Thelma Schoonmaker

Thelma Schoonmaker (/ˈskuːnmeɪkər/; born January 3, 1940) is an American film editor, best known for her collaboration over five decades with director Martin Scorsese. She has received numerous accolades, including three Academy Awards, two BAFTA 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 a record nine nominations for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing and has won a record three times for Raging Bull, The Aviator (2004), and The Departed (2006). She has also been nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Editing a record 11 times, winning twice for Raging Bull and Goodfellas (1990).

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. The State Department claimed that her views were "too politically liberal" and that she wouldn't be happy having a job at the Department.

You get to contribute so significantly in the editing room because you shape the movie and the performances. You help the director bring all the hard work of those who made the film to fruition. You give their work rhythm and pace and sometimes adjust the structure to make the film work – to make it start to flow up there on the screen. And then it's very rewarding after a year's work to see people react to what you've done in the theater.

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

Schoonmaker received her first major screen credits when she and Scorsese both became part of the editing team on Michael Wadleigh's seminal music festival documentary, 1970's Woodstock. She received an Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing for her groundbreaking work—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.