Historic Long Island Indie Theatre in Crisis After Beloved Co-Director Fired: Protests, Cancellations, Accusations of ‘Disloyalty’

On the afternoon of October 3, a crowd of unhappy protesters gathered along a busy street in the heart of Huntington, New York, a sleepy suburb along the northern coast of Long Island. The demonstrators — local news estimated they numbered from 200 to 300 — brandished signs like “Honk if you hate fascism” and “Shame,” but they weren’t there in opposition to the latest political outrage. They were rallying to save the Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington’s beloved three-screen independent movie theater, and to support its former co-director, Dylan Skolnick, the man who, in their view, had been an indispensable part of the community institution since his parents founded it 53 years ago.

A month earlier, the CAC board of directors fired Skolnick, due to “what [the board] believed to be, and continues to believe was, serious misconduct,” it explained in social media post on September 2. No other details were provided, and since that announcement, the CAC and its membership have found themselves on opposite sides of an increasingly combative divide.

According to the CAC’s current leadership, Skolnick was a “dysfunctional” and “disloyal” manager whose freelance work as a film buyer for other indie cinemas was an egregious, and fireable, conflict of interest. According to Skolnick and his supporters, the CAC board has undergone a “hostile takeover” by members with no understanding of how the tight-knit world of independent film actually operates, and who are now recklessly damaging the CAC’s reputation as a first-class cultural destination for the area.

“I’m appalled by [Dylan’s] firing and its circumstances,” said director Wim Wenders in a statement provided to IndieWire. “‘Serious misconduct’ seems like total baloney, if you know Dylan.”

Filmmaker and critic Kent Jones — whose film “Late Fame” starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee was pulled from the CAC by Magnolia Pictures after Skolnick’s dismissal — called the board’s decision “a blow that strikes deep into the heart of New York movie culture.”

“Dylan knows the historical path of the Cinema Arts Centre, from an intimate point of view,” said actor Isabella Rossellini in a statement. “It is unimaginable for me that the board of directors doesn’t capitalize on Dylan’s knowledge and guarantee the continuity of relationships with clients and friends in the film community. I urge the board to reconsider this disgraceful, cruel, and offensive decision.”

“Some of my fondest memories of growing up on Long Island are trips taken with friends to see obscure movies at Cinema Arts Centre,” said actor Edie Falco in a statement. “That’s what makes Dylan’s removal so heartbreaking. To pull him out of a place that was built by his family, and that has meant so much to me and my friends and so many others is impossible to imagine. What is that place even, without Dylan?”

In response, Skolnick’s supporters have been aggressively campaigning to get him reinstated. Along with the protest, a MoveOn.org petition has garnered more than 3,100 signatures, and a GoFundMe campaign for Skolnick’s legal fees has raised more than $13,000. The fight has already appeared to affect the CAC’s ability to operate just as awards season kicks into high gear. Hosts have canceled at least two subscriber-based film series, and actor Dolph Lundgren withdrew from a scheduled appearance. Subscribers have reportedly demanded refunds, donors have pulled their support, and according to a knowledgeable source at the theater, box office receipts are down steeply, causing a cash crunch that could imperil the Cinema Arts Centre’s longterm future.

How did everything get so bad, so quickly? The first blow came on August 19, when Skolnick was placed on paid administrative leave for “ongoing concerns regarding leadership and management,” per an email from board chair Matthew Daidola that Skolnick shared with IndieWire. According to Skolnick and his attorney Jennifer Casey, the board provided no further details about these concerns until September 1, when Skolnick was informed he’d been terminated and he and Casey received a 15-page demand letter from the CAC board, which IndieWire has reviewed.

According to the letter, Skolnick was fired largely due to his decision to supplement his salary at the CAC — which this year reached $75,000 — by working as a freelance film booker for other indie cinemas. The letter alleged Skolnick violated its employee manual, which “prohibits every employee from holding any interest in an organization that competes with” the CAC. These activities were “without the company’s knowledge or authorization.”

Dylan Skolnickcourtesy of James O’Connor

By naming his side business Cinema Arts Booking, and doing this work using his CAC email address, Skolnick was “trading on goodwill associated with the Company.” Skolnick’s use of the CAC’s internet and company telephone for his freelance work “may constitute misuse, diversion, or waste of corporate assets.”

These actions, the letter said, “breached the duty of loyalty that Mr. Skolnick owed” the CAC. The board demanded Skolnick repay “all profits he earned … from disloyal work performed while he owed fiduciary or employment duties to CAC.”

Separately, the letter also said the CAC had “received reports” that Skolnick “pressured Company employees to file false and fictitious complaints against members” of the board, though the letter noted that the accuracy of those reports had yet to be confirmed. Skolnick denied that he coerced anyone, but he confirmed that a report against board members was filed. “And it wasn’t false,” he said. “It was totally accurate and correct to complain.”

As for his film booking work, to Skolnick, the board’s arguments not only don’t hold water, they betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how business is done in indie film. He said his freelance booking work has included theaters in Oklahoma, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and most recently, Queens, New York. “These are not in competition with the Cinema Arts Center in any way,” he said. More to the point, Skolnick doesn’t see any non-profit indie theaters as competition for the CAC’s audience. “Our competition is Netflix or Hulu, things that keep people in the house,” he said. “Anything that gets people going out to the movies will benefit all of us.”

He said he informed the CAC board about his work when he started doing it roughly 10 years ago, but he conceded that the current board “was not aware” of his activities. And he used his CAC email for the booking work because he used that address for everything. “Clearly, not a good idea,” he said. “But it didn’t cost the Cinema a penny.”

As for trading on the CAC’s reputation, Skolnick didn’t mince words: “I’ve been doing this almost 30 years,” he said. “I’m very active in the national community. I have a reputation. The Cinema’s reputation partly grows from those almost 30 years of work.”

Multiple individuals within the world of independent film backed up Skolnick’s assertions about his reputation and the wider industry to IndieWire. “He’s a beloved member of our independent film community,” said Isil Bagdadi-Sergio, who worked with Skolnick first as an indie distributor and then as the host of a film preview series for CAC subscribers (which she canceled following Skolnick’s dismissal). “Distributors, other exhibitors, art house cinema owners, everyone just has great respect for him. I can’t separate him from the Cinema. I think for most people, it’s this way.”

Michael Tuckman, head of indie distributor mTuckman Media, which brought the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” to the CAC in 2025, said Skolnick is “beyond respected and highly regarded.” He argued that Skolnick’s freelance film buying work directly benefits the CAC. “It helps that exhibitor have even more clout knowing that they’re not just buying for one cinema but many,” he said. “Often film buyers will have a main gig at one theater and have accounts on the side.”

One such buyer, Adam Birnbaum of the Avon Theater in Stamford, Connecticut, told IndieWire that “it’s a very common practice for people on the exhibition side who are working as film programmers or film buyers to be doing different gigs simultaneously.” Birnbaum also operates the Nova Theater Circuit, which represents nearly 50 independent cinemas in the U.S. “It’s a strategic advantage for a film programmer to be taking on multiple clients or projects,” he said. “It gives them greater cachet, I suppose you could say, at the negotiating table.”

Birnbaum also noted that side gigs are an “economic necessity” for many in the indie film industry, which is populated with a relative handful of dedicated and passionate film lovers navigating paper-thin financial resources. “It’s not an extraordinarily lucrative career for somebody to be a film programmer for a lone cinema,” he said.

Given how widespread freelancing is within the indie film industry, firing the co-director of an independent theater for freelance work “seems like an utterly baseless rationale,” Birnbaum said. “It’s so highly questionable that it makes me wonder what is actually going on there.”

Indeed, the lack of further detail or communication from the CAC board about Skolnick’s dismissal has been a major point of contention for everyone affiliated with the theater who spoke to IndieWire for this story. Ellen Reynolds — who’s been a CAC member for 38 years, and a high-level donor for over 25 years — said she gave a few thousand dollars to the theater in August; when Skolnick was suspended days later, she demanded the money be returned. It was, she said, but no one from the theater contacted her directly, and no one has tried to connect with her since.

“It’s entirely possible that this board, for whatever demented reasons, thought they were doing the right thing, but they did a terrible job of implementing it,” she said. “It’s been over four weeks now since they fired him, and they have never reached out to me.”

Similarly, Kenneth Katz, former Cinema Arts Centre board co-chair from 2015 to 2018, said that no one on the current board “has reached out at all for anything” regarding Skolnick’s past performance as co-director. If they had, the board may not have asserted in its demand letter that Skolnick “never” informed the CAC about his work as a freelance booker. According to Katz, Skolnick did. In the weeks following Skolnick’s dismissal, Katz said he mailed a letter to every board member saying as much.

The CAC leadership’s silence about Skolnick’s departure was in keeping with a September 4 social media post that “in accordance with our legal and ethical obligations regarding personnel matters,” the CAC “cannot publicly discuss the specific details of any individual’s departure.” But in an email to IndieWire on October 6, CAC co-director Kelsie Greene — who was promoted into the job alongside Skolnick at the beginning of the summer — took issue with how Skolnick and his supporters were representing why he was fired.

“The overwhelming outcry to this dismissal is focusing on one publicly available sliver of information. It is far from the full scope of the situation at hand,” Greene said. “An intentionally false narrative is leading the charge in destroying a cultural institution that has the potential to do so much more for independent cinema, but the industry would rather fall for the halo effect of a prodigal son than try to understand the nuances of navigating a legal personnel issue.”

When asked to clarify what she meant by “the full scope of the situation at hand,” Greene replied that in August, Skolnick “was provided a detailed letter explaining the reasons he was put on paid administrative leave when the situation was being looked into” prior to the board’s decision to fire Skolnick. She added: “The demand letter regarding booking for outside theaters is an addendum to the provided reasons, not the sole reason.”

According to Skolnick, Casey, and his current attorney, Vess Mitev, however, the only details Skolnick has received from the CAC board or its leadership about why he was fired are in the board’s demand letter of September 1. When asked on what basis she’s contending that Skolnick received more details before the demand letter, Greene replied on October 6: “This is the information that was conveyed to me by the board when I was informed of their decision.”

Adding to the confusion, one hour after Greene’s October 5 email, Michael Kornfeld — who stepped down as co-chair of the board to take over Skolnick’s job as the theater’s interim co-director — sent IndieWire a lengthy statement that did provide additional reasons for firing Skolnick that were not mentioned in the board’s demand letter.

“Relieving Dylan of his responsibilities was not an easy decision and did not happen overnight,” Kornfeld said. “Indeed, it was a year in the making and through much of that time I had sought to talk with him and persuade him to change some of his ways.”

While Kornfeld applauded Skolnick’s “programming capabilities,” he said he found Skolnick “lacking in leadership and management skills,” and that “CAC operations were dysfunctional and not sustainable in my view.”

More pointedly, Kornfeld said that Skolnick was “generally unresponsive to employee complaints and even ignored or put off addressing those about abusive behavior and harassment by select patrons and program hosts.”

Skolnick confirmed that “there were some complaints” from staffers “that probably should have been investigated faster, but everything did get discussed and investigated.” “We talked to the people who there were complaints about,” he added. “I think they were pretty much all resolved.”

Kornfeld also went into more detail about the board’s issues with Skolnick’s freelance booking work. He said that, at Skolnick’s urging, the board contracted with Queens-based indie theater North Shore Towers Cinema “to book and program films,” but the CAC broke off the arrangement after 14 months.
“Or so we thought,” Kornfeld wrote. Although Skolnick acknowledged the board’s directive to end the CAC’s business relationship with North Shore Towers, Skolnick “continued undisclosed work” with the theater as a film booker. “This is clearly more than ample grounds for his dismissal.”

Skolnick acknowledged that when he ended the CAC’s relationship with North Shore Towers in June 2026, he offered them his services as a freelance film booker, and did not inform the CAC board about that work. “But there was no hidden agenda,” he said. “It was outside of my work at the Cinema, a separate relationship.” And he reiterated that he does not see North Shore Towers as competition: “We’re part of an ecosystem of cinemas. There’s no conflict of interest.”

For his part, Skolnick did agree with Kornfeld’s assessment that his dismissal was “a year in the making” — though he sees a far different reason for what led to his departure.

Skolnick believes that the current board is unhappy with what he characterized as the “socially pointed” and “really challenging artistic programs” he regularly brought to the CAC, including films about LGBTQ issues, reproductive rights, immigration, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I don’t see any more any of that on the schedule coming up, that’s for sure,” he said.

He added that he was always open to whatever suggestions board members had for programming. “Our default response is yes, and the result is lots of great, great programs,” he said. “I think they see me as an obstacle, a problem to be dealt with.”

The difficulty, Skolnick said, started when Daidola, a former NYPD officer who practices law in Huntington and earned a medical degree in 2024, became co-chair in 2025 after joining the board in 2024. Almost immediately, Skolnick said, the board began “micro-managing” decisions, including payroll and promotions, that Skolnick felt exceeded the purview of non-profit boards.

Jude Schanzer, the other co-chair, told IndieWire that her working relationship with Daidola deteriorated to such a degree that she resigned her chairmanship in February 2026 and from the board outright four months later. In a June 2 resignation letter Schanzer provided to IndieWire, she said that “under the current circumstances, I don’t think that I can achieve anything of consequence.”

Skolnick enjoyed the support of the CAC board since he took over as co-director in 2010 when his father, Vic Skolnick, passed away, according to Katz and Schanzer. But the board has turned over almost entirely to new members in the last two years, four of whom joined just this year.

“I used to be in banking,” Reynolds said. “This is like a classic hostile takeover. This is like the Kennedy Center or the Smithsonian, where someone just comes in and takes advantage because we allowed it.”

In an email to IndieWire, Greene wrote that “the insinuation that we are trying to do away with ‘socially pointed programming’ is genuinely offensive and a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation.”

“As a queer, Jewish, feminist raised in a progressive environment,” she added, “I aim to continue the established mission of exploring complex issues and expanding discourse on social causes.”

Kornfeld expressed a similar sentiment: “I am saddened and appalled by the false claims being shared by some of Dylan’s backers that I am part of a corporate cabal engaged in a hostile takeover of the CAC that is seeking to change the nature and programming of Long Island’s premiere, independent, nonprofit arthouse theater. That couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Daidola and the rest of the CAC board did not respond to multiple requests from IndieWire for comment. In an October 3 story in Newsday, Daidola said he has “tried to engage in good faith and find common ground” with Skolnick’s supporters “because I believe we share the same goal, which is protecting the Cinema Arts Centre,” adding that he is “open to constructive dialogue.”

With both sides seemingly dug in and litigation looking increasingly likely, it’s unclear when this dispute will be resolved, or if it even can be without lasting damage to the Cinema Arts Centre. Skolnick and his supporters believe the only way he could realistically return is if Greene, Kornfeld, and the current board all resign.

“It just seems impossible any other way,” Skolnick said. “All I really want to do is get back to work.”