Reel change

The 1970s-era Showcase Cinemas will screen its last two films next week before being demolished to make way for National Amusements' next project, a shopping center and movie theater complex called Legacy Place.

The groundbreaking for the roughly $190 million project will take place next Thursday, the day the theater closes.

After the lights dim and the Providence Highway cinema empties for the last time, Richard Juskewicz, the projectionist who screened the cinema's first film - "Oliver" - in 1973, will leave the booth he occupied on and off for more than 35 years. ("Oliver" was originally released in 1968. The Dedham Showcase Cinema showed old movies its first week in business before shifting to contemporary blockbusters.)

While the new theater complex is being built, Juskewicz will work at Showcase Cinema Randolph, where he will also get training in digital projection.

And when National Amusements opens its Cinema de Lux movie theater at the 675,000-square-foot Legacy Place, Juskewicz will return to be a projectionist there. But it won't be quite the same.

National Amusements is replacing its reels of film with movies stored on a simple thumb drive, just a couple of inches tall, that would be inserted into a projector.

What the new technology will mean for Juskewicz is that his days of hustling up and down the football-field-length projection booth are over.

The 71-year-old Stoughton resident is responsible for making sure that the film is "laced up" on the feed and roll up platters that sit next to each of the 12 projectors, one for every auditorium in the roughly 43,000-square-foot theater.

The theater runs an average of 60 shows a day.

Juskewicz isn't the slightest bit nostalgic about the gradual disappearance of film or at being thrust into a new digital era. "I'll be able to just sit in this chair!" he said happily yesterday. "They say it's not hard. Once you program it, you don't have to be there."

Maybe it's because Juskewicz has already weathered the changes of film technology that he seems so unfazed. Before getting a job at Showcase Cinemas, he worked for 10 years at National Amusements' nearby drive-in theater, which opened in 1948 and closed in 1982. While he was there, he used reel-to-reel projectors. The platter system he now uses is only about 25 years old.

Juskewicz says he's always been intrigued by the mysterious processes that make movies come to life. "I was fascinated with the idea of how it was done," said Juskewicz. "Before I worked in the theater I used to watch the guys through the portholes trying to figure out what they were doing."

At the movies with his parents as a child, he would wander off, leaving them to find him later in the projection booth. "Something bit me when I was at the movies," he said.

So obsessed was he with screening films in high school, Juskewicz almost got kicked out. When he was 16, he was hired as an usher at a theater in Dorchester's Codman Square. He learned the tricks of the trade from the projectionists there. "You've got to have it in your blood," he said.

After a few years at Showcase Cinemas, Juskewicz left for The Music Hall in Boston, which later became the Wang Center. While he was there, he experienced the pinnacle of his career, the East Coast world premiere of the film version of "Grease" in 1978.

"That was the highlight of my whole life," said the veteran projectionist, whose experiences also include meeting Charlton Heston at a screening of "Ben- Hur."

Showcase Cinema currently has 50 employees, many of whom have been offered jobs at other National Amusements' theater locations, said Wanda Whitson, a spokeswoman for the company.

Daily News staff writer Anna Kivlan can be reached at 781-433-8336 or akivlan@cnc.com