INTERVIEW: Inside the First Gary Cooper Festival with Eric Kohn

Eric Kohn is the Artistic Director of the Southampton Playhouse with a vision. He was kind enough to talk with Hamptons.com during the Playhouse’s First Annual Gary Cooper Film Festival, which was a success. He said, “This is a new chapter for the Southampton Playhouse, but it’s also a continuation of where we came from.”

About the festival, Kohn said, “Gary Cooper is one of the most incredible movie stars in Hollywood history because, unlike a lot of his contemporaries in the industry, he didn’t have just one model. He could be in a romantic comedy, or he could be in a Western, or he could be in a sports movie. And not only that, he has this tremendous history in Southampton that hasn’t even been fully documented until now.”

Mr. Kohn continued, “One of the things that struck me as notable was when we reopened the theater in February was that there hadn’t really been an acknowledgment of this history from the kind of screening side of things…We were watching the movies in that context. So, it felt like a no-brainer to use the fact that this theater was coming back to life as a portal to this particular history. As it happens, Gary Cooper died in the first week of May, and he was born in the first week of May. So, the first week of May was a perfect opportunity to explore his legacy as we get ready for this summer.”

He explained, “Everyone is excited again to go to the movies. The reason why that’s surprising is that going to a movie has generally been seen as a very challenging cultural experience in the last few years. This very theater closed as a result of circumstances in 2020, but not only are people excited to go to this movie theater, but it’s multi-generational… from the 1930s till 2020, you have so many different eras of people for whom going to the movies in this town meant something, and that’s the foundation that we’re building our programming on.”

A visit to the Playhouse Friday (opening night) of the festival was impressive. The space is alive. The corridor leading to the theaters has a certain magical elegance. Eric Kohn was there greeting the patrons before giving an impromptu introduction talk before the first screening of the festival.  Earlier that day, he explained about showing the Gary Cooper films and the festival; he said, “We decided that not only were we going to show these movies, but we were going to use them as a starting point for all kinds of ways to explore Gary Cooper’s legacy. So, we’ve created a map. Anybody who comes to the theater this weekend can get a Gary Cooper guide to Southampton, which will show you all of these places where he used to spend his time, from the beach clubs to Shippy’s (SH restaurant) to even this movie theater.”

The festival featured a talk by Maria Cooper Janis, Gary Cooper’s daughter, and a presentation by Richard Sandomir, author of the book “The Pride of the Yankees“. Then, there was even some live music before the opening night film, a film from the 1940s, “Ball of Fire.” Kohn used Cooper’s Legacy as a platform for exploring all of these different genres in film history and different moments in America because of the eclectic nature of his career.

Part of Kohn’s vision is that he also wants to develop a lot of educational initiatives that will bring people into the projection booth, learning how to project, but also into the movie theater to learn how to program movies, talk about movies, and ultimately make them. He said, “We want to bring production back to the East End of Long Island. So hopefully, once we start putting grants out in the world, we’ll be able to support that side of things, and we want our repertory programs to be signature aspects of what we do.”

When asked, Eric Kohn boldly spoke of his vision of the Southampton Playhouse perhaps five years from now, saying, “Five years from now, I can imagine the fifth edition of the Gary Cooper Festival, but hopefully there’s a lot of other programming that will come along from all parts of the world and all different kinds of experiences.”

In conclusion, he said, “Wherever movies are, five years from now in our culture, we know that we’ll be pulling from great aspects of its history and learning how to use it to utilize this space in new ways. We have big plans, especially for our theater. He explained there is a flex space to have performing arts and to do parties, lectures, workshops, and all kinds of things like that.  He said the hope is that not only will that be exciting for people who are already in Southampton, but for people all over the world. He predicted, “People are going to hear about this, and it will feel like a destination as a result of that. So that’s kind of the grand vision. There’s going to be a lot of incremental steps along the way, but much of the programming this summer is going to be about laying that foundation for what we think we could pull off in the years ahead.”