How ‘The Exorcist’ kickstarted Martin Scorsese’s career: “New, exciting, and unknown”
Finding a connection between William Friedkin’s horror classic The Exorcist, which instilled a true sense of religious terror in audiences in 1973, and Martin Scorsese‘s career isn’t immediately obvious. After all, Scorsese had nothing to do with the movie. In fact, when Friedkin was shooting the film, Scorsese hadn’t even made a true Hollywood studio picture yet, as Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Boxcar Bertha, and Mean Streets were all independent productions.
In addition, even though Friedkin and Scorsese would become indelibly associated with the ‘New Hollywood’ crop of young directors who turned the industry on its head in the 1970s, it doesn’t seem they were particularly close. They were good friends with Francis Ford Coppola, with the iconic Godfather director identifying Friedkin as his “first friend among the filmmakers of my generation” after he sadly passed in 2023. As for Scorsese, outside Coppola, he was closer to guys like Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma than he was to Friedkin.
So, how did Friedkin’s bowel-loosening ‘Best Picture’ nominee inadvertently kickstart Scorsese’s career as arguably the finest director of his generation? Well, the former hired The Last Picture Show’s Ellen Burstyn to play his female lead, Chris MacNeill, a working actor horrified to discover her daughter has seemingly been possessed by the devil. As the dailies of Friedkin’s film began trickling into Warner Bros executives, they became increasingly impressed with Burstyn’s performance, and the studio soon decided it wanted to keep the talented performer in the fold.
“They wanted to do another picture with me, and they started sending me scripts that I wasn’t very interested in,” Burstyn revealed in Martin Scorsese: A Journey. “The scripts were full of stereotypes—the woman as victim, the woman as helper—so my agent started looking for scripts for me to bring to Warner.”
While still making The Exorcist, Burstyn’s agent came across Robert Getchell’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, a comedy-drama about a widow who travels the Southwestern US with her young son in search of a better life. She soon meets Kris Kristofferson’s David, a divorced rancher, in Tucson, Arizona, and romance blossoms. Burstyn liked the script but also felt it was too slick and polished. She wanted more gritty realism applied to the story, joking that “it seemed as if it were written for Doris Day and Rock Hudson”.
However, both parties saw the potential, and it was decided Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore would be her next movie. Amazingly, Warner was so enamoured with her work on The Exorcist that the executives asked her who she envisioned as the director. She wasn’t sure, so she called Friedkin’s old buddy Coppola and told him she required “a director who was new, exciting, and unknown”.
Thankfully, he knew just the guy for the job. “Go look at a movie called Mean Streets and see what you think,” he told Burstyn, who quickly booked a screening for Scorsese’s intensely personal crime picture set in New York’s Little Italy, where he grew up. The movie hadn’t even been released to the public yet, but Burstyn saw in the director’s work precisely the realism and verisimilitude she was after. “I felt that it was exactly what Alice needed,” she later said.
So, Burstyn went back to Warner and told them she wanted Scorsese, and the rest is history. She described her time working with the future Taxi Driver and Goodfellas helmer as “one of the best experiences I’ve ever had”, and the resulting movie was so brilliant that she picked up a ‘Best Actress’ Academy Award for her heartfelt performance.
