Content area
Full text
The recent Martin Scorsese retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne has prompted renewed interest in the director's oeuvre, providing an excellent opportunity to revisit some of his lesser-known works. Scorsese's first studio film, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), is one such title.1 Despite its commercial success, Alice is a relative obscurity compared to Scorsese's two narrative features that bookend it: Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976). Alice is a challenging outlier in an auteurist consideration of Scorsese's career: while he continues to hone the stylistic hallmarks that he employed in Mean Streets, Alice's subject matter is atypical, its woman-centric narrative at odds with the general thematic inclinations of this distinctly macho director. Furthermore, the creative involvement of Alice star Ellen Burstyn, who plays the titular character, throughout the production challenges assumptions over the singularity of Scorsese's directorial vision, in turn calling into question the status of authorship in the Hollywood studio film.
Scorsese's previous film, Mean Streets, which he co-wrote with Mardik Martin in 1966, was a heavily autobiographical work drawing on the director's own experiences growing up in Manhattan's Little Italy. Scorsese struggled to secure funding for the project over subsequent years, eventually obtaining independent financing for the work in piecemeal fashion once he had a handful of directorial credits to his name.2 Alice, on the other hand, originated as a studio property prior to Scorsese's involvement. Firsttime screenwriter Robert Getchell's Alice screenplay came to the attention of Burstyn when she was considering her next project following her supporting role in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) and her starring turn in The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), both of which garnered her Academy Award nominations. John Calley, production head at Warner Bros., sent Burstyn numerous screenplays from the studio backlog, but none of them were to her liking. She recalls that '[i]n every one, the woman was either the victim, running from a pursuer, or she was a prostitute, and there just wasn't anything that interested me.'3 It was her agent who encountered Getchell's Alice screenplay, and Burstyn took it to Calley.4 Calley liked the project and wanted Burstyn to direct, but she felt that she wasn't ready to both act and direct, so she...