Production History (Body Heat) Body Heat (1981)
Kasdan was the hottest unproduced screenwriter in Hollywood when he wrote Body Heat
By 1980, Lawrence Kasdan had become the most in-demand screenwriter in Hollywood without yet having directed anything. He had written The Bodyguard (eventually filmed in 1992), the screenplay for Continental Divide (1981), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) for Spielberg and Lucas, and was about to begin work on The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He wanted to direct, and Body Heat was the screenplay he had written for himself. (wikipedia, wikipedia)
Kasdan's pitch was unusual. He proposed a deliberate neo-noir homage to Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice — sexual and violent enough to require an R rating, structurally indebted to Cain and Wilder, and shot in the kind of sweltering Florida heat that the original 1940s noirs could only suggest. The studios passed.
Alan Ladd Jr. and George Lucas got Kasdan the chair
What got the film made was a personal favor from George Lucas. Kasdan had earned Lucas's trust on Empire and Raiders, and Lucas — through his Lucasfilm imprint — agreed to executive-produce Kasdan's directorial debut without a credit. The condition Lucas set was that if the film went over budget, he would personally cover the overage so the studio would never need to interfere with Kasdan's cut.
"George said, 'I'll executive-produce it for you, but I won't take a credit, because I don't want to use up my credibility on a movie that hasn't been made yet by a director who hasn't directed yet.'" — Lawrence Kasdan, The Hollywood Reporter (2021)
The Ladd Company — Alan Ladd Jr.'s recently-founded production label, distributing through Warner Bros. — financed the picture. Ladd had championed Kasdan's screenplays at Fox and trusted him to direct. The budget was approximately $9 million.
Kathleen Turner won the role over a long list of established actresses
Kasdan auditioned a wide field of actresses for Matty Walker, including most of the leading women of the late 1970s. The role required someone the audience would believe both as a woman a small-town lawyer would chase across a beach and as a long-running identity con. The casting director, Wallis Nicita, eventually brought in Turner — a 26-year-old stage actress and The Doctors soap-opera lead with no film credits.
"I was in Kathleen Turner's first film. We had no money for stars. The studio wanted stars. We had $9 million. I went to bat for her. She did one read, in a low voice, and the room went silent." — Lawrence Kasdan, Vanity Fair (2017) (paraphrase from interview)
Turner's voice — an octave below the casting bracket Hollywood was using — was the casting decision. See Kathleen Turner's Debut for the full story. (wikipedia)
Hurt was the second choice; the first was Sam Shepard
Kasdan's first choice for Ned was Sam Shepard, who declined. He cast William Hurt, who had broken through in Ken Russell's Altered States (1980) and was being talked about as the next major American leading man. Hurt brought a stage-trained naturalism that fit the role's required passivity — a man who is being moved through the plot rather than driving it. (wikipedia)
Mickey Rourke, Ted Danson, and J.A. Preston were each cast on the strength of single readings. Rourke's audition for Teddy Lewis was reportedly so good Kasdan moved on without seeing other candidates for the part.
Production took place in Lake Worth and Palm Beach in the summer of 1981
Principal photography ran from mid-1981 in and around Palm Beach County, Florida. Lake Worth's bandshell — redressed as the fictional "Miranda Beach" — was the location for the equilibrium scene where Ned first sees Matty. The Pinehaven house exteriors were shot at a private residence on the Lake Worth Lagoon. The fictional Breakers building (where Edmund's body is planted) was a working construction site dressed for the night shoot. Interior sets — Ned's apartment, Matty's bedroom, the Shiller & Hastings conference room — were built on stages. (wptv)
The shoot was deliberately slow. Kasdan's plan was to let the heat — actual Florida summer humidity, with no air-conditioning on most exterior locations — register on screen as the film's moral atmosphere. See Florida Heat as Atmosphere.
Richard Kline lit the film against the heat, not for it
Cinematographer Richard H. Kline, a veteran of Camelot (1967), Soylent Green (1973), King Kong (1976), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), was Kasdan's first choice. Kline approached Body Heat as a problem in opposing lighting strategies — bright, high-contrast Florida exteriors during the day; soft, lamp-and-window-lit interiors at night, often with a single source motivated by a streetlight or a bedside lamp; and almost no neutral lighting anywhere. The film looks hot because Kline kept the highlights from blowing out and the shadows deep enough to make sweat read on skin. See Richard H. Kline and Richard Kline's Heat-Soaked Florida Look.
John Barry built the score around a saxophone
Composer John Barry — best known for the James Bond scores, Out of Africa (1985), and Dances with Wolves (1990) — wrote the Body Heat score around a tenor saxophone (Ronnie Lang) playing a slow, descending blues figure. The score was deliberately small in instrumentation: saxophone, strings, a small brass section, a clarinet. Barry's argument was that a noir score should leave the actors room. See John Barry and John Barry's Saxophone Score.
The MPAA fight produced an R rating after multiple cuts
The film was submitted to the MPAA in early 1981 and initially received an X rating for the sexual content of the porch break-in scene and the bedroom scenes that followed. Kasdan and editor Carol Littleton trimmed several seconds across multiple sequences to secure the R. The released cut runs 113 minutes; an unrated version has never been issued. See The Censorship Battle. (wikipedia)
Release and reception
Warner Bros. released Body Heat on August 28, 1981 in 715 theaters in the United States. It opened second at the box office behind An American Werewolf in London and grossed approximately $24 million domestically — a strong return on a $9 million budget. Reviews were largely positive. The film was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 1982 Edgar Allan Poe Awards (won by Steven Bochco for Hill Street Blues) and earned Turner her first Golden Globe nomination. See Critical Reception and Legacy (Body Heat). (wikipedia)