While Ellen Burstyn was filming The Exorcist (1973), she got a message from executives at Warner Bros. who had screened the dailies, liked what they saw, and wanted to do another picture with her. They sent her a number of scripts, but she felt every female in them was either a victim, the understanding wife of the hero, or some sort of sex object, but never the protagonist.

Burstyn's new agent sent her a script by Robert Getchell, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. She loved it and felt a kinship with the main character because "I had just gone through a divorce and I was discovering for myself what it was like not to be an auxiliary person." David Susskind, a producer and pioneering talk show host who Burstyn knew slightly (and didn't really want to work with), held the option on the script and wanted to make it with Anne Bancroft. (Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross were other stars who had been considered for the project.). When Susskind heard Warners was ready to greenlight it with Burstyn, he agreed.

Warners executive John Calley initially asked Burstyn if she wanted to direct it herself, but she didn't have the confidence. She told him she wanted someone new and exciting and called Francis Ford Coppola for a recommendation. He told her to watch Mean Streets (1973) by Martin Scorsese. Burstyn was very impressed with Scorsese's picture, but she was concerned because it was very male-dominated. She set up a meeting with the young director, whom she found nervous and uncomfortable. She told him she liked his film but that she wanted this one made from a woman's point of view. "What do you know about women?" she asked. His pleasant reply--"Nothing, but I'd like to learn"--won her over.

Burstyn was also eager to work with Scorsese because she liked the vibrant immediacy of Mean Streets and thought that edge could keep Alice from becoming too glib and facile and too much of a formula "woman's picture."

Scorsese told film scholar Richard Schickel he was attracted to the project as a way of exploring his ability to make a genre film in Hollywood. "It was something like a vehicle, like a Bette Davis vehicle or a Joan Crawford vehicle," he said. "So I felt this would be a way of embracing the genre."

Scorsese was also attracted by Burstyn's background with the Actors Studio. He felt that with New York-trained actors like her, Diane Ladd, Harvey Keitel, and Lelia Goldoni in the cast, he could work with improvisations and incorporate them into the script. The process, he said, was inspired by the films of John Cassavetes.

Scorsese was convinced by John Calley that working successfully on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore would show Hollywood that he could make a commercial film from someone else's script with established talents, a big budget, multiple locations, and starring a woman.

Early drafts of the script contained some very different approaches to what was eventually seen on screen. There was some thought of having her divorce her husband and run away, but Scorsese liked the idea that his death happened out of the blue--"the hand of God," he called it--that forced her to make the decision to change her life.

In the earliest version of the script, one Scorsese never saw, Getchell had Alice's son Tommy commit suicide.

Getchell's skill at almost 1930s-style wisecracking dialogue, most evident in Alice's interchanges with Tommy, inspired Scorsese to begin thinking about a completely different opening to the picture, a flashback filmed on a highly stylized studio set that recalled movies of a bygone era.

Scorsese scheduled several weeks of rehearsal before principal photography began on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, allowing the actors to improvise many scenes. Screenwriter Robert Getchell sat in on these sessions, taking notes and incorporating the improvised material into the script.

by Rob Nixon