Thelma Schoonmaker

Schoonmaker was born on January 3, 1940 in Algiers (then part of French Algeria), the daughter of American parents, Thelma and Bertram Schoonmaker.[2][3] Bertram, descended from the New York Dutch Schoonmaker political family,[3] was employed as an agent of the Standard Oil Company and worked extensively abroad.[4] The Schoonmakers were shortly after evacuated to the United States following the Fall of France during the Second World War.[2] In 1941, the family moved to the Dutch-Caribbean island of Aruba,[2][4] where Schoonmaker's father continued to work for Standard Oil and her mother ran nursery schools.[5] Schoonmaker was primarily raised in Aruba, in a community she described as "a colony of expatriates from over the world";[5] she also spent part of her childhood in Portugal.[6]

Schoonmaker did not live in the United States until she was an adolescent in 1955, and was initially alienated and dumbfounded by American culture.[4] 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 in the U.S. government.[4][7]

Politically inclined and opinionated, Schoonmaker was opposed to the Vietnam War and supported the Civil Rights Movement.[5] 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.[4][8]

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.[10][11] 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.[4]

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.[4] Schoonmaker edited Scorsese's first feature film, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967).[12]

At NYU, Schoonmaker also met filmmaker Michael Wadleigh and later edited his influential music festival documentary, Woodstock on which Scorsese also worked. Her first major film editing work on Woodstock gained Schoonmaker an Academy Award nomination for Best Editing.[13] Her use of superimpositions and freeze frames brought the performances in the film to life, and added to the movie's wide appeal, thus helping to raise the artistry and visibility of documentary film-making to a new level.[11]

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.[5] The union's entry requirements included spending five years as an apprentice and three as an assistant, which Schoonmaker was unwilling to meet.[5][9][13] 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."[5]

Consequently, Schoonmaker did not work with Scorsese in a formal capacity in the 1970s;[13] 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.[14][15]

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.[16]

Thelma Schoonmaker and Columba Powell at the Cannes Film Festival (2009). Columba Powell is the son of Michael Powell, a prominent film director to whom Schoonmaker was married.

She was introduced to Michael Powell by Scorsese and London-based film producer Frixos Constantine.[13] The couple were married from May 19, 1984 until his death in 1990. The couple had no children.[17]

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.[7]

With eight Academy Award nominations, Schoonmaker tied with Michael Kahn for being the most-nominated editor in Academy Awards history. Tied with Kahn, Daniel Mandell, and Ralph Dawson, she also holds the record for the most wins in the category of Best Editing, with three.

In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild published a list of the 75 best-edited films of all time based on a survey of its membership. Three films edited by Schoonmaker with Scorsese are on this list: Raging Bull (1980), listed first, Goodfellas (1990), listed fifteenth, and Hugo (2011), listed sixty-ninth. Only George Tomasini, the editor of Alfred Hitchcock's films in the 1950s, has more appearances on this list.[18]

• List of film director and editor collaborations

• Aloi, Daniel. "Scorsese's film editor, Thelma Schoonmaker '61, talks of 'Raging Bull' and Michael Powell". Cornell University.
• Schoonmaker, Thelma (December 26, 2005). "Oscar-Winning Scorsese Editor Thelma Schoonmaker". Fresh Air (Interview). Interviewed by Terry Gross. National Public Radio. No transcript available.
• Hynes, Daniel (January 17, 2014). "Cut Here, Cut There, but It's Still 3 Hours: Thelma Schoonmaker on the Art of Editing Long Movies". The New York Times.
• Kallay, William (March 3, 2005). "American Cinema Editors – 2004 Oscar Nominees Discuss their Craft".
• Morgan, David (1991). "Interview with Thelma Schoonmaker". Wide Angle/Closeup.
• Schoonmaker, Thelma (September 26, 2005). "Thelma Schoonmaker Q&A: The Oscar-winning editor discusses Martin Scorsese, Michael Powell and her new film, 'The Departed'". Time Out (Interview). Interviewed by Chris Tilly. Archived from the original on January 7, 2006.
• 2007 Coolidge Award Thelma Schoonmaker – The Coolidge Corner Theatre

• Thelma Schoonmaker at IMDb
• Schoonmaker, Thelma at Encyclopedia.com
• "Thelma Schoonmaker: From 'Raging Bull' to 'Silence'"—January 26, 2017 interview on Studio 360