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.

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In 1973, after Francois Truffaut's movie about moviemaking Day for Night opened in Paris, Jean-Luc Godard sent him a letter. Fifteen years earlier, Truffaut and Godard had been friends and comrades, self-educated film nuts and critics who were beginning to make good on their shared dream of becoming filmmakers. Truffaut's The 400 Blows premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, and was such a success that Godard was able to get funding for his own debut feature, Breathless, by having Truffaut agree to pretend that he had written the script. (Breathless originated with a news story about a young car thief turned killer that Truffaut had considered filming himself before making The 400 Blows.) The two had achieved fame as the twin giants of the French New Wave, but they had gradually drifted apart, both in their aesthetic aims and their personal relationship. In his letter, Godard accused Truffaut of having made a dishonest movie but also brought the happy news that he had a way for Truffaut to repent: he offered to allow Truffaut to use some of his ill-gotten proceeds to fund a movie by Godard that would tell the truth about film sets, with a political-minded focus on the people who do the grunt work. The sensitive, gentle-natured Truffaut freaked out; he sent Godard a lengthy reply in which he discharged years' worth of pent-up resentments and declared that Godard's radicalism, which Godard wore as a badge of honor even as it limited his access to the large audiences that turned out for Truffaut's movies, was actually practiced in bad faith: "Between your interest in the masses and your own narcissism there's no room for anyone or anything else."

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