Thelma Schoonmaker

Thelma Schoonmaker (born January 3, 1940) is an American film editor. She is best known for her collaboration
over five decades with film director Martin Scorsese. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including three Academy Awards, two BAFTA Film Awards, and four ACE Eddie Awards. 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.
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). She has received eight nominations for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, winning three—for Raging Bull, The Aviator (2004), and The Departed (2006), both records.
Early life
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. 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.
Career
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 François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Federico 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 film What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? A negative cutter had butchered his film, not leaving enough negative frames to allow for hot splicing, so a film professor asked her to help Scorsese. Schoonmaker went on to edit Scorsese's directorial film debut, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967).
At NYU, Schoonmaker also met filmmaker Michael Wadleigh and later did her first major editing work on his influential music festival documentary, Woodstock, on which Scorsese also worked. She received her first Oscar nomination for that film. 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, with Scorsese's help, Schoonmaker was finally admitted to the union. The two collaborated on Raging Bull, which garnered Schoonmaker an Academy Award for Best Film Editing.
Personal life
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.
Since Powell's death, Schoonmaker has dedicated herself to preserving the films and honoring the legacy of her husband, who directed many classic films, including The Red Shoes.
Selected film credits
Selected television credits
Music videos
Achievements and recognition
Schoonmaker holds the record for the most Oscar wins (three) in the Best Film Editing category, shared with Ralph Dawson, Daniel Mandell, and Michael Kahn. Furthermore, she equaled Kahn for the most nominations in that category with eight. Schoonmaker is the first woman to win multiple film editing Oscars.
In 2012, on the 75th anniversary of its founding, the Motion Picture Editors Guild issued a list of the 75 best-edited films of all time based on a survey of its membership. Three films edited by Schoonmaker made the list—all Scorsese's directed and from three different decades—including Raging Bull (1980), which is ranked first; Goodfellas (1990), ranked fifteenth; and Hugo (2011), ranked sixty-ninth. Only George Tomasini, the editor of Alfred Hitchcock's films in the 1950s and 1960s, has more appearances on this list, with four; and only Dede Allen also edited three pictures that each spanned a separate decade, hers from the 1960s through the 1980s.
Awards and nominations
Major associations
Academy Awards
British Academy Film Awards
Primetime Emmy Awards
Other awards and nominations
Honorary awards
State and academic honours
See also
List of film director and editor collaborations
References
Further reading
No transcript available.
2007 Coolidge Award Thelma Schoonmaker – The Coolidge Corner Theatre
External links
Schoonmaker, Thelma at Encyclopedia.com
"Thelma Schoonmaker: From 'Raging Bull' to 'Silence—January 26, 2017 interview on Studio 360
1940 births
Living people
Algerian people of American descent
American Cinema Editors
American film editors
American people of Dutch descent
American women film editors
Artists from New York City
BAFTA fellows
Best Editing BAFTA Award winners
Best Film Editing Academy Award winners
Columbia University alumni
Cornell University alumni
French people of American descent
French people of Dutch descent
Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement recipients
People from Algiers