Plot Summary (Blow Out) Blow Out
Jack Terry records a sound he wasn't supposed to hear
Jack Terry (John Travolta (in Blow Out, as actor)) 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 (in Blow Out, as actor)). 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 (in Blow Out, as actor)), 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 his evidence to a detective, who dismisses him as a conspiracy nut — a special commission is already forming to declare the death an accident. A television reporter named Donahue offers to put Jack on the air, but Burke has tapped Jack's phone and is already working to destroy the evidence.
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 (in Blow Out, as actor)) 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 wires Sally with a microphone for a meeting with Donahue during Philadelphia's Liberty Day celebration — not as bait, but because he suspects his phone has been tapped and wants to monitor the exchange. The man who shows up is not Donahue but Burke, impersonating the reporter. Burke steers Sally onto a train, out of Jack's monitoring range, takes the film, and throws it in the river. Jack hears Sally calling his name through the wire and races through the city, but crashes his Jeep. He 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 plays Sally's death scream — the recording from the wire she was wearing — into the slasher film's mix. Sam is delighted with the sound. Jack says it three times to himself: "It's a good scream." Each repetition lands emptier than the last, a man trying to convince himself that what he has done is professional rather than monstrous. See The Ending.