Body Double is a 1984 American neo-noir erotic thriller film directed, co-written, and produced by Brian De Palma, and starring Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Melanie Griffith, and Deborah Shelton. The film is a direct homage to the 1950s films of Alfred Hitchcock, specifically Rear Window, Vertigo, and Dial M for Murder, taking plot lines and themes (such as voyeurism, panic attacks, and obsession) from the first two.
At the time of its release, the film was a commercial failure, earning $8.8 million at the box office against a production budget of $10 million, as well as mixed reviews, though Griffith's performance earned praise and earned her a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture. Subsequently, the film received positive appraisal from cinema fans and is now considered to be a cult film.
Plot In Los Angeles, struggling actor Jake Scully has recently lost his role as a vampire in a low-budget horror film after his claustrophobia thwarts shooting. Upon returning home to discover his girlfriend Carol cheating on him, Scully splits up with her and is left homeless. At a method acting class, where he meets Sam Bouchard, Scully reveals his fears and the childhood cause of his claustrophobia. They go to a bar where Scully is offered a place to stay; Sam's rich friend Alan has gone on a trip to Europe and needs a house-sitter for his ultra-modern home in the Hollywood Hills.
While touring the house with Scully, Sam is especially enthusiastic about showing him one feature: a telescope, and through it a female neighbor, Gloria Revelle, who erotically dances at a specific time each night. Scully voyeuristically watches Gloria until he sees her being abused by a man she appears to know. The next day, he follows her when she goes shopping. Gloria makes calls to an unknown person whom she promises to meet. Scully also notices a disfigured Indian, a man he had noticed watching Gloria a few days prior.
Scully follows Gloria to a seaside motel where she is apparently stood up by the person she was there to meet. On the beach, the Indian suddenly appears and snatches her purse. Scully chases him into a nearby tunnel, but his claustrophobia overcomes him. Gloria walks him out of it, and they impulsively kiss before she retreats. That night, Scully again is watching through the telescope when the Indian returns and breaks into Gloria's home. Scully races to save Gloria, but her vicious white German Shepherd attacks him, and the Indian murders Gloria with a huge handheld drill.
Scully alerts the police, who rule the murder a botched robbery. However, Detective Jim McLean becomes suspicious after finding a pair of Gloria's panties in Scully's pocket. Although McLean does not arrest him, he tells Scully that his voyeuristic behavior and failure to alert police sooner helped cause Gloria's death. Later that night, suffering from insomnia and watching a pornographic television channel, Scully sees porn actress Holly Body dancing sensually, exactly as Gloria did. In order to meet Holly, he is hired as a porn actor in Holly's new film.
Scully learns from Holly that Sam hired her to impersonate Gloria each night, dancing in the window, knowing Scully would be watching and later witness the real Gloria's murder. Offended when he suggests she was involved in a killing, Holly storms out of the house. An older man in a Ford Bronco picks her up, knocks her unconscious and drives away with her.
Scully follows the man and Holly to a reservoir where the man is digging a grave. Scully attacks him, and in the scuffle peels his face off to reveal it as a mask worn by Sam (who also disguised himself as the Indian earlier). Scully has been set up as a scapegoat by Sam, who is in fact Gloria's abusive husband Alex, to provide him with an alibi during the murder. Scully is overpowered and thrown into the grave. Though his claustrophobia initially incapacitates him again, he overcomes his fear and climbs out, and Sam is knocked into the aqueduct by Gloria's white German Shepherd and drowned. Some time later, Scully has been recast in his previous vampire role as Holly watches from the sidelines.
Cast
The film includes appearances from real-life adult performers Linda Shaw, Alexandra Day, Cara Lott, Melissa Scott, Barbara Peckinpaugh and Annette Haven. Steven Bauer, from De Palma's previous film Scarface and Griffith's then-husband, has a cameo as a male porn actor.
Production
Writing After Brian De Palma's successes of Carrie, Dressed to Kill and his remake of Scarface, Columbia Pictures offered him a three-picture deal with Body Double set to be the first. De Palma created the concept of the film after interviewing Angie Dickinson's body doubles for Dressed to Kill. "I started thinking about the whole idea of the body double," he said. "I wondered what I would do if I wanted to make sure to get somebody's attention, to have them looking at a certain place at a certain time." The erotic thriller was also becoming a popular genre to audiences, with the box offices successes of Dressed to Kill and Body Heat. After fighting with censorship boards over the rating of Scarface — they rated it X and he had to battle to make it R – De Palma resolved to make Body Double as pushback. At the time, he said, "If this one doesn't get an X, nothing I ever do is going to. This is going to be the most erotic and surprising and thrilling movie I know how to make...I'm going to give them everything they hate and more of it than they've ever seen. They think Scarface was violent? They think my other movies were erotic? Wait until they see Body Double."
Having been impressed with the horror film Blood Bride, De Palma enlisted its director and writer Robert J. Avrech to write the Body Double script with him. Both were fans of Alfred Hitchcock, and screened Rear Window and Vertigo to gather inspiration. Avrech later described his work on the film as "working off of De Palma's ideas of Hitchcock's ideas."
Casting De Palma initially wanted pornographic actress Annette Haven to play Holly, but she was rejected by the studio due to her pornographic filmography. Nonetheless, Haven did appear in a minor role and consulted with De Palma about the adult film industry. De Palma then offered the role to Linda Hamilton, who turned it down in favor of The Terminator. Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher and Tatum O'Neal were considered for the role before Melanie Griffith was cast. De Palma later said Haven "was an enormous amount of help" to him in his understanding of the adult film industry and what Holly's background might be, and Griffith brought "a comic edge that I wanted to be a major part of the tone of the second half of the movie." Griffith was initially reluctant to take the role, thinking she "didn't want any more nymphet roles, but now I think I can bring a lot of life to that kind of character...I think I gave her a great amount of intelligence."
De Palma considered Dutch erotic actress Sylvia Kristel for the role of Gloria Revelle, but she was unavailable. Although he cast Deborah Shelton, he found her voice to be unsuitable and had her lines dubbed by Helen Shaver in post-production.
Body Double contains a film within a film sequence in which pop band Frankie Goes to Hollywood performs their song "Relax" on the set of a pornographic film, and in which scream queen Brinke Stevens and adult actresses Cara Lott and Annette Haven appear. The club scene was converted into a music video and shown on MTV. Voice actor Rob Paulsen has a bit role as a cameraman who utters "Where's the cum shot?".
Filming
Principal photography began in Los Angeles on February 21, 1984. Several locations in and around the area were used, including: Tail o' the Pup, the Beverly Center, Barney's Beanery, the LA Farmer's Market, the Rodeo Collection mall on Rodeo Drive, the Spruce Goose dome, the Beach Terrace Motel in Long Beach, the Hollywood Tower and adjacent Hollywood Freeway, Tower Records and the Chemosphere house.
Post-production The film was initially given an X by the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board. Because many theaters refused to show X-rated films, De Palma had to re-edit the film as he did on Dressed to Kill and Scarface. De Palma cut what he called "a few minor things from the porno movie scene" and secured an R rating. De Palma said Columbia did not support the film due to its excessive violence. He said, "Do you think the guys who run Coca-Cola (Columbia Pictures' parent company) want publicity about violence? They are very aware of their public images, and when they start seeing articles in The New York Times about their product and violence, they go crazy. They're not showmen. They're corporation types."
Themes
Artifice and illusion De Palma said the film deals with themes previously explored in his other films: "visualistic storytelling, a kind of obsessional voyeuristic activity, a sense of humor about the world we live in, manipulators manipulating manipulators". The theme of artifice is demonstrated through Body Doubles Hollywood setting—a location itself understood to be in the business of "make-believe"—characters, and plot. The title refers to the filmmaking term for a person who substitutes for another actor in scenes where the face is not shown, but it also acquires a second literal meaning in the film as the audience, along with Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), is presented with situations intended to deceive. The theme is also exhibited in multiple plot lines throughout, such as Jake's belief that it is Gloria he is spying on, Jake disguising himself in order to infiltrate the pornographic film shoot, and the reveal of the killer's identity.
Numerous scenes call attention to their own artificiality and the film's construction, from the opening scene of a desert where the camera then pulls away to reveal the desert is in fact a painted backdrop on the set of a B movie. Critics noted that with this scene, "De Palma puts us on edge from the start...repeatedly revealing in the first few minutes that what we're seeing isn't real — it's all a calculated illusion intended to trick us."
De Palma also makes use of rear projection techniques to emphasize artificialness. Rear projection is used in scenes where Jake drives around Los Angeles following Gloria. The scene of Jake's kiss with Gloria in front of the tunnel uses rear projection and functions as a direct reference to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with its 360-degree camera shot.
The scene on the porn film set soundtracked to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's song "Relax" is referred to by critics as "exhilarating" for its staging and metatextuality. Filmed in one long unbroken take, the scene segues into a musical sequence without warning and prompts viewers to question whether the action is happening in the porn film itself or the larger world of Body Double.
Manuela Lazic of The Film Stage noted that the scene has "Jake [playing] a parody of his nebbish self accompanied physically and musically by Frankie Goes to Hollywood", and that "the director presents a need to 'fake it 'til you make it' as absolute and inescapable. It is telling of De Palma's joyful cynicism that this scene, an apotheosis of fakery and eroticism, is probably Body Doubles most memorable." For the sequence, De Palma allowed his actual camera crew to be visible in shots, further blurring the lines between the film itself and the film Holly Body is making.