NEW YORK (AP) — Toby Talbot, a great patron of art house cinema who with her husband, Dan, helped introduce movie lovers to celebrated works from Jean-Luc Godard,Pedro Almodóvar and hundreds of other international filmmakers and to American favorites old and new, has died at age 96.
Talbot died Sept. 15 at her home in Manhattan, The New York Times reported Monday. The cause was complications from Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease.
The Talbots, through their distribution company, New Yorker Films, and such prominent Manhattan theaters as The New Yorker and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, were a prolific force behind the transformation of movies in the 1960s and ‘70s from popular entertainment to an art form regarded with the seriousness of literature or painting. Martin Scorsese, Pauline Kael, Wim Wenders and Susan Sontag were among their many friends and customers, turning up for the latest Godard release, a documentary about Sen. Joseph McCarthy or a double feature of Cary Grant movies.
“The New Yorker was a very special place. It was a place of communion, where the customers, the owners, the programmers, and the filmmakers seemed to be part of the same family,” Scorsese wrote in the foreword to Toby Talbot’s memoir, “The New Yorker Theater,” which came out in 2009. “Dan and Toby were right there on the front lines, showing films … distributing films, sticking their neck out on pictures by Godard and Bertolucci and Fassbinder and Straub and Huillet and Oshima and Sembene.”
The New Yorker theater had a special role in movie history, as the setting for a classic scene from Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”: While Allen and Diane Keaton wait on line in the lobby, they overhear a fellow moviegoer’s pedantic thoughts on the Canadian philosopher-media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who turns up in a cameo to rebuke the man.
For foreign language directors or for such contemporary American filmmakers as Allen or Jim Jarmusch who depended on the art house market, support from the Talbots was essential. The feature releases they championed were a template for cinephiles: Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” and Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise,” Yasujiro Ozu’s “Late Spring” and Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God.” The Talbots also helped inspire a reevaluation of Hollywood’s past, with retrospectives of Preston Sturges, Humphrey Bogart and Buster Keaton among others.
The Talbots’ art house dreams started in a car
Toby Talbot was born Toby Tolpen, a native New Yorker who met her future husband in 1949, went to the movies with him on dates and married him the following year. (They had three children). In the 1950s, Dan Talbot worked as an editor at Gold Medal Books among other jobs and Toby Talbot was an editor and translator.
Their art house years began spontaneously, on a road trip. The Talbots had been thinking about opening a book store in New Hampshire, but while driving north to look for possible locations they found themselves talking about the movies they loved.