15 Differences Between the 'Alice's Restaurant’ Movie and the Real-Life Story
What’s the best way to celebrate Thanksgiving? Listening to a 20-minute protest song about the Vietnam War, of course. If you’re a true “Alice’s Restaurant” devotee, you also watch the 1969 movie, even if it’s stuffed with more filler than the turkey. While both are based on real events, the filmmakers cooked up a much less appetizing dinner of baloney.
Montana Was Perfectly Nice to Arlo Guthrie
In the film, Guthrie decides to head east after being bullied out of the Montana town where he was attending college, but in fact, he was still enrolled during Thanksgiving 1965. He lamented that Montana got a “bad rap” in the movie.
The Commune Was a Lot Smaller
The church where Alice Brock lived is portrayed as a large commune of around 50 of Alice’s “kids,” “but in reality, there were less than a half dozen who regularly visited or would stay overnight,” Guthrie said. “There were a few who would live there longer, but always at the invitation of Alice or Ray.”
There Was No “Mari-Chan”
In a frankly commonplace display of weird fetishism, Alice’s Restaurant invented a Chinese woman solely for Guthrie to romance. In real life, Guthrie was dating an English woman at the time.
There Was No Shelly, Either
Much of the film’s action concerns a character named Shelly, who drives a wedge between Alice and her husband before dutifully getting killed in a motorcycle accident, but he was invented to inject some non-litter drama into the narrative.
Ray’s Jealousy Was Invented as a Symbol
The tension in Alice and Ray’s marriage illustrates the supposedly fatal flaws of the hippie life, but it, too, was invented to enhance the drama. It turns out there’s actually no downsides to free love. Alice and Ray did divorce while the movie was filming, but it was unrelated.
Alice Was Pretty Anti-Heroin
Alice Brock hated the way she was portrayed in the movie, specifically as a “dope-taking, free-loving woman.” She resented the insinuation of her relationship with a heroin user, as she insisted that she didn’t “know anybody who shot heroin.”
Alice and Arlo
In a 2008 interview, Alice Brock decried how the film "misrepresented me, embarrassed me, and made me into an object." She especially objected to the suggestion that she’d slept with Guthrie. "I wasn't sleeping with everybody in the world, for example – and not Arlo Guthrie!”
Guthrie’s Buddy Was Fictionalized
In the film, the friend who is arrested with Arlo Guthrie is named Roger Crowther, but in real life, it was songwriter Rick Robbins. For his part, Robbins complained in 2006 that "they had to fill up the movie with stuff, and it was all fiction … was complete bull.”
The Envelope Didn’t Have Guthrie’s Name On It
In both the song and the movie, the fuzz tracks down Guthrie after finding an envelope in the illegally dumped trash with his name on it, but according to the local newspaper’s report, the envelope was addressed to the area man “Robbins and Guthrie had been visiting,” presumably Ray Brock. When you think about it, that makes a thousand times more sense.
Officer Obie Denied Handcuffing Guthrie
Guthrie’s account of his dealings with “Officer Obie” is full of hostility that police chief William J. Obanhein insisted wasn’t there. "I didn't put any handcuffs on them, and I didn't take the toilet seats off, 'cause we don't have any seats,” he said, only raising further questions.
About Those Toilet Seats
It turns out that the toilet seats Guthrie claimed in both the song and the movie were supposedly removed to prevent the detainees from harming themselves were actually removed long before they got there, at least according to Obie. “I told the architect who designed the cells you can't have things like that 'cause when people come in here, they're like to rip them off," he said, still confusingly.
Guthrie Was Never in Danger of Getting Drafted
The point of the story ends up concerning Guthrie’s efforts to avoid the draft, but in reality, he knew it was never going to be a problem. He had such a high draft number that he was “not going to get called unless there’s a squirrel invasion in New Hampshire.”
Woody Guthrie Survived the Song
In the movie, Arlo is devastated to learn that his father, folk legend Woody Guthrie, has passed away before he had a chance to say goodbye, but Woody Guthrie didn’t die until October 1967. Since “Alice’s Restaurant” was released the same month, it’s safe to say he was still kicking during its events.
Alice Sold the Church After the Movie
At the end of the movie, Alice muses that maybe they should sell the church, but actually, it was all the attention from the movie that made her start thinking about giving it up. In 2014, she confirmed that “there were stories about people stopping by the church, knocking on the door, looking in the windows,” and noted that “we sold the church at that point.”
It Wasn’t Called “Alice’s Restaurant”
That jingle would have made a poor advertisement for Alice’s restaurant, because it wasn’t, in fact, called “Alice’s Restaurant.” It was called The Back Room. So there you go. Everything you know is a lie. Might as well eat some turkey.