Daniel Talbot, influential indie film figure, dies in NYC
LOS ANGELES: Daniel Talbot, a force in the independent film world who distributed art house movies and co-founded New York City’s influential Lincoln Plaza Cinema, has died.
Talbot’s death was announced on Friday in a post on the movie theater’s Facebook page. He was in his 90s and had been in declining health in recent months, according to trade publication Variety.
Two weeks ago, it was reported that the theater’s lease was up and it could close in January after operating for nearly four decades. Talbot and his wife and business partner, Toby Talbot, started and ran the six-screen theater tucked into a basement in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood. The couple would determine which films passed muster, flagging them for wider attention, Toby Talbot said in a recent interview with the website Deadline.
“We acted as kind of first readers. If a film opened at Lincoln Plaza, it had to be worthwhile,” she said.
Daniel Talbot ran the New Yorker Theater in the early 1960s and started the distribution company New Yorker Films in 1965 with “Before the Revolution,” among Bernardo Bertolucci’s earliest films.
“I had no interest in distribution,” Talbot told Variety in 2009. “I made him a very small offer and I got the film, and that was the beginning of New Yorker Films.”
Other releases included Louis Malle’s “My Dinner With Andre" and films by Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.