CORRECTION APPENDED

Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker go together like black and white—complete opposites with nothing in common. Scorsese is famously brash, moody, and macho, whereas Schoonmaker is soft-spoken, even-tempered, and thoughtful.

What Marty, Thelma, black, and white all have in common is film. All four collaborated for the first time professionally on the 1980 Scorsese-directed movie “Raging Bull,” which earned Schoonmaker her first of three Academy Awards for editing. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

Schoonmaker accepted another honor, the Coolidge Award, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline on April 11. The next day, she held a sold-out master class in film editing and participated in a panel discussion following a screening of the her latest Oscar-winning film, “The Departed,” which included film composer Howard Shore and screenwriter William Monahan.

To honor Schoonmaker, the Coolidge organized a retrospective of her films, showing “Raging Bull,” “Goodfellas,” “The Aviator” (for which she earned her second Oscar), and “The King of Comedy,” all of which were made in collaboration with Scorsese.

Schoonmaker said she originally thought that she would work for the State Department, but was rejected for being too opinionated.

“I wasn’t allowed to speak about apartheid at cocktail parties in South Africa,” she said at a press conference after her award ceremony. Unwilling to compromise and join the Foreign Service, Schoonmaker moved to New York and answered an ad for an assistant film editor, chiefly due to her childhood love of film.

Her boss was responsible for cutting up old reels from classic directors like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Federico Fellini, sometimes hacking at random to prepare the film for broadcast on late-night television.

“He’d say, ‘It’s okay, no one watches this stuff anyway.’ But you know who was watching was Marty,” Schoonmaker said.

The two met for the first time at an NYU summer course in film editing, which paired student-editors with student-directors to work on short films. Schoonmaker was assigned to another director, but was asked to help the young Scorsese, whose film had been mangled by another editor.

Though she winced as her former boss savaged those precious films, Schoonmaker was able to practice an editing technique called “negative cutting,” and her expertise made her the obvious choice to save Scorsese’s film. Their mutual trust began then, as did Schoonmaker’s admiration for Scorsese’s work.

“We [in the class] all knew at that point that he had it,” Schoonmaker said.

Schoonmaker said that she and Scorsese would race after work to the small movie houses on New York’s Upper West Side, where they were able to watch, absorb, and learn. As a result of these shared film experiences and their long-time friendship, Schoonmaker and Scorsese have similar tastes and a blessedly healthy working relationship.

Schoonmaker lamented some of the lost skill and appreciation for black-and- white cinema. Her primary advice for aspiring filmmakers was to study older films, as both she and Scorsese have done from a young age.

“I find it very disturbing in film classes when a professor announces that the film they are about to watch is in black and white and elicits a groan,” Schoonmaker said. “That’s 85 years of filmmaking.”

According to Schoonmaker, audiences are beginning to understand the editor’s role in the filmmaking process more thoroughly, but most would be surprised to know the extent to which she has put her stamp on Scorsese’s films. Schoonmaker assembles the director’s characteristic jump-cuts and improvised scenes in the editing room, and although she and Scorsese collaborate over the course of the editing process, the work is Schoonmaker’s.

“As an editor, you spend long, hard hours banging away until you solve [the film],” Schoonmaker said.

Schoonmaker alluded to her respect for Scorsese throughout the press conference, and she repeatedly made it clear that credit for the shots themselves goes to him.

“I’m given absolutely golden footage to work with,” she said.

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION: The April 20 arts article "Scorsese's Editor Scores Coolidge Award" incorrectly stated that director Martin Scorsese and film editor Thelma Schoonmaker's first collaboration was the 1980 movie "Raging Bull." In fact, the duo first worked together on the 1968 film "Who's That Knocking at My Door."