Green Collars.(The Talk of the Town)(screening of documentary movie on green construction 'The Greening of Southie')

Aspiring ironworkers in New York City must complete a three-year apprenticeship. They take classes two evenings a week and on occasional Saturdays, and they spend most of the third year practicing things like arc-welding single-V butt joints and slicing through inch-thick steel plates with oxyacetylene torches. One recent Wednesday evening, approximately two hundred of them arrived at the training center of Locals 40 and 361, on Thirty-sixth Street in Astoria, and encountered a scene of a type that has gladdened students' hearts since the time of Thomas Edison: a classroom furnished with a screen and a movie projector. It was Earth Day, and in its observance the apprentices were going to be shown "The Greening of Southie," a documentary about the construction of an environmentally friendly luxury apartment building in an old working-class neighborhood in Boston. Some of the third-year students were feeling nervous--the city's licensing exam for welders was a week away, leaving them little time for last-minute practice in the center's welding booths, which resemble oversized shower stalls--but few could have been as nervous as Ian Cheney, who had directed the film and agreed to introduce it. Making a movie about green construction is one thing; screening it for actual construction workers is another. Cheney wasn't wearing steel-toed boots, a do-rag, or a split cowhide welding jacket, and his arms and neck were neither bulging with muscles nor heavily tattooed, and he had to warn the ironworkers that they might see people in the film wearing Boston Red Sox insignia. "If that's shocking to you," he said, "just close your eyes."

In one of the movie's opening sequences, a foreman explains to a roomful of workers that, for environmental reasons, smoking will be prohibited, even during construction--and, as he says this, the workers look less like workers than like third-year acting apprentices who have mastered a variety of techniques for conveying bemused incredulity. As the project proceeds, however, many of them become converts, or semi-converts--"I believe that shit is organic," a roofer says as he spreads hot black glop. An ironworker named Bob Gottlich, who has so many earrings in his left ear that its rim looks like a riveting exercise, says that, before the project began, "I never ...