In Love with Movies: From New Yorker Films to Lincoln Plaza Cinemas

In this posthumous work, Talbot (1926–2017) brings back to glittering life the “golden age” of New York City’s art house cinemas with an enchanting look at his life working in film. From opening the Upper West Side’s New Yorker Theater in 1960 to running the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas from 1976 until his death (which was shortly followed by the theater’s shuttering), Talbot details his tenure as a film distributor and exhibitor committed to “eliminat[ing] barriers between filmmakers and their audience.” Of his career highlights, he recalls bringing 1985’s Shoah to the U.S. for the first time (a “moral undertaking” that brought the French film commercial success) and renders engrossing sketches of the many directors he worked with—among them Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Louis Malle, whom he helped launch 1981’s My Dinner with André, which ran for 53 weeks and grossed $5 million theatrically. Talbot’s infectious enthusiasm is on full display, perhaps most when he waxes rhapsodic about his favorite comic actors: W. C. Fields was the “Don Quixote of domestic life... voic[ing] what others dared not: the shackles of life are infinite, and the best we can do is turn it into comedy.” Film buffs will find much to marvel at in this terrific book. (Mar.)