Yes, Martin Scorsese made a film with women, and women made it great

“Martin Scorsese only makes movies for men.” That’s often the prevailing wisdom about one of our finest filmmakers, an assertion that has dominated the discourse around his work as much as the falsehood that he endorses the bad actions of his characters. It’s an idea so embedded in the cultural conception of Scorsese that even Nicole Kidman shaded the director over it while admitting she yearned to work with him. Sure, it’s tough to deny that Scorsese is a storyteller primarily concerned with masculinity, although it’d be an outright lie to claim he revels in macho sensibilities. Women’s perspectives are present throughout his decades of output, from Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver to Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas to Lily Gladstone in Killers Of The Flower Moon. One of the most intriguing outliers in his filmography is a work that could resolutely be described as a woman’s picture, and Scorsese made it with the collaboration of a group of talented women whose contributions to cinema have largely been dismissed by history. As Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore turns 50 this month, it feels only fair to give them their long-overdue moment in the spotlight.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore wasn’t a Scorsese project from birth. The romantic drama, written by Robert Getchell, was brought to his attention by Ellen Burstyn. A rising talent who trained with The Actors Studio, Burstyn was shooting The Exorcist, her soon-to-be-smash follow-up to her breakout The Last Picture Show, when Warner Bros. executives expressed interest in working with her on another project. She wanted to make something with a woman’s perspective front and center, one who all viewers could relate to. The Alice of the title is a down-on-her-luck widow who is forced to start her life over. Low on finances on her way to California, she and her son travel across the country, confronting violence, poverty, and misogyny. As Burstyn herself noted, she wanted “a film from a woman’s point of view, but a woman that I recognized, that I knew.” Her agent found Getchell’s script, and Burstyn was eager to bring it to a director with a vision.

Influenced by Francis Ford Coppola, Burstyn checked out an early cut of Mean Streets and knew that Scorsese was the man she needed for her project. She wanted someone with the grit to turn the screenplay, which she described as “well-written but…a little slick,” and make it a believable story about a woman’s struggle.

The ‘70s was an incredible time for rising visionary filmmakers breaking free from the now-decimated studio system of old, but those freedoms were restricted almost entirely to white male directors. Aside from outliers like Elaine May (who was repeatedly derided by studio bosses and often stripped of creative control) or independent figures like Joan Micklin Silver and Barbara Loden, directing was still seen as a man’s job. Male viewpoints were deemed universal in a way never afforded to women (men can make films about anyone, but women can only make films for women, so the assertion goes). So, with this context in mind, it’s not a surprise that a female director wasn’t considered for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (which was also written by a man). But in their choice of collaborators, both Burstyn and Scorsese made sure women helped shape the narrative.

Many women who offered crucial contributions to the changing landscape of Hollywood during this decade did so as part of a team with their romantic partners. Scorsese was no exception. During this time, he was dating Sandra Weintraub, his first serious partner after his first divorce. The daughter of Fred Weintraub, Executive Vice President of Warner Bros. in the ‘70s, Sandra Weintraub had made a cameo in Mean Streets alongside her sister Heather. She was also credited as a pre- and post-production coordinator for the crime film and helped Scorsese with some key decisions, like the casting of his Boxcar Bertha star David Carradine in the role of a drunk who gets shot in Tony’s bar.

Scorsese, who was remarkably candid about his then-girlfriend’s contributions and in offering her credit, said that Weintraub even did some editing on the film and helped him hone his rough-around-the-edges sensibility for a major moviegoing audience. It was Weintraub who first read the script for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, saying, “I thought it was a good idea too, dealing with women for a change.” That job would require a few other women on their side. Explained Scorsese in 1973 to The New York Times, “She [Weintraub] starts at the very beginning of a film, discussing dialogue with me and making suggestions for casting […] People say I’m giving Sandy a job because she’s my girlfriend, but the fact is she understands film […] and when you find somebody like that, you should hang onto her.”

Another woman who understands film, Marcia Lucas came from a long line of female editors. Once seen as grunt work, the early days of cutting in Hollywood were done largely by women, as the job was viewed as something more akin to sewing than the macho labor of directing. That changed drastically once it became viewed as an artistic endeavor, and soon women were outnumbered by men in the field. It was through one of the few major female editors of her time, Verna Fields (who would go on to edit Jaws), that Lucas got her start. Her first major collaborator was her husband, a fellow USC graduate named George, with whom she worked on his first documentary about the making of Coppola’s film, The Rain People (Marcia was uncredited). Together, the Lucases worked closely on George’s feature debut, THX-1138. Then, she edited his follow-up, American Graffiti, earning her first Oscar nomination. A few years later, she would be credited with helping to save the fortunes of a troubled nostalgia-driven sci-fi movie her husband made called Star Wars.

Scorsese asked Lucas to cut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, her first solo editing endeavor on a movie not directed by her spouse. “Here she was, a wonderful director working on her husband’s films,” said Weintraub. “I don’t think she got taken seriously.” With Lucas, Scorsese sought a collaborator who he could trust to not wrestle control away from him on his first studio picture, but also someone whose judgment he trusted without a second thought.

Also on board as a trusted confidante was Toby Carr Rafelson, a production designer and the first wife of Bob Rafelson, director of Five Easy Pieces. She had worked as a set designer and production head on her husband’s early films, which were considered a crucial foundation of New Hollywood. The Rafelsons were childhood sweethearts and even after they divorced, Bob credited her as one of his greatest collaborators, calling her his “production designer, head nurse, teacher, brujo.” Scorsese offered her the job of production designer on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which would be only her second official credit.

Ellen Burstyn was, of course, the lynchpin of the team. Alongside their male director and screenwriter, they helped to hone Alice and refine the film into something far less glossy and old Hollywood than it had been on the page. Burstyn, aided by Weintraub and Scorsese, improvised on the script. They even made a tape of her playing Alice two decades into the future so that they could more fully define the character in the present. None of this is in the film. It was just an extra tool to bring realism to a film that otherwise could have been disconnected from the truth. When a line rang false, Scorsese said that all of “these women were free to […] suggest alternatives.” Said women included cast members like Diane Ladd (who would be Oscar-nominated for her performance).

As a born and bred New Yorker, Scorsese admitted that he felt like a fish out of water on a project that was about a woman and shot in Arizona. Matters of gender and geography were something he felt comfortable handing over to others, like Weintraub and Lucas.

Burstyn complimented Rafelson’s “incredible eye for detail, from the right doorknob on the door to the clothes.” With Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Rafelson was working both with mundane realism and moments of Capra-like fantasy. The film’s opening, shot on a deliberately artificial-looking soundstage, is theatrical to the point of absurdity, with an idyllic sepia-esque home and garden that was a homage to The Wizard Of Oz. It’s sharply contrasted with the claustrophobic and shoddy motel rooms with wilting wallpaper that Alice and her son later find themselves in before going to work in Mel’s, a homey diner in Tucson.

Mel’s is the platonic ideal of a ’70s diner, all cream countertops and home-baked pies concealed behind glass cloches. It’s ragtag but familiar, brightened by a color palette that echoes the Arizona desert and contrasts with Alice and her fellow waitresses’ baby pink uniforms. Alice starkly contrasts with her customer base of gruff men in denim and cowboy hats, among the wolves but never a sheep. Burstyn’s clear-eyed performance ensures she’s never a victim, even in a world where every guy is hot-tempered and unpredictable (not unlike the men of many other Scorsese films). In Burstyn’s hands, Alice is as much a determined and ferocious figure as Chris MacNeil in The Exorcist.

But Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore doesn’t share the gritty neorealism of many of the era’s films. It still feels decidedly Hollywood in tone, particularly with its happy ending where Burstyn goes off with handsome but kind of jerky Kris Kristofferson (it’s not hard to see how Getchell spun this into the long-running sitcom Alice). It’s in the moments in between where you see the evidence of this feminine team’s work. One crucial scene has Alice’s son telling a story in the car. Scorsese left Marcia Lucas to edit the entirely improvised scene as she saw fit. “It was a two-shot close-up, close-up,” said Scorsese. “I didn’t touch it. She got into the feeling of the acting.” The result is a beautiful sequence that shows the relationship between mother and son, a constant amid the flux of their lives.

This quartet of women wasn’t totally erased from film history. In particular, Burstyn became an acting icon and won the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Yet they didn’t become known as a power team, and this collaboration wasn’t exactly a harbinger of things to come. They are featured in Peter Biskind’s oft-cited Hollywood history of the decade, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. That juicy but historically questionable read cites Rafelson and Weintraub as key sources, but almost exclusively in terms of the men in their lives. They’re there for Biskind to squirrel out gossipy tidbits about philandering men and the perils of cocaine, not to detail their own achievements—which is a shame, because Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore wouldn’t work without these four artists’ contributions.

Many decades had to pass before so many women of this time were given their rightful dues, from the Polly Platt season of You Must Remember This to Carrie Courugen’s biography on Elaine May. Perhaps Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore being viewed as a minor Scorsese work due to the sheer excellence of his filmography meant that the film was to be forever seen as minor on everyone’s behalf. It’d be foolish, however, to agree with those assertions. Alice was a critical and commercial hit, an Oscar winner that premiered in competition at Cannes and inspired a sitcom that ran for nine seasons and one spin-off. How much of its “minor” status is due to it being a so-called woman’s picture? 

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore helped broaden Scorsese’s own worldview and ready him for the big leagues. It also showed that the changing sensibilities of New Hollywood could and should be dominated by women. That they weren’t is just another reminder of how history is written by the victors (i.e. the guys). There are a lot of gaps in our pop culture history where women are still waiting to receive their proper credit. It’s taken almost 50 years for the much-mythologized Easy Riders, Raging Bulls narrative to be punctured and its feminine contributions to be seen as more than add-ons—as wives and girlfriends assisting genius men. That change is happening, slowly but surely, whether it’s the reassessment of Polly Platt or Joan Micklin Silver’s work entering the Criterion Collection.  We’re long overdue a helpful rewrite to put the likes of Weintraub, Burstyn, Lucas, and Rafelson in their rightful places, and the work will continue long after the same old “Scorsese only cares about men” discourse has run dry.