Toby Talbot, leading patron of art house film, dies at 96, report says

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 favourites old and new, has died at age 96.

Toby Talbot passes away at 96

Toby died September 15 at her home in Manhattan, a news publication 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,” Martin 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.

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