New Yorker Films Shuts Its Doors; Back Catalog of Foreign-Indie Classics to Be Auctioned Off

Phil Nugent — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Founded in 1965 by Dan Talbot, New Yorker Films has been recognized for some forty years as one of America's premier distributors of foreign films. Talbot originally set the company up when he had his own theater, also called the New Yorker; it was a brainstorm born of frustration over the difficulty he was having programming his own theater, given the haphazard and slovenly way in which even important international movies were then brought into the American market. Beginning in 1965 with its acquisition of Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, New Yorker Films took on a life of its own, becoming the support system through which movie lovers in the United States were able to gain access to work by Godard, Fellini, Bresson, Chabrol, Fassbinder, Eric Rohmer, Werner Herzog, Ousmane Sembene, Wim Wenders, Pedro Almodovar, and the more recent auteurs of the Iranian New Wave, as well as such homegrown independent directors as Errol Morris, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, and Wayne Wang. Now comes word that New Yorker Films "has ceased operations". Reacting to this bland announcement posted on the company's website, Eugene Hernandez posted a fuller report on indieWIRE. After first reporting that neither Talbot nor New Yorker Films' Jose Talbot "have been available for comment", indieWIRE later added the text of an email the site received from Lopez: “I have sad news. The parent company of New Yorker Films has defaulted on a loan. The assets of New Yorker were used as security on the loan. The lender has informed us that it intends to foreclose on these assets. New Yorker stopped doing business yesterday... We are in total shock that after forty three years this has happened.” Rumors that New Yorker Films was in trouble were apparently strong enough to put a damper on the Spirit Awards ceremony this past weekend.

New Yorker Films was a revered institution, and it sometimes behaved in a manner befitting a regal force that expected its full due of obeisance, in keeping with J. Hoberman's description of the company as having long been "the only game in town." They were notorious about charging excessive rental fees for their prints and not offering bulk discounts to the most faithful customers in their chains of poor starving classrooms and rep theaters. And the quality of both their prints and DVD releases could be erratic. (As the wolf at their door began to growl, they also made the dubious cost-saving move of dropping me from their DVD screeners list, apparently oblivious to the terrible fate that awaits any company that fails to kiss my shoe.) But even though there are more distribution options available today for international and independent films, there will never be enough, and the number of valuable and interesting foreign movies that are never made available to the eyeballs of American movie fans is always a favorite topic of conversation among those critics and film writers with a global reach. As Richard Brody notes, this unhappy development also leaves open the question of what will happen to "perhaps the richest back catalogue in the business". Brody notes that "it’s worth remembering that, unlike book publishers, whose wares are widely distributed to libraries (it’s bitterly sad when a publisher goes out of business, but the back catalogue is already out there), film distributors hold the prints of the movies they own rights to; those which are out on home video have a second life, but the 35mm prints are, as of now, locked up, and revival houses wanting to screen them are simply out of luck." According to the New York Times, Talbot says that "The library could be auctioned off as early as next week." Whether it will somehow manage to remain intact is still to be seen.

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 2)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: "The Clash of '68" (March 27 - April 23) at Pacific Film Archives commemorates the fortieth anniversary of May 1968, a time of intense political unrest across the globe and, what seems even more remarkable now, a time when those tensions were reflected in a series of high-profile movies. In its efforts to convey the full range of "revolutionary" political cinema at the time, the programming mixes some especially choice examples (including Alain Tanner's 1975 comedy Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, from a screenplay by John Berger; Bertolucci's Before the Revolution and Godard's La Chinoise; Costa-Gavras's torn-from-the-headlines thriller Z, which rewrote the rules on packaging political content in a commercial form; and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers required viewing at the Pentagon for those trying to learn how to fight an insurgency, and its controversial follow-up, Queimada! (better known here as Burn!) starring Marlon Brando) with such obscurities and oddities as The Revolutionary (1970), an allegorical look at campus activism starring young Jon Voight as a fellow called "A." (Attention, Steve Ditko!) Especially notable: A Grin without a Cat, one of the documentarian Chris Marker's obsessive yet playful meditations on where the heck we've been and how we all ended up here. Show up twenty minutes ahead of screening time and listen to Pacifica Radio's "Revolution Rewind Moments", aural montages of high points from 1968 as captured by news radio microphones. (The program is presented in conjunction with the exhibit Protest in Paris 1968: Photographs by Serge Hambourg", at Berkeley Art Museum.)

Also at PFA: "Heinz Emigholz: Architecture as Autobiography" (April 1 - April 17) brings together five of the German filmmaker's "Photography and Beyond" documentaries, focusing on such architects as Louis Sullivan, Bruce Goff, and Rudolph Schindler. Emigholz will be in attendance at several of the screenings.

NEW YORK: Starting March 26, the Anthology Film Archives dusts off two of the early comedies of writer-director-star Albert Brooks. Like Woody Allen's earliest stuff, these movies are spotty, erratic, and not always so easy on the eyes, yet keep hitting wild streaks of comic inspiration that could have come from nobody else. Brooks's first film as a triple threat, the 1979 Real Life, in which he plays a documentarian who invades a "normal American family" household, was once a parody of the PBS series An American Family and now looks like a prescient vision of a time when it would seem as if nobody could walk to the bathroom without tripping over a camera cord. 1981's Modern Romance, about a malfunctioning love affair (between Brooks and Kathryn Harrold) that proves too dysfunctional to simply die, features a Qualuude-fueled routine by Brooks that's as funny as any five minutes of footage from the '80s.

The Screengrab : before the revolution

New Yorker Films Shuts Its Doors; Back Catalog of Foreign-Indie Classics to Be Auctioned Off

The Rep Report (March 26 - April 2)