Maria Cooper Janis Revisits Her Father’s
Classics in IMAX at the 1st Annual
Gary Cooper Film Festival
What a great Southampton weekend! The town has always been part of my life since I was 5 years old and visiting my maternal grandmother, Veronica Shields. The house which they built in the 1920s was on Ox Pasture Road, and is still alive and well! But the special glow around this weekend for me was being at the 1st Annual Gary Cooper Film Festival, held in the beautifully renovated Southampton Playhouse. It boasts 4 screens, one of them being a state of the art IMAX theater; beautiful image, exquisite sound. It should be a “destination point” for every Hamptonite, local or visitor. It was a totally new experience for me to absorb my father’s movies on an IMAX screen––the average size is 55’ x 30’––as opposed to even the largest television screens available today.
This is seeing movies the way they were created and meant to be viewed!
You can imagine… Memories sitting with my mother and father, hands plunged into real buttered popcorn and watching the movies of the 1940s and 50s unfold. I am a good many decades past those simple idyllic days but the magic feeling of sitting in a darkened movie theater does not fade!
Coop Classics
The director of the Playhouse, Eric Kohn, selected an important variety of Gary Cooper films to screen on this opening weekend: Ball of Fire, a screwball comedy, the famous western High Noon, and the emotional moving baseball story of Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees.
One can’t put into words the feeling of watching one’s own father up there bigger than life, living, still talking, laughing, weeping, loving a wife, and portraying courage. These are many of the things that we not only admire on the Silver Screen, but hope can carry us through our own lives in the real world.
While signing copies of my books, Gary Cooper: A Daughter Remembers, so many old friends came over to say hello and reminisce with me about personal memories and conversations they had with my father. We laughed with members of the Catena’s Market family about how many dozens of Little Neck clams my father could put away in one sitting! How he would take time to talk with a little boy who wanted an autograph, how he loved to drive out alone toward Montauk looking to photograph Osprey nests, always weaving himself into the fabric of the wildlife and nature he was surrounded by.
Yes, it was a great weekend seeing 3 terrific Gary Cooper movies, but oh so much more than that! Putting my own wonderful, personal, emotional experiences this weekend, aside, those in Southampton who can say “Let’s go to the movies tonight!” are very lucky.
Love,
Maria
CONTINUE READING: Maria’s post-screening thoughts on High Noon, Pride of the Yankees, & Ball of Fire
