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The show keeps going on for residents of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s retirement campus in Woodland Hills.
Also known as the Wasserman Campus, the living and medical care facility offers dozens of programs to keep the entertainment industry veterans and their spouses living there occupied and thriving. And since most of them had creative careers of one kind or another, key activities involve writing, art and putting on shows.
There’s even origami.
“This isn’t your typical retirement community, it’s a peer-to-peer relationship,” explained Jennifer Clymer, a production pro who’s been the MPTF’s director of media since 2006. “This isn’t the place that you’re coming to wait to die, it’s a place where you come to live.
“Primarily, I run the day-to-day operations of Channel 22,” the campus’ 24/7, closed circuit TV station, Clymer continued. “I work to produce the content that the residents want created. And I’ll go around campus and try to figure out who’s new and needs to get pulled out of their shell a little bit.”
A drawing class and a writing group — the Grey Quill Society — are among other creative outlets taught by industry volunteers that give the seniors a sense of community and, often, opportunities for expressive exploration.
“You look at our community, and these are people who all came from a creative background,” Fredda Johnson, MPTF’s Volunteer Engagement director, noted. “They all speak a certain language. Many of them worked in a certain aspect of the industry, but might have always wanted to try something else. We allow them to do that here.”
While many residents move in needing to adjust and find activities, others arrive with fully prepared projects.
Raymond DeTournay, a former head of production at L.A.’s Channel 2 who ran his own industrial and corporate communications production outfit for decades, had a semi-autobiographical novel, “The Boy at Booth Memorial,” written when he moved with his wife, Louise, from their Woodland Hills house onto the MPTF campus a little over a year ago. It was published in September.
“It’s my experience, embellished a bit to tell a better story,” DeTournay, 83, said of his book about a 14-year-old boy who moved, with his nurse mother, into a Minnesota home for unwed mothers in 1950. “I was with 10 Salvation Army women, who were like nuns, and 50 teenage girls who were not.”
While it’s available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other internet booksellers, DeTournay was pleased to find another market of interested readers at his new home. And more. He got tips on marketing and promotion from another resident who’d been a p.r. professional, shortly before that man passed away. He currently finds it quite rewarding to read his story to blind and other MPTF residents.
“I don’t imagine I’ll ever get rich selling books myself,” DeTournay acknowledged. “The whole idea is that we’re trying to get it exposed in the Hollywood community, because it really has great potential for a movie or a series.”
Another resident, 93-year-old former KGIL-deejay Johnny Gunn, also moved onto the campus two years ago with a book he’d written. He lives 172 steps away from Harry’s Haven, where his wife Jo-Ann and other people with Alzheimer’s are cared for.
Also published in September, “I’m Dressed, You’re Not” recounts Gunn’s lifelong experience, and those of others, as a crossdresser. And although he’s not actively trying to sell it to his neighbors, they come to him requesting copies.
“It’s happened because people have heard about it and seen it laying around,” Gunn explained, then added that he’s otherwise got many, many other things to do. “I get involved. I work a little bit at doing short subjects, announcements, scheduled events. I do what I did in the Business, I use my voice. I narrate, bits and pieces, nothing regularly but they keep me busy. Sometimes it’s too busy!”
For less-experienced, literary-minded residents, Emmy-winning TV producer Peter Dunne — who helmed the groundbreaking 1973 “Sybil” TV movie and some two dozen prime-time series — has been teaching the Grey Quill Society for going on six years now. The group’s second anthology of stories, “The Grey Quill Society Review: Number 2, Fall 2018,” is available on Amazon.
“It’s part of the wellness program here, more than it is a writing program,” explained the semi-retired, Topanga-based Dunne, who’s paid to teach writing at UCLA and other universities.
“It interests people who don’t know how to write or want to write their life stories,” he said. “The whole purpose of it is memoir writing. They write stories that are very funny, and some that are heartbreaking.”
About 20 percent of the students wrote for their careers. “They’re very familiar with script and storytelling, so it comes naturally to them once they try it,” Dunne noted.
Even some very busy working professionals get a great deal out of volunteering at the campus. Doug Petrie, most recently showrunner for the Netflix Marvel superhero series “Daredevil” and “The Defenders” asked what he could contribute in the summer of 2017. Since then, he’s been teaching a drawing class every Thursday his production schedule permits.
“I get so much more out of teaching this class than I ever could have guessed,” Petrie revealed. “When you teach a class, it’s very easy to be kind and very patient and kind of open to discovery with all of them. I think, boy, if I could be as nice to myself as I am to them, what would that be like? So that’s a big change.”
He said he has learned to ease up a little bit on himself. Better, a student whose left side was paralyzed by a stroke got some of her feeling and motion back thanks to Petrie’s athletic approach to drawing. He’s also been told that one of his students with Alzheimer’s – he doesn’t know who it is – has seen some of his symptoms improve as a result of being part of the drawing community.
The key question, though: Are any of his students ready to draw Marvel Comics? “Sure, a couple of them,” Petrie laughed. “But I’d far sooner create our own indie imprint and start making original work rather than corporate licensed properties. Maybe we’ll start a comic book company.”
Channel 22’s aim isn’t to become a production shingle. As the most involving creative element of the MPTF’s wellness program, it enables the residents’ ideas, allows participants to apply their skills and provides them with stuff to watch, too.
“We will do whatever is interesting to the residents here,” Clymer said at the on-campus station, whose walls are decorated with posters of the latest and even upcoming Hollywood productions (which residents get to see, first-run, at the campus’ nearby movie theater, which also doubles as Channel 22’s soundstage) and a production board with the schedules of such in-house productions as “Looking Back,” “Harvard Yardbirds” and “Song of Myself.”
“Kind of our baseline of production is called ‘Behind the Silver Screen’,” Clymer said. “Joe Sutton, who’s been in the industry for over 50-plus years, comes out here and hosts interviews with people from all walks of the industry, just about whatever they did in their life, whatever is fascinating to them, family, whatever they want to talk about.
While making full features is not feasible with Channel 22’s resources, scenes, trailers, shorts and sitcoms can get filmed with donated cameras, computer-editing stations, used lights and stands, costumes, wigs and other equipment on hand.
“Nothing happens here unless somebody donates it to us, because we are a small department as part of a large charity,” Clymer pointed out. “I never lose sight of the fact that this is a really-nice-to-have. It is part of the wellness program, it provides quality and quantity for the lives of the people who live here. But we’re not spending money hand over fist. I squeeze a penny.”
Clymer’s station has four full-time staff members and otherwise depends on college-age part-timers, interns and volunteers. Fifty percent of the programming on the 24/7 channel is produced there.
“The thing that we are desperate for is money for overhead,” Clymer explained, “for the people that are working here. [Donors] love putting their names on equipment, but we need some kind of endowed chair or something.”
Whatever the financial future holds, one gets the impression that Channel 22 and the MPTF’s other creative programs will keep going and growing.
Still going out on auditions at age 88, Anne Faulkner volunteers at the station and learned to write her remarkable story at the Grey Quill Society.
A Metromedia TV executive and single mother in Ohio, she came to L.A. in her 50s to pursue her dream. She landed roles on “Knots Landing” and the original “Roseanne” show.
“What everything here on this campus does is keep the residents young, whether they want to or not,” Faulkner joked.”There are the people here who help them and convince them that they’re not retired and just waiting here, even if they act like it when they first come.
“I think that’s why I’m still on my feet, still walking, still working and still dreaming,” Faulkner said. “As long as I think I can do it, I might as well try.”
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