Leaders of the Screen Actors Guild voted to declare its opposition to the planned closure of an historic motion picture home where many well-known actors have spent their last days.
SAG’s national board voted by a 3.5-percent margin on Saturday to oppose the closure of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s long-term care facility and hospital in Los Angeles’ Woodland Hills neighborhood.
SAG has no role in administering the home — that’s the fund’s job — and no official say in its future but many of its members financially support the home through fund contributions. The vote from the divided 69-member board, plus two officers, served to highlight the controversy swirling around the issue.
Actors such as Mary Astor, Norma Shearer, “Gone With the Wind” Oscar-winner Hattie McDaniel and “Tarzan” star Johnny Weismuller once lived at the home, which opened in 1948.
The fund announced in January that it planned to close the home this year to save on overhead costs because the facility was running a $10-million deficit that could eventually bankrupt the fund. Payments from the state’s Medi-Cal program weren’t keeping pace with expenses, the fund said.
That outraged some actors who felt it would destroy a legacy. Critics also include some of the 300 hospital workers who would lose their jobs and relatives of those staying at the home — who argue that fragile patients might not survive being moved to other facilities.
About 200 people picketed the fund’s headquarters earlier this year, and opponents created a group called “Saving the Lives of Our Own” that vigorously challenges the fund’s contention that it can’t afford to maintain the facility.
The SAG board vote followed presentations by both the motion picture fund and opponents of closing the home.
“Our board voted to oppose the closing and did so to try and preserve the legacy of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Long Term Care historic commitment, in honor of the screen actors who founded it,” SAG National President Alan Rosenberg said in a statement.
The vote was disappointing, the fund said in a Sunday statement.
The long-term facility is losing nearly $1 million a month and if the fund doesn’t transfer its 84 residents to other nursing homes, “the fund will go bankrupt within five years,” said Frank Mancuso, the board’s chairman and the former chairman of Paramount Pictures and MGM.
“We cannot and will not compromise the best interests of SAG’s membership and the rest of the 60,000 people we serve every year by keeping it open,” he said in the statement.
The closures won’t affect the 185 residents of independent- and assisted-living facilities and the fund’s six area health centers that serve 60,000 industry workers.
Review: Director Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” Starring Robert Pattinson
So you think YOUR job is bad?
Sorry if we seem to be lacking empathy here. But however crummy you think your 9-5 routine is, it'll never be as bad as Robert Pattinson's in Bong Joon Ho's "Mickey 17" — nor will any job, on Earth or any planet, approach this level of misery.
Mickey, you see, is an "Expendable," and by this we don't mean he's a cast member in yet another sequel to Sylvester Stallone's tired band of mercenaries ("Expend17ables"?). No, even worse! He's literally expendable, in that his job description requires that he die, over and over, in the worst possible ways, only to be "reprinted" once again as the next Mickey.
And from here stems the good news, besides the excellent Pattinson, whom we hope got hazard pay, about Bong's hotly anticipated follow-up to "Parasite." There's creativity to spare, and much of it surrounds the ways he finds for his lead character to expire — again and again.
The bad news, besides, well, all the death, is that much of this film devolves into narrative chaos, bloat and excess. In so many ways, the always inventive Bong just doesn't know where to stop. It hardly seems a surprise that the sci-fi novel, by Edward Ashton, he's adapting here is called "Mickey7" — Bong decided to add 10 more Mickeys.
The first act, though, is crackling. We begin with Mickey lying alone at the bottom of a crevasse, having barely survived a fall. It is the year 2058, and he's part of a colonizing expedition from Earth to a far-off planet. He's surely about to die. In fact, the outcome is so expected that his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), staring down the crevasse, asks casually: "Haven't you died yet?"
How did Mickey get here? We flash back to Earth, where Mickey and Timo ran afoul of a villainous loan... Read More