Muscles and mobsters: Actor Chuck Zito in a scene from "Coalition," which will premiere at Long Island University's Kumble Theater on Friday.

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For years, the profitable world of New York City construction has been rife with conflict and drama; so what better place could there be for a "third-generation construction guy"-turned-filmmaker to build his first movie?

Joseph Ariola, a long-time member of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 15 in New York City, makes his big-screen directorial debut with "Coalition," a gritty independent film he also produced and co-wrote with retired New York City Police Detective Robert Cea.

Filmed on location in Williamsburg and Long Island City, and inspired by some of Ariola’s real-life experiences, "Coalition" is about how the construction business is "systematically shaken down" by minority non-union labor and mobsters who help broker the deals. Depending on whom you ask, the word "coalition" could mean "equal rights for minority workers" or "ruthless gangs that force contractors to hire their guys, so they can get a kick-back or give them a no-show job, so the job site would be safe," Ariola told GO Brooklyn.

In the movie, which draws heavily on both themes, the Wu Tang Clan’s Raekwon plays Akey, the head of the notorious, fictional Survival of the Black Man coalition group. Akey convinces his followers he wants to help them get jobs when all he really cares about is cold, hard cash.

Co-starring Frank Vincent from "The Sopranos," Michael Wright and Chuck Zito from "Oz" and Stephanie "Trinity" Finochio from World Wrestling Entertainment, the drama Ariola hopes will be viewed as a modern-day version of the union classic, "On the Waterfront," is set to premiere on Sept. 29 at The Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts on Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus.

"It’s been a long time in the making," Ariola said. "I wrote a couple of other scripts just playing around when I was a little younger and some production people here in New York said, ’These are big-budget movies.’ I wrote a story about Vietnam and they said, ’If you’re going to get your feet wet in independent film, you have to do more of a story, more of a drama that could be done a little inexpensively.’

"So, I turned my attention to the coalition, which I felt was more of a drama," continued Ariola. "And it was more in the industry that I knew well, and I knew I could get a lot of help with job sites and machinery and trucks to do the movie because the more I learned about how hard it was to make a movie, the more I started to mold the story around what I felt my strengths were."

The Long Island native says that before he became a full-time, Williamsburg-based filmmaker, he wrote his screenplays when he had down-time or during his lunch breaks when he was working construction. He started writing "Coalition" about 10 years ago.

"I was always interested in the [real-life] coalition. It was always fascinating to me," he said, recalling how coalition members would occasionally arrive on work sites and shut down jobs by pressuring foremen and laborers to give up assignments to non-union labor.

"They really wouldn’t go after the operating engineer guys because they knew the operating engineers’ union was a pretty strong union and, besides, they weren’t really interested in running the machines because they felt that a lot of the guys really weren’t qualified," Ariola noted. "So, they really went after the laborer jobs. It interested me how this whole thing was going on."

The filmmaker says conditions started improving in the 1990s as unions became more diverse (with more members who were minorities) and as then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani cracked down on the mob. That said, Ariola says his crew experienced some anxiety when he told them what his new movie was about and where they would be filming.

"There was always the fear factor of the real coalition," he said. "It was very, very hard in the beginning getting crew members on, once they knew what the topic was and once they knew there was a chance they would come face-to-face with real coalition groups and stuff. So, a lot of people were intimidated by that and we kept telling them that: ’You’re just for hire; you’re a hired crew member. If there’s a problem, we’ll deal with the problem.’"

Convincing New York City officials that everything would be OK proved to be a little more difficult.

"The city actually red-flagged my project in the very, very beginning, because they felt that we had too many tough elements - Wu Tang because of Raekwon, the Hell’s Angels because of Chuck Zito. We had organized crime because of the topic, and then we had the coalition. So they actually red-flagged my project, saying that they weren’t going to tolerate any kind of problem on the set," confided Ariola. "But to be honest with you, we kind of grew on them because we went through - knock on wood - 24 days of shooting and we didn’t have any problems with anybody on the set. Everyone was totally professional and the city became a fan of ours after that, I guess, for just doing what we said we were going to do and getting through it."

"Coalition" will premiere Sept. 29 at 7 pm at The Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts on Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus (at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb avenues in Downtown Brooklyn). Tickets are $10. For more information, call (718) 488-1624 or visit www.kumbletheater.org. The movie will be released by Image Entertainment on DVD Nov. 7.

©2006 Community Newspaper Group