Rushes Extra goes beyond the headlines to take a closer look at developing stories from throughout the film world.
Photographs by Eleanor Petry.
On the afternoon of March 7, a cold and blustery Friday in New York, about twenty people march in a neat ellipse on the sidewalk outside the Lower Manhattan location of Alamo Drafthouse, the American dine-in cinema chain. As more Alamo workers arrive to join the picket, they take signs from a nearby handcart, most of them handwritten on cardboard or on the back of all-purpose placards printed by United Auto Workers, the union with which Alamo United has been affiliated since the fall of 2023. References to movies occasionally appear: “‘I can do this all day.’ –Captain America,” “Sony make Alamo Do the Right Thing,” “Sony thought I was mad about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sequels.”
Just blocks from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, chants echo off of the limestone edifices of capital. “Exploitation ain’t the way / Alamo workers need fair pay!” “Sony corporate, you can’t hide / You committed labor crimes!”; “Who runs the Alamo? / We run the Alamo!”
On January 14, Alamo Drafthouse announced mass layoffs across the company, letting go of nine percent of its corporate staff (fifteen employees of 165) as well as an unspecified number of part-time hourly employees at its 42 venues on a last-in, first-out basis. At its Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn locations alone, 70 people were laid off. One month later, Alamo workers at the Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan locations went on strike to protest the layoffs. They are asking would-be cinemagoers to refrain from attending screenings at Alamo during the strike, and for Alamo members to cancel their subscriptions. (When contacted about this piece, Alamo management declined to comment.)
As the numbers on the sidewalk swell, Anthony Squitire—a server and trainer at the Brooklyn Alamo Drafthouse for three and a half years, and a member of the NYC Alamo United bargaining committee—delivers a speech, reading off handwritten loose sheafs of yellow legal-pad paper. “Everyone suffers under the pursuit of unattainable profit margins,” he hollers. “There are only two things in this world that seek to grow exponentially to selfish and lethal ends: capitalism and cancer.”
Squitire goes on to condemn the Alamo management representatives who insist their workers’ demands for health and safety protections, formalized disciplinary procedures, and increased pay on holidays are unrealistic while Sony Pictures executives “pop champagne with celebrities in our hallways, spend $10K on gifts for Oscar nominees, and make hundreds of billions off the PlayStation 5 alone.” He specifically identifies Kelley Bondelie, VP of Operations at Alamo, and Jennifer Yarbrough, Chief People Officer, claiming that they log on to Zoom bargaining sessions with “sweaters wrapped around their necks” and “twenty-foot in-ground pools” in the background.
“Today marks three weeks of our strike,” Squitire concludes. “We are stronger than ever, and we will fight until the bitter end.”
Founded in Austin, Texas, in 1997 by Tim and Karrie League as a one-screen second-run theater, Alamo Drafthouse quickly made a name for itself as an independently-operated cinema dedicated to elevating the theatrical experience with food-and-drink service (including alcohol) and well-curated programming. The theater garnered early notices from hometown filmmaking heroes like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez; in 1999, Quentin Tarantino moved his then-annual QT Fest, at which he screened selections from his personal print collection, from the Dobie Theatre to the Alamo. With its kooky preshow attractions, special celebrity guest appearances, and strictly enforced “no talking” policy, Alamo generated a cult-like reputation as a place run by and for contemporary film enthusiasts.
By 2010, Alamo had begun to expand beyond Texas as part of a national dine-in cinema boom. Since the mid-to-late aughts, competing chains had been taking up its business model, offering premium concessions to mitigate flagging theater attendance. Today, major theater chains like AMC and Regal Cinemas offer full bar service, multiple dine-in theaters have sprung up around the country, and Alamo operates 42 locations in ten states and Washington, D.C., with plans to expand further.
When the COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, Alamo closed most of its locations and furloughed about 80 percent of its theater employees; four months later, it laid off more than 80 corporate employees. In March 2021, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy as it failed to service approximately $105 million in debt. A couple months later, Alamo emerged from bankruptcy with Altamont Capital Partners and Fortress Investment Group as its new owners.
In August 2020, the Department of Justice lifted the Paramount Consent Decrees, which had prevented film distributors from owning and controlling exhibition companies since 1948. “Because changes in antitrust law and administration have diminished the importance of the Decrees’ restrictions, while still providing protections that will keep the probability of future violations low, the Court finds that termination of the Decrees is in the public interest,” wrote US District Judge Analisa Torres in her decision.
In June 2024, Sony Pictures Entertainment acquired Alamo, making it the first Hollywood studio to own a theater chain in over 75 years. Mass deregulation and weakened antitrust laws paved the way for American cinema to become even more consolidated and monopolized than it was before. Michael Kustermann, the current CEO of Alamo Drafthouse, is also the head of “Sony Pictures Experiences.”
In recent years, several New York City cinemas have unionized as a way to bargain for higher wages and more equitable workplace policies. In 2019, BAM administrative workers and cinema staff at the Brooklyn Academy of Music voted to unionize. Anthology Film Archives employees went on a one-day strike on March 31, 2022, and voted to ratify their first contract two and a half months later. Film Forum workers voted unanimously in favor of unionization in June 2022 and ratified their first contract one year later.
On July 21, 2023, the summer’s most hotly anticipated films, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (both 2023), opened on the same day and made a combined $300 million. Their success was manna from heaven for a Hollywood still feeling the effects of the pandemic slump and its own labor strikes, but the opening weekend placed a heavy strain on theater employees nationwide, including and especially those working at Alamo Drafthouse, who are tasked with preparing and serving food and drinks on-demand throughout the shows, in addition to the usual responsibilities of an usher. It was after the infamous “Barbenheimer weekend” that workers at the Brooklyn and Manhattan Alamo Drafthouses began to collectively organize.
Though League stepped down as Alamo’s CEO to become chairman of the board in May 2020, he endures as a brand mascot for the company and a leading industry figure, having gone on to cofound Neon, an Oscar-winning production and distribution company. Alamo management brought him in to encourage workers at the Brooklyn Alamo not to unionize in the fall of 2023.
During a meeting, an audio recording of which was obtained by the Associated Press, League insisted that a union would drive a wedge between staff and management while proclaiming his progressive bona fides, like supporting Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run. “I built this company to be the best damn cinema that has ever, or will ever, exist,” he told workers. “I personally feel strongly that inserting a union between you and me and the team hinders that goal.”
Within days, on September 29, the Brooklyn Alamo voted to unionize. Two weeks later, on October 12, the Lower Manhattan Alamo did the same. Both cited a toxic culture of understaffing and exhaustion that was not being effectively addressed by management.
“The whole point of a contract was for some modicum of consistency,” Squitire told Notebook over the phone in February. “It can't be that some days are easy, and some days I'm pulling my hair out in the walk-in and smoking six cigarettes because I'm on the verge of a panic attack. Unionizing was a matter of legally forcing corporate to listen to us when we tell them what they need for the business not to go under.”
In the United States, businesses are legally required to negotiate layoffs with unions in the midst of contract bargaining, so they did not go into effect immediately at the company’s three unionized locations. In Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, NYC Alamo United is associated with UAW Local 2179; in Denver, Colorado, Alamo Collective joined Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 7777. On January 31, after multiple negotiation sessions, when dozens of articles of contention were reportedly still on the table, management unilaterally declared an impasse on the layoffs issue. In response, the union filed an Unfair Labor Practice complaint to the National Labor Relations Board on February 3, the same day roughly twenty percent of the New York City workforce was laid off.
NYC Alamo United had discussed the possibility of a strike if layoffs were imposed and had voted to approve one on January 30, the day before the impasse. Following a week of informational pickets, 175 New York workers agreed to walk out on February 14, the same day that 60 workers at the Sloans Lake location in Denver did. The holiday is typically a busy day for Alamo; this year it was also the beginning of a crucial opening weekend for Captain America: Brave New World and Paddington in Peru (both 2025).
Conor Hall, who has worked as a server at the Brooklyn Alamo for three years, gave a passionate speech in the kitchen prior to the walkout that effectively rallied the troops. Gesturing wildly to his peers, he exclaims, “All of [you] wonderful people make this the number one Alamo in the country. This is how we remind corporate that it's not because of movies and popcorn. It's because of the people.”
“All I had to do was recognize how I was feeling and how I was seeing my coworkers treated,” Hall told Notebook. “So all I could say was the truth, which is that the only way to send a message these days is as a unified voice. No one person can be heard in the din and clamor of corporate America, but if enough people come together and speak loudly enough, it's impossible to drown them out.”
In Manhattan, the picketers, now about 45 strong and tailed by four relaxed police officers, wind their way noisily north, rounding the corner of City Hall Park at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. Several unionists field questions from passersby and distribute leaflets about the layoffs featuring a menacing cartoon popcorn bucket holding kernels in either hand as though they might be bricks. When a Downtown Alliance pickup truck pulls up in the midst of its garbage-collection rounds, unionists hand leaflets to the curious men through the open window.
As on the cinema floor, a division of labor takes root, though in this case it is self-selected. Someone leads the chants. Someone distributes snacks from a large backpack. Someone pushes the cart in which signs have been replaced with backpacks and water bottles. (Others help them to get its rickety wheels over every curb cut.) Bringing up the rear, one unionist wheels a piece of carry-on luggage with a neck pillow strung around the handle; he must proceed directly to the airport after the march, heading home for a funeral.
Rosa Martinez, who has worked as a food runner at the Brooklyn Alamo for two years, told Notebook that most of their coworkers are also film workers of one kind or another. (In fact, they are taking advantage of the strike to work on the set of another worker’s film that weekend.) It’s no surprise that cinema workers would have creative passions beyond theater operations, but Martinez’s comment is a reminder of how the struggles at Alamo are intertwined with those of a larger industry in crisis. We’re still experiencing the longtail effects of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, which exacerbated concerns around the future of theatrical exhibition and human labor in Hollywood.
Ariana Fatalia, a bartender who works both in front and back of house at the Brooklyn Alamo, was laid off and has been striking alongside her former colleagues since Valentine’s Day. She had been going to school for computer science at the City College of New York and informed venue management about her relatively limited availability during the winter months. Just as winter classes ended and her availability opened up, she learned she was on the list for layoffs.
“Funny story about me, the place I worked for like five years was Amazon Whole Foods,” she told Notebook. “They wrongfully fired me, and I joined Alamo because I thought, It’s unionized, and this will never happen to me again. This will be the part-time job that will get me through college.” Ariana believes that the old Alamo would have only reduced people’s hours instead of resorting to layoffs, but that the Sony buyout changed the mandate. “Flexible scheduling was a big part of Alamo, and now everything’s completely changed,” she says. “This is all Alamo Drafthouse under Sony.”
Jordan Baruch—a bargaining committee member and concierge shift lead who has worked at the Brooklyn Alamo since November 2022—insists that “one of the very significant things that is different about this year compared to the past years when Alamo didn’t lay anybody off in this quarter is that Sony now owns Alamo. I don't really see how that’s not a big part of the equation.” In previous years, Alamo would regularly reduce hours depending on seasonal market shifts, as film exhibitors expect to have busier and slower months. The company alleged low first-quarter projections as a reason for layoffs, rather than the usual reduction in hours.
According to information shared with Notebook, Alamo has cut back on screenings and food service in response to the strike. Between spring and summer 2024, Alamo added five new screens to the Brooklyn location. It and the Lower Manhattan location are the chain’s two most profitable locations, according to internal ticket admission numbers. Currently, the Brooklyn Alamo is operating only seven of its twelve theaters due to the strike. For the first week and a half, showtimes were marked “sold out” on the app when they reached roughly 50 percent capacity.
As the sun wanes on the afternoon of March 7, the picket passes Zuccotti Park, the site of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment. It passes the Bowling Green Bull, where tourists turn their phones and cameras to the march, a mixture of impassivity and confusion playing across their faces. The unionists weave through sculptural roadblocks and come to a stop in front of the Trump Building, which was built in 1930 to house the earliest progenitor of JPMorgan Chase, the largest American bank; the lease was sold to Donald Trump’s company in 1995.
“We’re going in,” someone murmurs, but they do not. Instead, Brooks Cline—member of the bargaining committee and guest attendant shift lead at the Lower Manhattan Alamo for three and a half years—unfolds another sheaf of yellow legal pad paper. He denounces Alamo management for the layoffs and their “inhumanity and disregard for working-class people” before putting their struggle into context with the rising tides of reactionism:
The federal administration represented by this building is trying to gut all of our rights. Trump and his rich thug buddies are fixated on gutting the NLRA and the NLRB, the last standing relics of a foregone time where people knew the power of a union. We are here to let them know that we know the power of unions, and we will fight tooth and nail to maintain them.
Cline concludes his speech by reiterating that the unionists are out in the streets for all the people whom Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Elon Musk have declared a war against. “We are marching out here for workers everywhere—workers of color, trans workers, migrant workers, workers of all circumstances chronically stymied by the hammer of capitalism. We are marching because we are united against corporate greed in all its forms.”
As he tucks his paper back into his pocket, the chants resume: “No Trump, no KKK / No fascist USA.”
NYC Alamo United has been on strike for nearly two months. Meanwhile, the parallel strike in Denver ended after just four days. According to Josh Reitze—a member of the CWA bargaining committee who has worked in the kitchen at the Sloans Lake Alamo since 2022—their union had always planned on a brief walkout, a strategy they shared with New York ahead of time.
“We did not intend to stay out indefinitely,” he says. “This is our first strike. Not everybody is able to strike for the same amount of time; not everybody has the same level of agitation to sustain a strike for as long as New York has. I commend them wholeheartedly for keeping their strike going, but we wanted something more targeted for our first big action.”
Reitze believes their strike was a success in terms of “organizational maturity,” as he has witnessed a rise in participation and engagement within the shop, though it remains to be seen whether any gains will be reflected in future bargaining sessions. Reitze received assurances from management that the laid-off Sloans Lake workers will be offered their jobs back, but that has yet to materialize and he admits that general progress in contract negotiations has slowed to a crawl.
In New York, Baruch has been in the bargaining sessions since contract negotiations began in January 2024, and he says that management has been dismissive of union proposals from the start. “We've been through three different [management] law firms over the course of this union fight,” he says. “They've been using Ogletree Deakins now for the longest, and their playbook is to decline or reject proposals that mean a lot to the contract and not give a reason why or just to shrug. The workers themselves will tell them what it takes to adequately staff our locations with long speeches that are very from the heart. They just ignore what we say and essentially put their heads face down on the table.”
Two bargaining sessions have taken place since the strike began. Baruch believes the March 3 session was particularly productive in terms of contract negotiation and working toward reinstatement of the terminated workers. Despite high hopes after the demonstration, the union was disappointed by the tenor of the subsequent session on March 10, three days later.
As the strike nears the end of its second month, with workers on the picket line most days of the week, the unionists are keenly aware of how important maintaining morale and momentum will be in the days ahead. Baruch invokes a few recent positive developments: a food drive secured donations for striking workers, and a public screening of Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union (2024), which documents the Amazon Labor Union’s efforts to unionize a Staten Island warehouse, doubled as a successful fundraiser for Alamo United.
He also mentions that some strikers have started to receive unemployment insurance. With that money in addition to the strike assistance fund, some people might end up making more money on strike than they would working at Alamo two or three shifts a week due to the slow season. “That's not why we did it,” Baruch insists, “but it’s part of the calculus of how people are still thinking about the strike and their personal decisions about whether or not they want to continue or advocate for us to end prematurely.”
Fatalia, the bartender and computer-science student, says that she’s made everlasting bonds with the people on the picket line, and that whether or not she gets her job back, she’s willing to fight “to get rid of Sony's corporate greed.” Squitire believes that they’ve shown Alamo that they will “not accept them flagrantly breaking federal labor law” and they “we will make them hurt if they try to make us hurt.”
The next bargaining session is scheduled for April 11. Alamo management and the unionized workers remain functionally deadlocked, the former evidently hoping to sweat out the strike while the latter builds public support and discusses potential escalation. Meanwhile, union fervor has spread to other Alamo locations across the country. On March 25, the Slaughter Lane Alamo in Austin, Texas, the company’s hometown, delivered their demand for recognition with UAW to management. They also cited the layoffs as a reason for unionization.
Regardless of what happens in the future, Conor Hall believes that they’ve made an impact on the public and the company: “What I know is that we stood together and we made it known that it was unfair, it was cruel, and if nothing else, we show that we can do this. If nothing else, we fucking did it, dude. That's the message.”
Additional reporting by Maxwell Paparella.