music into the phone like we're listening to you and we're listening to you in real time. And then Harry call tearing the apartment up, trying to figure out where the bug is and then not finding it. That was inspired loosely by a Russian inventor named Lev tierman, and he invented this thing, for example, called the thing. It was also called the Great Seal bug, and it was a covert listening device that would transmit audio. It was concealed inside a gift that the USSR had given to Avril Harriman, who at that time was the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union. And I just thought yet again, like this is one of those cases where we're tempted to write something off as fiction. We're tempted to say it's a Hollywood movie. You're reading too much into it, come on. And it's like, Don't be so sure about that. Even though the conversation was not my personal cup of tea, particularly with the pacing, I just felt like it was a bit of a slog at times, and I wish that it had been maybe 20 to 30 minutes shorter than it actually was. It was not a horrible film, and it certainly made me think. It absolutely made me think about what did the government, the military intelligence complex, have access to even 50 years ago, given the types of things that we saw in the surveillance Expo. In the film, you can imagine it was much more advanced even then. Certainly gives me chills to think about what they have access to now, not the least of which, I mean, I'm sitting right here with a cell phone next to me as I'm recording this. You know, they're listening to every fucking thing I'm saying before you're ever going to hear it, long before you're ever going to hear it. We think about the analogous relationship to what happened with Watergate and what was even going on before the Watergate scandal blew open. Now we're learning about Lev Terman and this great seal bug. You know, I think that that happened. Let me go check the date, August 4, 1945 so that kind of spying was going on in a in a gift given to Avril Harriman in 1945 My point here is you can imagine how much more advanced it is now. And so we will move on to the film. Blow out a 1981 American Neo noir mystery thriller film. This one was written and directed by Brian De Palma. I was aware of this movie, but I had never seen it before, I think, and I'm going to tell on myself here, and it's going to be funny, I think, because I always thought that it was a movie about a hairdresser who witnessed a murder, and I was like. That just sounds so stupid, like, I just don't think I have the patience for that. Also, Brian De Palma films can be a little bit weird. You know, it's like, sometimes they can be good and sometimes they can just be weird. But it's definitely like, whenever you're watching a Brian De Palma film, like, you definitely know that it's his. I mean, the untouchables is a great film, and then also, Scarface is a classic. But there are some of the others I'm thinking, like body double, for example, with Melanie Griffith, just kind of some weird, almost like titty films. It's just, it's one of those things where it's like, you can just kind of tell when you're watching a Brian De Palma movie. And sometimes that's good, and then other times it's like, maybe not.

But no, this is not about a hairdresser who witnesses a murder. Instead, it's about this sound technician. So John Travolta stars as a sound technician that's living in Philadelphia, working in Philadelphia, and he's working for this, like, low budget slasher film. And of course, De Palma, being De Palma, the opening scenes are basically like they're filming and trying to get the sounds and the visuals right for this titty, like the slasher is on a college campus, and of course, he's in the girls dorm room. So there are girls in various states of undress. Some of them are in their pajamas. Some of them have their boyfriend over and they're canoodling in their dorm rooms. Others are in the shower, and it's just an excuse to get to see some boobs. So if that's your thing, knock yourself out. But they're anyway, they're in post production for this slasher, titty film, and Jack Terry, who's played by John Travolta, like the producer of the film, tells him, we've just got too much stuff that's played out like, How many times have we used the same screens? The screams don't even match what I want on the screen. I don't like them, and the wind going through the trees like we need new sounds. We need fresh meat. So he tells him to go out and get better effects. So one of the things that he's doing is he has like this, you know, large, primitive recording device with a long microphone. It looks like the long microphones that Gene Rayburn used to always use on the match game. So he goes off to a park, and he's like, standing on a bridge above this pond and this creek, trying to record the wind going through the trees, and then also, just like ambient night sounds, you know, like a frog is croaking and an owl is hooting. He sees a couple, like, so he's up on this bridge above this, like, pond or creek or whatever. And he sees this couple, and they're about to, like, make out or get into it in some way, but they see him, they're like, oh, I want to creep so they get out of there. And he kind of laughs like he doesn't, he doesn't move, he doesn't really react to it. Just kind of thinks it's funny that they think he's some kind of pervert or voyeur. Meanwhile, he's just there to literally record ambient night sounds. However, as he's standing above on this bridge, he hears and then rapidly sees a car like he hears a noise that sounds like the blow out of a tire, and this car comes careening around the corner. It breaks through a fence, and then it plunges into this pond Creek thing, and it goes deep into the water too. And he thinks, holy shit. So he like, sets the equipment down, takes his jacket off, and just runs down to the water's edge and dives in to see if he can help. So he doesn't even think about the consequences. He just dives in. Now we as the viewer, notice that kind of, over to the side, under the bridge, there's a man who runs away. And I actually like, rewound the movie a little bit to make sure that that wasn't a figment of my imagination. It wasn't I'm like, so there was a man down there. I'm certain that that's going to play a role in the film at some point. Could not have been a coincidence. So anyway, Jack gets under the water, and he sees that a young woman is trapped in the car, a man, an older kind of middle age to older age. Man was driving it, and he's obviously deceased. But Jack thinks, Well, I have the opportunity to rescue this young woman. She's still alive, so I'd be crazy not to try to get her out of there. He gets a rock bust the window out, gets her out of the car, and manages to save her from drowning. This young woman is played by Nancy Allen and is named Sally. I kept thinking, I've seen the two of them together before in another movie, I had to really sit and rack my brain. And then it hit me, Carrie. They played a couple in Carrie, and I was like, Duh, how did I forget that? Anyway, just a little trivia for you there. So we take Sally to the hospital, and she's a little bit clingy, like, you know, you saved my life, and I don't want you to leave. And I'm kind of freaked out being here by myself a detective. I. Interviews, like a police detective interviews Jack about what actually happened, and then also, it doesn't take long before newspaper reporters start to show up. And Jack is thinking, this is odd, like it was just, it was just a blowout. It was just a car that had an accident. Like, why are there so many newspaper men here, and then the police detective is like, you need to keep your mouth shut. You know, you you didn't see anything. You didn't see this woman, and you need to forget about her. Well, that again, yet again. Here we go. It's just like, in the conversation, there's dangerous stuff on those tapes really, like, that's that's not going to turn somebody off, that's going to turn them on in this hubbub, Jack learns that the man who died in the car, the man who was driving, was Governor George McBrien, who was a presidential hopeful that was doing pretty well in the polls. He seemed to be, I mean, almost a shoe in to win the next election. So you have this governor who's a presidential hopeful, it's going, well, he's married, he's, I don't know, probably 20 or 30 years older than she is. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on. So someone who was involved in MC Ryan's campaign, it's so it's like we've already had this police detective that's pretty much detective that's pretty much been like, you need to just shut your mouth and butt out. Now we have an associate of the campaign who tells Jack, like, butt out of it, conceal her involvement, make sure that nobody knows that she was in the car with them. Like, he's got a wife, he's got a family. Do you really want to ruin their lives? It's already bad enough that he's dead. Do you want to make everything worse for them by revealing to the press that he had a much younger woman in the car with him? I mean, really, do you really want to be that guy? And Jack decides that, No, he doesn't want to be that guy. And the Jack and Sally decide that they'll go out for a drink. And he's kind of like, okay, well, you know, she's been through something funky, and I'm curious about all of this. So why not? That's almost the attitude. It's like, okay, why not? As he's listening to the audio that he had recorded, yeah, he gets a lot more than frogs croaking and owls hooting. He hears this pop that happens actually, before the blowout, and he keeps listening to it, and he keeps listening to it, and he thinks that's a gunshot. That's not like one tire blowing out, nor is it two tires that are blowing out on the car. This is a gunshot followed by the tire blowing out, and the tire blows out because it was shot. So this is not an accident. This is not some terrible traffic accident. That's a shit happens, and it's nobody's fault. This was an assassination. He starts watching the news a bit obsessively, and there's a man, here's our here's our Zapruder film, okay, there's a man named Manny carp who had filmed the accident. So now we have not only the audio that Jack had recorded, but we have the visual coming from a man named Manny carp. Carp sells still photographs from this film to a local paper. Jack goes and gets a copy of this paper, and he cuts all of them out, like he goes to his studio at this kind of grimy film company, and he cuts out the still photographs from this newspaper, and he turns them into like a picture book, you know, like the old the old timey cartoon picture books where you used to, like, flip them really fast, and the character would go running that kind of thing. He puts them together that way, and then he listens to the audio at the same time. And while he's doing that, he sees that there's a flash of light and a puff of smoke. So now he really thinks, like, Okay, I hear what I believe to be is a gunshot. I see a flash and smoke in these images. It has to be that somebody was standing close enough to blow the tire out this. This absolutely was not an accident. Sally is hesitant about the whole thing. She tries to leave. She wants to leave on a train and get the hell out of Philadelphia, but winds up staying because Jack is persuading her that like, Well, you were involved in this, and you need to help me figure out what really happened. You never know who could be coming for you. You need to stay where I can keep an eye on you and try to keep you safe. And she, she kind of tells him like, Hey, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole too far. You know, I was, I was just his escort. I was just his, just his companion. I work as a makeup lady at a counter like, I don't want to get involved in this heavy shit, man. But he takes her for. A drink. After he causes her to miss her train, he takes her for a drink, and he tells her about how he had this assignment to help a government commission, and they're they're trying to to figure out, like, who's a corrupt cop, and he's part of this wiretap operation, and one of the undercover cops gets killed. So we again have a similar scenario to what we saw with Harry call in the conversation, he had worked a job in New York that led to three people getting killed. So he feels like I can no longer say that this is just a job and compartmentalize like there are some real consequences that happen when I spy on people.

And Jack feels that way too, like I got out of that kind of work and I just work on titty horror films because at least that feels safer. But now I've witnessed something that I wasn't supposed to, and I've got some real problems, and by the way, so do you because you were in the fucking car with the guy. Now Jack doesn't know, here's here's another twist in the film. Okay, so Jack doesn't know it, but Sally and this man named Manny carp are involved with each other, and they are actually also involved in a blackmail plot. And in fact, they were hired as part of an even bigger plot. So it's like they're blackmailers, but they're not the real like they're not the final stop on the map, they're not the real people pulling the strings of power. Instead, they're part of a larger plot that's been hatched by larger forces against this governor McRyan, someone who is a rival candidate, had created a scenario where Sally would pretend to be the escort, pretend to be the prostitute, there would be some illicit photographs taken of them in flagrante, and then MC Ryan would be presented with the blackmail photos and told like we're going to ruin your career. We're going to ruin your marriage and your family, unless you get out of the race? But instead, these people, it wasn't Manny and it wasn't Sally. Some other people that are higher up in the conspiracy decide that it will be more effective to kill him. Make it look like an accident, but kill him.

So after the murder of McRyan, kind of goes awry and Sally is still alive, because it would have been even more convenient for them if Sally died too, if both of them died, and it was like, oh my god, he died and he had a hooker in the car with him. What a cat. Nobody's going to mourn that. This is another part of using sexual predilections as part of character assassination. Nobody's going to mourn it if a married man with children dies with a hooker in the car. However, Sally survives. And then now they have this sound guy Jack, who is not only witnessed it visually, but has an audio recording of it, and has put together still images from Manny's film, and completely figured out what the fuck was going on. So they have some real problems. So they may start this bigger plot. Here we go again. It sounds crazy, but yet it's not completely implausible. They start this bigger plot. John Lithgow plays this guy named Burke, and he, you know, Lithgow has it sometimes in the movies, played some real creeps, and he's totally a creep. In this movie, he murders a woman who looks like Sally, but isn't. And they start this kind of fictional serial killer story, the Liberty Bell strangler, I think he was called, and the idea is that whenever she is murdered, it will be attributed to the Liberty Bell strangler. It won't be anything that really pertains to MC Ryan. They can. They can keep her out of it. You know, she can, she can they botch that first part of the job. So we need to get rid of her and get her to shut up before she tells anything. And when we do it, it will look like the serial killer got her. It doesn't have anything to do with MC Ryan or MC Ryan's opponents, Sally steals the film that Manny carp made. She's trying to help Jack out. She gets scared, and she steals the film that Manny carp had made of the murder. And it very clearly reveals that a gun was fired and then the tire blew out, and they went into this pond Creek thing, and that's when the drowning occurred. Nobody really believes Jack's story, even though he has the evidence to support it. It's like nobody believes him. He's kind of like the lone voice in the wilderness. However, there is a local talk show host that. Is willing to speak with Jack. And he says, I will have you on the air, and I will play your tapes if you are willing to come on here, I'm willing to have you. Jack is hesitant about it at first, just because there have been so many blind alleys that he's gone down, but he decides, like, it's worth it to get this information out to the public. The public needs to know Burke, aka John Lithgow, is listening, though. He taps the phone and he calls Sally under false pretenses. He pretends to be the talk show host and calls Sally and says, I want you to meet me at a train station. Bring the tapes with you. Don't worry. Jack will meet us too, but I want you to come out here with the tapes. And it's one of those things where it's like, well, this is a little bit thin, like, who would really do that? But she does. And Jack decides, like, I will be surveilling you from the car. Let's try to figure out who this guy is and what he wants. Don't worry about it. I will be surveilling you from the car. If anything goes awry, say a code word, and I'll hear you, and I'll come get you. Hijinks ensue, right? Because it's never going to be in the movies. As simple as that, as simple as really saying a code word into a microphone, and then within 10 seconds, your person comes to rescue you on the other side, he tries to warn her there's some botched communication. He tries to get to her. When he realizes that this man is not the talk show host and that he has nefarious intent, Jack tries to get to her, but he crashes his car into the window of the store. Becomes incapacitated. He gets taken in an ambulance, and by the time that he comes to he realizes that Sally is still in danger. He's any and he also still has his earpiece in. So it's like when, when he gets coherent enough to realize, like, okay, she's in danger, and I and I can still hear them, he sees that this man, Burke, is attacking her on top of a roof. He is able to get there, but not in time to save her. So it's like he does murder the bad guy, John Lithgow, but he's not in time to say Sally, who's played by Nancy Allen. So it's kind of like, okay, well, he gets the bad guy, but he's not in time to save Sally. So whenever this character, Burke, dies, it's kind of like just one more piece in the conspiracy. It's like, okay, so Sally is gone, so she's not going to be able to tell her side of the story. This guy, Burke, is gone. He's not going to be able to tell anything about who he was or who he was working for, or who ultimately hired him. There's some similarities also to the parallax view at the end, because the evidence that Jack has collected is deemed insufficient to prove that it was an assassination. So officially, it's just a sad, tragic accident. MC Ryan was driving. He had a blowout, he went into this creek, and he died. And it's very sad, but he was alone. There wasn't anybody else in the car, and nobody shot his tire out. It was just a sad accident.

Yeah, and it winds up that the skeevy guy that's running this low budget film company hears the screen like when Sally is about to be murdered by Burke. She lets out a blood curdling scream, and the skeevy film producer is like, well, at least you got a good scream out of it. We can put it in the titty horror film and that, and that's how the movie ends. And you're like, wow, there's, this is a bizarre movie, but at the same time, there are some interesting components to it. For one thing, that's Hollywood. Do you think they give a shit? They don't like they completely would use the scream of a dying woman if they thought that it sounded good in the film. I'm just saying there are certainly some similarities. There are similarities between this film and also the conversation, the hearing something that you're not supposed to, the trying to put all the puzzle pieces together and just putting yourself in more and more danger by doing it. There are also elements of the JFK, pop, pop, particularly in the film, having having the film, and then also still images that get sold to the media. That very much is an allusion to the Zapruder film. It's like you have somebody who's conveniently positioned to film the accident wink and then also sells that film to the media for a pretty penny, and still images of it get published in national news media. We have definitely seen and heard that before.

There are also some elements of the film. Particularly like there's a man with a younger woman and car going off the roadway and into a body of water. We think of Chappaquiddick. Now I intend to record, at some point an episode about that, because there are all kinds of theories, like, was was Teddy really doing something that he shouldn't have been doing that night? Did he? Did he leave this woman for dead in the water and just like, go home and pretend it didn't happen? Or was there something else afoot? Because there have been people that have said that Frank Sturgis, who was involved in Watergate, was also seen in the area around the time that Chappaquiddick happened. And I'm like, and we can't dismiss that out of hand, even though it might sound like that's crazy. It's an open and shut case. It's like, ah, but is it though? I want to read some more information on that and and at some point record a podcast episode or two to talk about Chappaquiddick. But certainly we get an allusion to it here. With the accident itself. The accident itself, we have an an obvious nod to the Zapruder film, as well as to elements of what happened at Chappaquiddick. But both of the films refer back to people hearing things that they are not supposed to and then being put in serious danger in the conversation. It's be it's more of corporate espionage. It's more like this director of a major company has a wife that's cheating on him. Harry assumes that the director is going to kill the wife and maybe the lover as well. But instead, the real pot is that the wife and the lover are going to kill the director in blowout. It's that this man, who's a sound guy for some low budget titty horror flick, has both seen and heard something that he was never supposed to. Nobody was supposed to be out there that night, except Manny, who was going to stand and conveniently make a video of it to prove that it was just a sad and tragic accident. Haven't we heard these themes before? As I always say, watch for yourself. Make up your own mind. You you may enjoy the films a lot. For me, the conversation was a bit slow and plotting, and it seemed like Coppola was driving the points home a little bit too much. And blow out, it's Brian De Palma. You know, if you like Brian De Palma's films, you might really love it. But to me, like again, there were elements of it that I was just like, how many pairs of boobs do we need to see in this movie? Like, I'm really more interested than in the political conspiracy. Okay, check them out and decide for yourself. In the meantime, stay a little bit crazy and I will see you in the next episode.

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