various people at The Guardian:
Tom played an incredibly important role in the history of modern cinema. Back in the 1970s, Tom was part of a counterculture generation who saw something new in the arthouse films being made in Europe. To him they were radical in a completely new way. They could change the world. Culture could be political.
Tom believed that very deeply – and he brought directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog over to the west coast and showed their films to a new generation like Francis Ford Coppola. Out of that came American independent cinema which flourished in the 1990s. But Tom was different from many of his counterculture generation. He was very aware of what happened to those radical ideas once they were injected into Hollywood.
more here. (h/t Brooks Riley)