A lot of bad blood remains between the two rival factions of the Screen Actors Guild, but one issue might just be powerful -- and apolitical -- enough to bring them together.
 
Board members representing both sides of the ideological divide hope they can unite their fractious supporters in opposition to the closure of the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s nursing home and hospital.
 
At least three board members, including Elliott Gould, are planning to put the MPTF closures on the agenda of a Hollywood division board meeting next Monday as part of a coordinated effort to find a way to prevent the oldest, most infirm members of the entertainment community from being thrown out of the home they long assumed would be their last.
 
Gould visited the MPTF campus in Woodland Hills last week and said he was saddened and angered by what he saw. "Bleak, very bleak," was his assessment.
 
The population of the long-term care facility has already shrunk from almost 140 when the closures were announced in January to less than 100. More than a dozen residents have died.
 
Gould, speaking to TheWrap, would not name the two other Hollywood board members planning to put the issue on the agenda, except to say that they represented opposite sides of the ideological divide. Other SAG sources said one was Ned Vaughn, a prominent member of the so-called Unite for Strength faction which believes in merging SAG with AFTRA. It was not immediately clear who the co-sponsor was from the Membership First faction, which believes SAG should remain separate.
 
Also involved are Hollywood board members Ken Howard, another Unite for Strength advocate, and Bill Smitrovich, who has already been very active in opposing the MPTF closures and is also a Unite for Strength supporter.
 
Gould said this was not just about making peace within SAG. It was also about trying to find a middle ground between the MPTF management, which has insisted the closures are inevitable because of the poor economy and the poor state of health care, and a noisy group of activists, many of them relatives of long-term care patients, who are preparing a lawsuit and suspect the MPTF may have an ulterior motive for shuttering the facilities.
 
“I want very much to be unbiased,” Gould said. “We should assess the situation before we start digging. The way forward is not to threaten. Perhaps by not threatening, we can gain some satisfaction or results.”
 
He added, however: “It’s easy to be biased when innocent people, who have depended on something for so long and put everything they have into making sure they can stay there, are asked to leave.”
 
Gould was meeting yesterday with Girardi & Keese, the high-profile downtown lawfirm handling the suit on behalf of the aggrieved residents’ relatives. He also hopes to talk to Michael Douglas, an MPTF Foundation board member whose family has been active in elderly care in Hollywood for three generations, and to Jeffrey Katzenberg, the MPTF”s chief fundraiser who has been particularly unapologetic about the unexpected closure announcement.
 
Gould said he hoped the MPTF could at least agree not to turf people out who are already in the long-term care facility. “My idea is that if you got here, you should stay here,” he said.

How bad is the film production crisis in L.A.?

Let’s put it this way: If you are a lighting technician or a grip, chances are you didn’t work at all in January, February or March. As I report Monday in the British daily the Guardian, the estimated unemployment rate for technicians for that period was 75-80 percent.
 
According to the leading agencies representing cinematographers, about 80 per cent of directors of photography are also currently out of work -- including members of the ASC, the cream of the profession.
 
As Film LA and other organizations have pointed out, nobody is shooting here -- not before the state’s proposed package of tax incentives kicks in over the summer, anyway. This winter saw just two big-budget productions: “Iron Man 2” and Tim Burton’s take on “Alice in Wonderland.” A decade ago, the same period would have seen a dozen or more major productions.
 
The rest of 2009 isn’t looking quite that slow, but almost. Film LA gave me the names of just six other movies with budgets over $75 million slated to shoot some or all of the time in our very own City of Angels.
 
They are: the latest superhero spectacular, “Green Hornet”; a sci-fi movie about an alien invasion called “Battle: Los Angeles,” starring Aaron Eckhardt; another sci-fi movie, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, called “Inception”; “Little Fockers” (the latest in the Meet The Parents franchise); “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel”; and Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of the Michael Lewis baseball bestseller “Moneyball.”
 
And that’s it. They say Hollywood is a state of mind as much as a geographical location; the risk for the industry, these days, is that it won’t be anything else.
 

Celebrities love a worthy cause, which perhaps explains why a dozen of this town’s better known film and television actresses made a pilgrimage to the Skirball Center Monday to stand up and be counted as people who care about women’s health and education on the African continent.
 
The event was a conference bringing together the wives of 15 of Africa’s political leaders with Melanne Verveer, President Obama’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, and a clutch of nongovernment (NGO) groups including U.S. Doctors for Africa.
 
For the organizers, the allure of the celebrities was clear: to attract the local media, especially television, who turned out in thick clusters. Quite what the celebrities themselves thought they were up to was less clear.
 
“I’m here primarily to learn and to be a witness to a wonderful exchange of information,” said a less than confident Diane Lane, looking elegant in a blue summer dress and straw hat but thematically sounding way, way out of her depth.
 
She rambled uncertainly about the work of NGOs being a “Catch-22” on the African continent (for reasons she couldn’t entirely explain) and called for something she called “self-sustenance," before finally acknowledging she had been to Africa precisely twice -- once to Rwanda last year and once to South Africa long ago. Asked what she and her fellow actresses could contribute to the cause, she pointed to the African first ladies and said: “They know how best we can serve them.”
 
Some of Lane’s fellow performers were happy to admit they were not exactly experts in the field. “This is one of those opportunities to learn rather than lead,” said a delightfully understated Amy Brenneman, who has never been to Africa at all. Asked what brought her to the event, she smiled broadly and answered: “My friend Maria Bello told me to come, and I always do what she asks.”
 
Bello, admittedly, was rather better informed, as was Joely Fisher, who serves as an ambassador for Save the Children and recently shot a public service announcement in Mozambique to try to encourage Americans to donate $28 a month -- money she calls the “latte fund” -- to the charity.
 
As a group, though, they were clearly happy to be associated with education, health and the fight against HIV but rather less happy at the suggestion that some of the first ladies represented governments with nasty reputations for brutality and corruption.
 
Lane called the corruption question a “tricky conundrum." Bello said the idea was to “focus on the positive," at least initially, in the hope that over several years a more frank discussion might evolve. Brenneman, once again proving disarmingly honest, admitted she didn’t know quite how she was supposed to broach the conversation. “I don’t know what the goal would be,” she said.
 
For once, the Hollywood crowd were not the princesses of the moment. Robin Wright Penn turned up in an tatty pair of plaid pants and Converse sneakers. But even the most elegant of the actresses could not compete with the pink and ivory designer suits, gold jewellery and shimmering handbags of the First Ladies.
 
The whole event felt, at times, like a scene from "Coming to America." PR flacks in black suits and Hermes scarves held parasols over the African ladies on the podium to shade them from the 90-degree heat, while event organizers did all the talking at a so-called news conference where reporters were not allowed to ask a single question.
 
Was this really an event that Hollywood’s liberal elite could be proud to be associated with? Diane Lane spoke words truer than perhaps she realised when she said: “All I can bring to this is the fact that you are willing to put a microphone to my mouth.”

Sometimes it takes a judge to state the obvious. The auction of Michael Jackson’s possessions from Neverland can go ahead later this month -- at least according to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brett Klein, who rejected a preliminary injunction to stop the sale on Friday -- for the very simple reason that Darren Julien’s auction house has a contract to do exactly what it is doing.

This is the latest loopy episode in Jackson’s frequently loopy legal chronicles, and it doesn’t look like it is going anywhere -- except perhaps back to more courtrooms for more litigation and wrangling. A different judge is going to hold another injunction hearing on April 15, just one week before the auction is set to begin, and the arguments may well continue to rage thereafter.

Last month Jackson slapped a lawsuit on the auction house, accusing it of trying to sell the litigation-happy pop star’s possessions without his permission.

“We don’t want to spend the next few years in litigation, but if we have to we’ll do it because we want to make sure our reputation is intact,” Julien told me. “We have nothing to hide in this matter, we have no reason to be afraid of anything.”

Julien and his crew emptied out Neverland last summer, at Jackson’s express instructions, then warehoused and catalogued every piece in preparation for the monster sale being staged in the soon-to-be-demolished Robinsons-May space next to the Beverly Hilton. “We have a valid, binding contract,” he said. “That’s why we were hired -- to conduct an auction.”

Julien is a hard man to ruffle. As a celebrity auctioneer, he’s had his share of demanding clients, but never has he gone ahead with a sale in the face of outright opposition from the person who hired him. “This is a new one for us, and probably for any auction house,” he said. “As we were when the lawsuit was filed, we are still puzzled. Nobody to this date has come forward and said, this is why we are doing this.”

If Jackson had a problem, he said, all he had to do was pick up the phone. “We deal with celebrities all the time, we’re very accommodating,” he insisted. “Canceling the auction never, never came up. We were never asked to cancel the auction.”

Some people might think the role of a chaplain was to stand in defense of the sick and afflicted in their time of need. That, though, is not the approach being taken by Arthur Rosenberg, the house rabbi at the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s soon-to-be-shuttered nursing home where residents, many of them in their 80s and 90s, are in varying states of anxiety about having to move out.

Nursing professionals have a name for their agitation -- it’s called transfer trauma, and it is often fatal. But Rosenberg is insisting that everything will be just fine.

“We will all go through changes on our journey through life,” Rosenberg writes soothingly in the latest issue of the MPTF Residents Gazette. “It is my point of view that (a) change always carries a lesson with it, (b) what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and (c) there is always the day after.”

Sadly, the evidence suggests there isn’t always a day after; or that what doesn’t make us stronger may indeed kill. Of the 15 or so residents who have moved since the closures were announced in mid-January, three or four have died, according to reports received by continuing residents, their families and staff members. At least 12 other long-term care residents, and possibly as many as 14, have died on campus, leaving about 110 still in place awaiting the next “change on our journey through life."

While it is impossible to establish a simple cause-and-effect behind these deaths, the figures seem consistent with a transfer trauma attrition rate of about 15 percent cited in the professional literature.

Rabbi Rosenberg’s platitudinous sentiments have unleashed strong emotions among those campaigning against the MPTF’s decision and still hoping to keep the nursing home open. Richard Stellar, whose 91-year-old mother is in the long-term care facility, has accused him to his face of shilling for the administration.

“Ask yourself: What would a pious man who was not beholden to his paycheck do in this circumstance?” Stellar wrote on his campaign website. “I’m calling you out bro -- you have f---ing failed us.”

Interestingly, one of Rosenberg’s predecessors as chaplain at the MPTF, Rabbi Jerry Ram Cutler, appears to agree. “I decry the callous decision to close the Home’s long term care facility,” Cutler wrote in an open letter published as an ad in Variety a few weeks ago. “In the name of decency, how can the fate of so many in need be held on the precipice of life by so few who seemingly disregard the elderly and indigent?”

The MPTF rabbi wars have begun.

I'm not usually a fan of individuals who set up front companies and phony websites with the express intention of misleading people. It's how the oil industry manages to convince people its "thinktanks" are in fact sources of objective research on energy and global warming. It’s how Washington uber-lobbyist Richard Berman -- the model for Aaron Eckhart’s character in "Thank You for Smoking" -- has operated for years.

At least in theory, then, I feel I should be at least a little scandalized that Sacha Baron Cohen has done exactly the same thing for his new movie, "Bruno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt."

As reported and extensively documented by The Smoking Gun, Cohen's production company set up at least 29 phony firms -- among them Amesbury Chase Productions, Chromium Films, Cold Stream Productions and Coral Blue Productions, all with remarkably similar websites linking back to the same Sunset Boulevard mailbox company -- so his victims would not connect requests from a "German documentary crew" for on-camera interviews with the creator of Ali G and Borat.

Is this strictly legal? It's a fair bet, once the movie comes out, that that proposition will be thoroughly tested in the courts. "Borat," after all, led to a large flurry of lawsuits, many of them alleging gross misrepresentation by Baron Cohen and his production assistants.

And is it defensible? I would have expressed some doubts, but that was before I saw the web postings of a Missouri neo-Nazi called Glenn Miller, who allowed himself not only to be taken in by Baron Cohen this time last year but was actually dumb enough to boast about the great interview he expected to give to a German documentary crew.

On a right-wing chat site called the Vanguard News Network, Miller salivates over the "two gorgeous young chicks" who made the first approach and positively swoons over the idea that he would be included in a two-hour documentary to be broadcast around the globe by German TV One ("whatever TV station that is," he wonders, all too briefly).

"And get this," he adds. "They're paying your's [sic] truly $500 bucks as payment for my time, use of ... photos, and for my signed permission for them to air my racist and anti-semitic 'ravings' far and wide. (Shit, life jus don’t git no bettern nat).”

When a sympathizer worries on the chat site that the interview might make him look "retarded," he dismisses the idea out of hand. “No journalist in 35 years has managed to do that,” he says, "and since I readily admit I’m a racist, hater and anti-semite with good reason, their name-callings are truth-tellings.”

We shall see just how well the Miller interview worked out for him. And much as I'd like to say I disapprove, the deeper truth is, I can't wait.

Anyone with half a mind to hate journalists could do worse than watch this video,
shot by TMZ, of Natasha Richardson’s nearest and dearest arriving at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital in the final hours of her life.

Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson arrive, only to be bombarded with an extraordinary barrage of questions both insensitive and inane. “You guys, how you doin’? How you doin’?” someone shouts. “How are you guys feeling about this?”

As they exit the building, some time later, the barrage continues: “Ms. Redgrave, how is Natasha doing? How’s she doin’? Is she holding up?” It’s hard to fathom the excruciating pain of watching a loved one die without warning, while at the same time having to put up with this sort of heinous crap.

The media crap has, in fact been abundant from the moment that news of Richardson’s sudden illness first hit the headlines -- and it hasn’t been confined to the paparazzi end of the spectrum. Was she brain-dead, they asked. Or merely critical? In the absence of solid information, the public rumor-mongering went into overdrive.

And it has only gotten worse now she has been declared dead: the fake expressions of concern on the part of a media gaggle itching to report the latest half-digested tidbit have given way to a bizarre game of who’s-to-blame.

Why wasn’t she wearing a helmet on the ski slopes, more than one columnist has asked. Did the doctors in the resort screw up? Or was it the doctors in Montreal?

A couple of news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, allowed themselves to indulge in a little armchair diagnosis. Richardson, they declared, had suffered from a syndrome called “walk and die”  -- a head trauma that appeared to leave her unaffected at first, but then proved deadly serious within an hour. The Times quoted a UCLA brain specialist who, of course, had not examined the patient, and a neurosurgeon at Cedars Sinai, who also had not examined the patient.

It took a commenter at the L.A. Times website to bring this madness to heel. “I understand that many may be curious as to how one can seem fine after an accident and wind up critically ill hours later,” a certain Amy wrote, “so it would be informative to explain Richardson’s malady AFTER WE KNOW WHAT IT IS.”

Exactly.
 

David Tillman, the chief executive of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, is desperate to put a human face on his decision to close down the Fund’s long-term nursing home and hospital.

That might explain why, when one of his longest-serving employees lost a son to cancer, he and his vice president for human resources, Jan Zlotowicz, showed up, uninvited, to the funeral. Nothing went as Dr. Tillman might have hoped. The ceremony, held at the chapel at Forest Lawn last Wednesday, was a colossally sad occasion – Joel Morales Jr. was just 29 when he lost his battle with lymphoma.

Joel’s mother Juana, who has worked at the MPTF nursing home for more than 25 years, was heartened to see several co-workers among the hundred or so mourners. But she was decidedly unhappy to see her boss, Dr. Tillman. And, according to those present, she became extremely upset when she saw what he did. On the way into the service, Dr. Tillman approached a group of women and reached out his hand to offer his condolences to the bereaved mother. Except, instead of Juana Morales, he reached out to one of her friends, Yolanda Granados, by mistake.  “Here she is, a staff member for more than 25 years, and he has his human resources director with him, and he can’t even recognize her,” one attendee told me. “It was a terrible form of disrespect – almost a form of funeral crashing.” Whoops. As usual, I'd be more than happy to hear Dr. Tillman's side of the story. All he has to do is end his radio silence with TheWrap and pick up the phone.