Thelma Schoonmaker

Thelma Schoonmaker (born January 3, 1940) is an American film editor, best known for her collaboration over five decades with director Martin Scorsese.

She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including three Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and four ACE Eddie Awards.

Thelma Schoonmaker was born on January 3, 1940, in Algiers (then part of French Algeria), the daughter of American parents, Thelma and Bertram Schoonmaker.

Bertram, descended from the New York Dutch Schoonmaker political family, was employed as an agent of the Standard Oil Company and worked extensively abroad.

The Schoonmakers were evacuated to the United States shortly after the Fall of France during the Second World War.

In 1941, the family moved to the Dutch-Caribbean island of Aruba, where Schoonmaker's father continued to work for Standard Oil and her mother ran nursery schools.

Schoonmaker was primarily raised in Aruba, in a community she described as "a colony of expatriates from over the world"; she also spent part of her childhood in Portugal.

Schoonmaker did not live in the United States until she was an adolescent in 1955, and was initially alienated and dumbfounded by American culture.

She settled in Ridgewood, New Jersey and graduated in 1957 from Ridgewood High School.

Schoonmaker was interested in a career in international diplomacy and began attending Cornell University in 1957, where she studied political science and the Russian language.

When she graduated from Cornell in 1961, she began taking State Department tests in order to apply for positions within the U.S. government.

Politically inclined and opinionated, Schoonmaker was opposed to the Vietnam War and supported the Civil rights movement.

She passed the State Department exams but failed the final "stress test" when she expressed distaste for the South African policy of apartheid, a stance which did not sit well with those administering the tests.

While taking a graduate course in primitive art at Columbia University, Schoonmaker saw an advertisement in The New York Times that offered training as an assistant film editor.

She responded to the advertisement and got the job.

The job entailed assisting an "editor" who was randomly cutting frames from classic European films (such as those by Truffaut, Godard and Fellini), so that their length would conform to the running times of U.S. television broadcasts.

She signed up for a brief six-week course in filmmaking at New York University, where she came into contact with Young Martin Scorsese, who was struggling to complete his short film What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?.

A negative cutter had butchered the film, not leaving enough negative frames to allow for hot splicing, so a film professor asked Schoonmaker to help Scorsese.

Schoonmaker started working with Scorsese on his debut feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), and has edited all of his films since Raging Bull (1980).

Schoonmaker went on to edit Scorsese's feature directorial debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967).

Schoonmaker met filmmaker Michael Wadleigh at NYU, and later both she and Scorsese became part of the editing team on his seminal music festival documentary, 1970's Woodstock.

It was her first major effort at picture editing, and she received an Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing—the first documentary ever to be nominated in that category.

Her use of superimpositions and freeze frames brought the performances in the film to life, and added to the movie's broad appeal, thus helping to raise the artistry and visibility of documentary film-making to a new level.

The early period of Schoonmaker's career was difficult.

Despite being an Oscar nominee, Schoonmaker could not work on feature films unless she became a member of the Motion Picture Editors Guild.

The union's entry requirements included spending five years as an apprentice and three as an assistant, which Schoonmaker was unwilling to meet.

Schoonmaker remarked, "And I just couldn't see why I, who had been a full editor and had been nominated for an Academy Award, should suddenly have to become an apprentice. ...And of course, they couldn't see the sense of why I, who had never been in the union all those years and had never paid dues all those years and had never served my time in their sense, should be allowed as a full editor. So it was quite understandable on both sides. It was just insane."

Consequently, Schoonmaker did not work with Scorsese in a formal capacity in the 1970s; however, she did make an uncredited contribution to Taxi Driver.

Scorsese had decided not to edit the picture during principal photography, but to save all the editing until shooting had wrapped.

Unfortunately, this left him very little time to cut the picture, as Columbia's contract stipulated that a finished cut had to be supplied by the middle of February.

Scorsese brought in Schoonmaker to help.

At one point, Steven Spielberg visited Scorsese and chipped in with some contributions toward the final edit.

In the 1980s, Schoonmaker, with some help from Scorsese, was eventually accepted into the union.

They worked together on the classic sports drama Raging Bull, which is widely considered masterful editing and won her the Best Film Editing Oscar.

She was introduced to Michael Powell by Scorsese and London-based film producer Frixos Constantine.

The couple were married from May 19, 1984, until his death in 1990.

The couple had no children.

She has also been nominated eleven times for the BAFTA Award for Best Editing, winning for Raging Bull and Goodfellas (1990).

She has been honored with the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1997, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2014, and the BAFTA Fellowship in 2019.

She has received nine nominations for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, winning three—for Raging Bull, The Aviator (2004), and The Departed (2006), both records.