Edwards Theaters Faces Wages Suit : Courts: Ex-employee says the chain owes $10 million to managers not paid for long overtime hours.

A former manager filed suit Monday against the Edwards Theaters Circuit Inc. seeking $10 million in back wages for former and current managers of the Newport Beach-based theater operator.

The suit, filed in Orange County Superior Court by Fountain Valley resident David Harold Holmes, alleges that Edwards executives, including chairman and founder James Edwards Sr., violated state and federal labor laws by forcing theater managers to work extensive workweeks and then failing to pay required overtime.

Edwards Theaters’ general counsel Lawrence H. Davidson said that the company had not seen the suit. “We’d be happy to talk about the suit once we’ve seen it,” Davidson said.

James S. Davis, the Rancho Cucamonga lawyer who filed the suit, said the plaintiff seeks damages on behalf of an unknown number of former and current managers who have worked at the company during the past four years.

“We think there are about 120 former and present managers involved,” Davis said. “We’ve run the numbers of past and present managers at the company in the past four years and it’s a huge figure . . . $10 million.”

Davis said the theater chain skirted overtime requirements by designating employees as “theater managers when they really didn’t have managerial work to do. . . . You can’t just take employees, give them the manager title, and then not pay them.”

Davis said related suits were filed Monday in San Bernardino County Superior Court and in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana.

The timing of the suit, just two days before the Edwards Theaters chain opens a $27-million theater complex in Irvine, “is coincidental,” Davis said. “We’ve been getting this together for months, and it just happened to coincide with the opening.”