In Love With Movies

One day I bought a neatly lined journal and over a period of ten years wrote the short takes that now appear in this book. For years the journal rested in my study closet among travel books, maps of Europe, issues of Robert Parker's The Wine Advocate, waiting patiently until I could organize my random thoughts into sentences I might come to trust. Meanwhile life swirled around me: the jangle of New York City culture, family pursuits, and my work as a film programmer and film distributor. So begins Talbot's episodic memoir of his somewhat accidental career. There is a brief section on his early life, when he spent entire days at the local movie house, and living in NYC in the 50s, always watching movies at the myriad theaters around the city, most of which eventually disappeared. He started the New Yorker theater with his wife Toby in the early 1960s and eventually introduced American moviegoers to a universe of European film making, including the French New Wave and German auteurs. Many of the films heshowed later became canonical, such as Rules of the Game, The Marriage of Maria Braun, My Dinner with Andre, and Shoah. He writes about the "ideal movie house," and the best way to screen a film (he screened up to 350 films a year), how he made his choices of what to show and what to distribute. Most film distributors, he writes, don't know anything about film, and all they care about is how much money a film will make--he disparages the "hit-driven business" he is in. He describes his accidental foray into film making--after watching all 187 hours of the Army-McCarthy hearings he thought he'd screen them over a month and charge people by the hour. But then he decided to abridge it and it became the documentary Point of Order. He provides short vignettesabout his relationships with the directors he knew--Ozu, Sembene, Rosesellini, Godard, Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, Varda, Tati, and others. There is a section on Claude Lanzmann and the distribution of Shoah. The Appendix includes an excellent interviewwith Talbot conducted by Stanley Kaufman when he was film critic for The New Republic"--