Influential indie film distributor and exhibitor Daniel Talbot died on Friday morning in New York, his longtime manager at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Ewneto Admassu, announced.
Talbot, who was in his early 90s, halted his routine travels to the annual Cannes and Toronto film festivals this year as his health was reported to be in decline.
Talbot managed Manhattan’s New Yorker Theater in the early 1960s and in 1965 launched his own indie distribution company, New Yorker Films, to handle the U.S. release of Bernardo Bertolucci’s debut film “Before the Revolution.”
Over the next 40 years, he distributed some of the very best of international films from directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Claude Lanzmann (who won wide acclaim for his nine-hour-plus 1985 documentary “Shoah”).
He also released seminal American indie films such as Errol Morris’ 1978 debut documentary “Gates of Heaven,” Louis Malle’s 1981 two-hander “My Dinner With Andre and Wayne Wang’s 1982 drama “Chan Is Missing.”
New Yorker Films shut down in 2009.
In 1981, Talbot helped open the six-screen Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a go-to destination for art-house films for several generations of New York moviegoers.
The venue scheduled to close before the end of January 2018 for structural work.
He is survived by his wife and business partner, Toby Talbot.
His memorial will take place on Sunday, Dec. 31 at 9:30 a.m. at the Riverside Memorial Chapel.