Plot Summary (Blow Out) Blow Out
Jack Terry records a sound he wasn't supposed to hear
Jack Terry (John Travolta) is a sound-effects technician working on cheap slasher films in Philadelphia. One night he's out recording ambient sounds — wind, crickets, an owl — when a car blows a tire on a bridge, crashes through the guardrail, and plunges into a creek. Jack dives in and pulls out a young woman, Sally Bedina (Nancy Allen). The driver — a man named McRyan — is dead.
The dead man turns out to be the next president
McRyan is Governor George McRyan, the leading candidate for the upcoming presidential election. The official story is a tire blowout — an accident. But when Jack plays back his recording, he hears something before the blowout: the sound of a gunshot. The tire didn't blow — it was shot out. The accident was an assassination.
Jack assembles the evidence and no one cares
Jack synchronizes his audio recording with still photographs taken by Manny Karp (Dennis Franz (Blow Out)), a sleazy photographer who was coincidentally shooting the bridge that night. By combining the photos with his soundtrack, Jack creates a crude film — a Zapruder-film reconstruction — that proves the assassination. He takes it to a journalist, but the political establishment has no interest in the truth. The cover-up is already in motion.
Sally was part of a setup that went wrong
Sally, it turns out, was placed in the car as part of an unrelated scheme. Karp had been hired to photograph McRyan in a compromising position with a young woman — a classic political dirty trick. Sally was the bait. The assassination happened independently, turning Karp's blackmail setup into a murder scene. Sally is caught between the conspiracy and the cover-up, and she's a liability to both.
Burke kills to keep the secret buried
Burke (John Lithgow) is the assassin — a contract killer posing as a political operative. To cover his tracks, he begins murdering young women in Philadelphia, staging the deaths as the work of a serial killer. His target is Sally, but by killing other women first, he creates a pattern that will make her death look like just another victim of a random predator.
Jack tries to save Sally and fails
Jack realizes Sally is in danger and attempts to use her as bait to draw Burke into the open, wiring her with a microphone during Philadelphia's Liberty Day celebration. The plan goes catastrophically wrong. Burke kills Sally. Jack arrives too late. He holds her body as fireworks explode overhead — a grotesque, beautiful image that mocks the very idea of American celebration.
The ending weaponizes Jack's skill against him
Back in his studio, Jack needs a better scream for the slasher film he's been working on. He plays back Sally's final moments — her real scream as Burke killed her — and uses it. "It's a good scream," says his producer. Jack sits alone, headphones on, listening to a dead woman's last sound, trapped in the knowledge that the only thing his expertise was good for was making a better B-movie. See The Ending.