Carl Covelli Jr. has been a movie projectionist since he was 17. He says it’s in his blood. His brother is a projectionist. His grandfather was a projectionist, hand cranking movies in the days of silver nitrate film, which was highly flammable (it caused the Iroquois Theatre fire that killed 571 people). Covelli’s father too was a projectionist. “I remember on Saturday nights mom would get some fried chicken, and we’d all go sit with dad in the booth while he ran the movies. If we were lucky, he’d get the drive-in.” Covelli, now 42, has been looking forward to bringing his three-year-old son to the 11-screen Webster Place, where he’s worked for about a decade as one of five projectionists.
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Sony/Loews and Cineplex Odeon–which will merge operations by the end of June–locked out union projectionists at 62 area theaters during contract negotiations. Cineplex Odeon wants to cut its 85 full-time workers to 41 as well as cut their pay, which ranges from $16.25 to $31.50 an hour, to $13.50 to $20 an hour. (According to the union, the average pay is now about $21 an hour, for an annual salary of around $42,000.) Sony/Loews has asked for a nearly 50 percent workforce cut as well as a reduction in wages and benefits.
Marc Pascucci, spokesman for Sony/Loews, denies that the intention is to break the union and says the company is willing to negotiate at any time. But he also claims that improved technology has made many of the current jobs unnecessary–the chain runs theaters in other parts of the country with smaller, nonunion workforces. “We’ve built new theaters and reconditioned old ones, so it is easier to operate a projector than it used to be,” he says. “We’re trying to deal with the realities of operating a business today.”
As if acknowledging that the job can be tricky, Sony/Loews, which had trained theater managers and supervisors to run projectors for several weeks before locking the union out, flew in experienced nonunion personnel from out of state to work the projectors. Union members don’t believe it will be possible to run the theaters with unskilled projectionists. They think the chain intends to train a new staff of nonunion projectionists and pay them less.
