They begin a courtship, bonding over their differences as well as their similarities (for instance, a shared obsession with movies). One day, he meets a girl (the aforementioned Bethune and the first of many Scorsese blondes) on the Staten Island Ferry and is taken with her effortless charms and virginal purity. He’s a little bit of a dreamer, but for all his open-mindedness, he can’t help fall in line with the community mentality towards women. JR (Harvey Keitel, in his first of several collaborations with Scorsese) is a young hood who spends his days raising hell around town with his no-good friends, and his nights getting his kicks with an endless rotation of loose women he dismisses as “broads”. The film takes place in a world the young Scorsese knew quite well: the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan. This led to the film’s acquisition by exploitation distributor Joseph Brenner, who forced the young director to add in a gratuitous sex scene (spliced quite literally into the middle of a dialogue scene) and retitle the film to WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR. In 1967, Scorsese added a romantic sublot with actress Zina Bethune to the short and changed the title to I CALL FIRST, eventually screening it at the Chicago Film Festival the following year (and even earning high praise from a young Roger Ebert). He might not have known it at the time, but what he was really embarking on was his very first feature film-albeit the process of how it came to be deviated greatly from conventional processes. However, the real test would come in the form of a student short he embarked on the following year-a film about rambunctious young Italian men called BRING ON THE DANCING GIRLS. The young Scorsese would try his hand at filmmaking by directing two shorts during his undergraduate studies- WHAT’S A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS? (1963), and IT’S JUST NOT YOU, MURRAY! (1964). Sometime in the mid-60’s, a young man named Martin Scorsese was sitting in a film history course at New York University and found himself struck by his professor’s sheer enthusiasm and love for cinema, beginning a journey that bring him to the forefront of his particular generation of filmmakers. That first class of school-taught filmmakers, comprised of the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma, or George Lucas, would prove invaluable in legitimizing the idea of film schools as a breeding ground for tomorrow’s top cinematic talents. It’s hard to believe, in the late 60’s when the idea of “film school” was new and untested, that pursuing a profession in film carried a certain stigma with it. Nobody bats an eye when a young man or woman declares his or her intentions to become a filmmaker (except maybe for the parents shouldering those insane tuition fees). Nowadays, going to college to pursue filmmaking is almost as commonplace as studying law or economics. Martin Scorsese: WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR (1967)

Whos that knocking at my door 1967