From C. Mason Wells comes word that Dan Talbot, founder of New Yorker Films (and pictured above in front of the New Yorker Theater with Alfred Hitchcock), has passed away. “Alongside his wife Toby, few did more for world cinema distribution and exhibition in this country,” writes Wells. “A crushing loss.”
As Jordan Hoffman writes in the Village Voice today, Dan and Toby Talbot had been “at the forefront of arthouse cinema since they opened the New Yorker Theater in 1960 (with a double bill of Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon), followed by the Cinema Studio and the Metro. They ran the New Yorker Films distribution company, which released works by Bertolucci, Ozu, Godard, Bresson, Malle, Varda, Herzog, Merchant and Ivory, Sembène, Akerman, Mizoguchi, and more. They brought the nine-plus-hour documentary Shoah to theaters. What we talk about when we talk about ‘foreign films’ is in no small part defined by their curatorial instincts.”
In its Spring 2017 issue, Cineaste ran an article in which Talbot looked back on his years as a distributor and exhibitor. It’s not online, but Cynthia Rowell’s introduction to the piece is, and she notes that Talbot “started his illustrious career with words, not images: the 1959 publication of Film: An Anthology (a volume collecting invaluable essays on the art), and short-lived stints as an East Coast story editor for Warner Bros. and film critic at The Progressive. This literary interest would manifest itself in one of the New Yorker Theater’s defining qualities: the film program notes, often written by well-known authors.”
In 2009, Toby Talbot wrote a memoir, The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies, reviewed for Offscreen by Daniel Garrett: “Talbot’s book is a love story, for her husband, film, the theaters they have operated; and the love that is celebrated is a broadening, complex circle of connections. The Talbots knew Peter Bogdanovich and Jonas Mekas, as well as Morris Dickstein, Phillip Lopate, Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag, and Parker Tyler. At their theater, the Talbots began a film society, and people like Jules Feiffer and Terry Southern wrote program notes.”
When New Yorker Films was sold to Madstone Films in 2009, “the now-defunct entity that used portions of New Yorker’s library as collateral for a loan,” Anthony Kaufman spoke with Dan Talbot for Variety in 2009, noting that he took full responsibility for the demise of the company. But he also credited “the success of many of the company’s groundbreaking standouts (e.g., Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God) to a confluence of factors: The films of the French New Wave helped cultivate ‘a climate of excitement’; critics such as Vincent Canby and Andrew Sarris championed the films and kept them alive among the cognoscenti; more New York arthouses created an expanded environment for the films and sparked word of mouth; and audiences ‘were extremely literate, cultivated and traveled,’ he recalls. . . . Ultimately, however, Talbot says, he didn’t have a magic touch: ‘I’ve always maintained that the real distributor of a film is the film itself. There is something inside successful films that’s not definable that makes them work. The role of a distributor, seems to me, is to get behind the film and not get in front of it and fuck it up.’”
“Despite the loss of New Yorker Films—it took him years to get over it, he said—Mr. Talbot remains upbeat about the industry side of the art-film world,” noted the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis when she met him in Cannes in 2011. “The movie business (‘It’s not a business,’ he corrected me, ‘it’s a casino’) is more complicated now. ‘I don’t think it’s worse or better—it’s just different.’”
Though New Yorker Films was gone, Dan and Toby Talbot were still running Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, “a temple of the art house movie scene in New York for thirty years,” as Dade Hayes called in a story for Deadline—reporting, sadly, on the theater’s imminent closing.
In 2004, the Independent Film Project presented its Gotham Award for Industry Lifetime Achievement to Talbot, and IndieWire ran his acceptance speech. He had stories to tell.
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