Biography|Robert Shaye — The West 53rd Street Desk That Taught Him How Films Travel

The founding myth of New Line Cinema starts in an East Village walk-up.

The job that made the myth possible sat inside this museum.

In the mid-1960s Shaye worked in the stills department of the Museum of Modern Art's film division at 11 West 53rd Street. A 1976 New York Times profile says he catalogued old movie stills. Vanity Fair later called him the head, and sole employee, of that stills desk.

The museum's film library already circulated pictures to campuses across North America. Shaye was sitting at one of the few American desks where foreign and art films were treated as inventory, not as souvenirs.

Variety's 2004 studio timeline puts the first New Line deal in 1967: a fifty-fifty split to distribute two Czech films that had just played a Festival of New Czechoslovak Cinema presented with MoMA. The titles in later scholarly accounts are The End of August at the Hotel Ozone and Martyrs of Love.

He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He wrote the articles of incorporation himself.

The apartment office was a fifth-floor walk-up at 14th Street and Second Avenue. That building is an ordinary private address now, so this memory stays on the public museum that trained the eye.

New Line's early motto, recorded in the same Vanity Fair account, was a line about new films for a new audience. The college circuit was the market. The stills desk had shown him that the prints already moved.

MoMA's present glass facade on 53rd Street is later architecture. The institution, and the film department's address, are the same.

Photo: Ingo Mehling, 28 April 2005, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons