INTERVIEW: Rooftop Cinema Club returns to NYC for third season
The Rooftop Cinema Club, a live-event cinema experience, returns Wednesday, May 3 to New York City’s YOTEL in Midtown Manhattan. Audience members, while noshing on food and imbibing on spirits, can expect to take in an outdoor screening of Distance Between Dreams, a biopic of iconic surfer Ian Walsh, who will be in attendance for a Q&A.
Throughout the spring and summer, fans can also check out Annie Hall, Hidden Figures, The Edge of Seventeen, Clueless, the animated Beauty and the Beast, Moonlight, Arrival and Moana, among many others.
The company’s second location in the Big Apple is Office Ops in Bushwick, Brooklyn. That venue will host screenings of Mulholland Drive, Moonlight, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, Arrival and The Edge of Seventeen, among others.
Gerry Cottle Jr. founded the company, which now has outposts in several cities, including London and Los Angeles. Recently, Hollywood Soapbox spoke with Cottle about what audience members can expect. Here’s what he had to say:
On how he developed Rooftop Cinema Club …
“I used to be a clown and a juggler, and I ran away from the circus. And I moved to London, and I spent a few years doing events and sort of marketing and stuff like that. And basically I got to a stage in my life, and I just wanted to do something different. And I basically combined my passion for doing entertainment and live events with my passion for film. I just found this amazing rooftop in Shoreditch [in London]. I just thought, wow, everyone does it in parks and stuff like that, but nobody’s really done it on a rooftop. That was it really. I started, and to be perfectly honest, I just started playing my DVD collection. They’re kind of obsolete now, aren’t they, DVDs? I started playing all my favorite films. I wanted to see if people like me wanted to come and enjoy their favorite films on the rooftop, and that’s how it really began. And the rest is history as they say.”
On the success of the company …
“I did it because it’s a passion, and it’s something I love. I obviously wanted it to do well. It’s obviously exceeded all my expectations, but I think also it’s just lucky timing. There wasn’t really anyone else doing it in London at that time like that. There were other cinemas like Secret Cinema doing kind of immersive, but no one was really showing the cult films that we were. Obviously it’s … exploded, and it’s big all around the world now, isn’t it, this kind of outdoor pop-up cinema phenomenon.”
On the NYC locations …
“We’re at a hotel just off Times Square called YOTEL in Manhattan, and we’re now starting our third season there, our third full season. And Bushwick in Brooklyn, we’ve started there on a lovely co-working space funny enough, very similar to what we have here in Peckham in London, and that’s on the rooftop of this great co-working space with artists and young independent businesses inside it. And we occupy the rooftop on top.”
On the programming …
“Our mission has always been the same with Rooftop. We’re trying to do something prevalent. We’re trying to make something that is just really fun and a new way to watch cinema. We’re the antithesis of the multiplex cinema. We’re all about great food, great drink and then your favorite film, so that community side of it has kind of grown over the last few years. …
“What would you like to see? What would the community like to see? … We try to program stuff that we think people would really enjoy on a rooftop. We’re not trying to win awards for being cool, but actually what we tend to do is something that is quite authentic and quite real. But, yeah, we ask around, and we study what we do. The programming is a really key part of what we do. … Whenever we’ve done studies, people always say the programming is the thing that brings people to the rooftop. At the end of the day, the food and the drink is important. It’s quality, but it’s really about the film. And that’s what people are coming to see, so we spend a lot of time on our program, doing a lot of research, asking a lot of people.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Rooftop Cinema Club returns Wednesday, May 3 to New York City with a special screening of Distance Between Dreams at YOTEL in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information on both the Manhattan and Brooklyn locations.
