Toby Talbot, who with her husband, Dan, cultivated an erudite and eclectic audience of American cinephiles by exhibiting and distributing foreign and independent films in humble art houses in New York City and across the country, died on Sept. 15 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.
The cause was complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome, her daughter Sarah Talbot said.
For six decades, Toby and Dan Talbot operated four pioneering art-house cinemas on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (the New Yorker Theater, from 1960 to 1973; Cinema Studio, from 1977 to 1990; the Metro Theater, from 1982 to 1987; and the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, from 1981 to 2018).
The Talbots introduced audiences to avant-garde films by Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Robert Bresson, Claude Chabrol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ousmane Sembène.
“We often will play a film that we know has no, quote, commercial value,” Ms. Talbot told The New York Times in 2017, “but we admire it and respect it and would like to share it with our audience.”
The future filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, who lived in the neighborhood and was then in his 20s, befriended the Talbots and suggested old and lesser-known movies for the New Yorker to show under the title “Forgotten Films.” The theater’s entranceway was the site of the media guru Marshall McLuhan’s memorable cameo role in Woody Allen’s Oscar-winning 1977 film, “Annie Hall.” (The Talbots had by that time sold the theater to the Walter Reade Organization, which would continue to operate it until 1985.)
Ms. Talbot, who had a bachelor’s degree in Spanish, was also education editor of the Spanish-language newspaper El Diario Nueva York and translated “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number” (1981), the Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman’s harrowing memoir about being kidnapped and tortured by the military junta, into English. She also taught Spanish at East Rockaway High School in Queens and Spanish literature at Columbia, New York University and elsewhere, as well as a documentary film class at the New School.
She wrote dozens of books, including a combination memoir and biography, “A Book About My Mother” (1980), and a novel, “Early Disorder” (1980, under the pseudonym Rebecca Joseph), about a teenager with an eating disorder. After her husband died in 2017 at 91, she edited his memoir, “In Love With the Movies” (2022), which featured a foreword by Mr. Herzog.
From 1965 to 2009, the Talbots’ New Yorker Films distributed more than a thousand titles, including Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust epic, “Shoah” (1985).
Dan managed operations at the New Yorker Theater. Toby, who resisted his decision to sell the theater to focus on film distribution, exercised veto power over the film offerings. Her mother ran the candy concessions, lox and carrot cake included. Her father stood sentry in the lobby, which, became a salon for film buffs.
The New Yorker, on Broadway and West 88th Street, had been known as the Yorktown before the Talbots took over. They renamed it after a Miami Beach hotel run by Ms. Talbot’s uncle Harry and refurbished it with 900 seats from the recently shuttered Roxy.
It opened as a revival house with a double feature: “Henry V” (1944), starring Laurence Olivier, and the 1956 French short “The Red Balloon.” It featured madcap comedies starring the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields; it also presented “Point of Order!” (1964), a documentary about the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that Mr. Talbot helped produce, and the city’s first full-length public screening of “The Triumph of the Will” (1935), Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film documenting the 1934 Nazi Party Congress rally.
“The theater became a cocoon for young people getting schooled in film,” Ms. Talbot wrote in 2009 in “The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes From a Life at the Movies.” “We thought of it as our living room, playing movies we wanted to see.”
“We were our best audience,” she added. “It was a place of communion, where the customers, the owners, the programmers and the filmmakers all seemed to be part of the same family.”
The six-screen Lincoln Plaza, located in the basement of a high-rise apartment building, featured a statue of Humphrey Bogart and had lavender-painted walls bedecked with posters promoting abstruse French movies.
Dan Talbot died a week after the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas’ landlord declined to extend the lease. “The Talbots have been crucial to the formation, sustenance and perpetuation of film culture in New York — for that matter, in the United States,” the movie critic Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker at the time.
The last thing shown at the Lincoln Plaza, on Jan. 28, 2018, was a film about Winston Churchill called “Darkest Hour.”
Toby Tolpen, the elder of two daughters, was born on Nov. 29, 1928, in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her father, Joseph, owned a window-washing company. Her mother, Bella (Neger) Tolpen, looked after the home.
Toby was raised in the borough’s Pelham Parkway section and graduated from Christopher Columbus High School before receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1949 from Queens College.
In addition to her daughter Sarah, she is survived by two other daughters, Nina and Emily Talbot; a sister, Roslyn Gamiel; and four grandchildren.
Toby, who had been an inveterate moviegoer since childhood, met Daniel Distenfeld on her way to a movie theater in the Bronx. They married in 1951, the same year Dan, a book editor, changed his surname — because, his daughter said, antisemitism was rampant in the publishing industry.
Opening a movie theater around the corner on Broadway was adventitious. Dan had wanted to start a bookstore in New Hampshire, and the couple would often rattle off their favorite films as they drove up to scout locations for the store. When they learned that her sister’s accountant had bought a movie theater, the Yorktown, the Talbots decided on a whim to lease it.
Her husband’s decision to sell the New Yorker to focus solely on film distribution, she said in 2009, was “the only moment I considered divorce.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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