The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies

The nation didn't know it, but 1960 would change American film forever, and the revolution would take place nowhere near a Hollywood set. With the opening of the New Yorker Theater, a cinema located at the center of Manhattan's Upper West Side, cutting-edge films from around the world were screened for an eager audience, including the city's most influential producers, directors, critics, and writers. Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, and Pauline Kael& -among many others& -made the New Yorker their home, trusting in the owners' impeccable taste and working much of what they viewed into their work.For the first time, Toby Talbot, co-owner and proud "matron" of the New Yorker, recounts the eclectic personalities she and her husband Dan encountered as they pioneered the art-house movement in Manhattan. Godard, Fassbinder, Ozu, and Tati& -these directors were regulars at a theater that introduced French New Wave and New German cinema to American audiences. With Vietnam protests and the struggle for civil rights in full swing, the New Yorker became an early distributor of political films, such as Bertolucci's Before the Revolutionand the documentaries Shoahand Point of Order. The theater's Monday-night series featured program notes by Jack Kerouac, Jules Feiffer, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonas Mekas, Jack Gelber, and Harold Humes, testifying to the deeply engaged and collaborative spirit behind each showing. Talbot also shares her stories from the projection booth, the box office, even the lost and found, detailing the highs and lows of a thrilling era in filmmaking