Trailer
Plot summary
Jake Scully is a struggling actor in Los Angeles whose claustrophobia ruins a scene and costs him his role. He comes home to find his girlfriend with another man, moves out and meets Sam Bouchard in a method acting class. Sam offers him a few weeks of house-sitting at a wealthy friend's ultra-modern home in the Hollywood Hills. The house comes with a telescope, and through it Sam points out a neighbor, Gloria Revelle, who dances erotically in her window at the same hour every night. Jake watches her, follows her when she goes shopping, and notices a disfigured Indian who has also been watching her. Gloria places calls to someone she promises to meet.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Body Double (1984)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Before casting Melanie Griffith, director Brian De Palma tried to hire porn actress Annette Haven for Holly but the studio rejected her over her adult filmography, then offered the role to Linda Hamilton, who turned it down to make The Terminator instead, with Jamie Lee Curtis, Carrie Fisher and Tatum O'Neal also considered.
SPOILER
The film's power-drill murder scene left such a mark that Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel American Psycho has serial killer Patrick Bateman name Body Double as his favorite film, claiming he watched it 37 times and repeatedly rented the tape.- The Motion Picture Association initially slapped the film with an X rating, and because many theaters refused to book X-rated films, De Palma had to cut scenes from the porn-shoot sequence to bring it down to an R, just as he had done on Dressed to Kill and Scarface.
- The London Clinic for Battered Women asked Columbia Pictures for a percentage of the profits from the film, calling it “blood money” for using “the victimization of women as a source of massive profit”.
- Brian De Palma cast Deborah Shelton, then found her voice to be unsuitable and had all of her lines dubbed by Helen Shaver in post-production.
- A lukewarm reaction at Columbia's own preview screening in Van Nuys turned the studio from enthusiastic to worried, and De Palma and Columbia ended up mutually dissolving the three-picture deal that had brought the film to the studio in the first place.
