With the recent exit of Dr. David Tillman from the Motion Picture and Television Fund, all eyes are on his second in charge, Seth Ellis, who serves as the fund's vice president and its chief operating officer.
Tillman and Ellis arrived together at the fund in 2000 as new brooms -- but would make bitter enemies of the elderly residents and their family members who are resisting the fund’s closure of the Motion Picture Home.
If ever words have come back to haunt someone, they may have in Ellis' case.
Depending on the listener, the term “successful aging” either describes a proactive strategy of coping with aging, or is Orwellian shorthand for expelling the fund’s most vulnerable residents.
The expression, in fact, was coined in the early 1960s and its broadly defined principles were soon embraced by gerontologists. The thumbnail definition of successful aging says that, given opportunities to socialize, proper nutrition and physical activity, the vast number of elderly people can continue to lead rewarding lives from the time of retirement until death.
The successful-aging phrase – if not the concept behind it – struck a raw nerve among those fighting the Motion Picture Home’s closing, when they discovered it in a 2007 interview with Ellis – conducted well before the closure announcement.
“We want this campus,” Ellis told “Long-Term Living Magazine” (then “Nursing Homes Magazine”) “to be a place for elders to live their best lives; not a place that looks at sickness, but looks at the key ingredients of successful aging.”
The quote has appeared in numerous posts and comment emails at TheWrap and other sites that reported on the home’s closure. The otherwise innocuous article in which Ellis was interviewed was the kind of journalistic karaoke in which a microphone is handed to an interview subject to tout the good work his or her organization is doing.
Where eyebrows raise, however, is over the clause about the campus not being “a place that looks at sickness” – which seemed to equate successful aging with only the healthiest seniors. The ambiguous phrase could imply that MPTF either doesn’t want to see sick people on its Wasserman Campus, or doesn’t want to solely be preoccupied with sickness.
In conversation with TheWrap, Ellis emphasizes he meant the latter.
“The people who find it sinister took it cynically,” Ellis says of the interview quote. “It’s been terribly misquoted and misconstrued. This notion that all I want is healthy, buff seniors is ludicrous,” he says.
Ellis explains that the point he was making was that conversations about aging in America are too often dominated by the frailties associated with growing old -- to the detriment of figuring out ways to let senior citizens live full lives.
“Many, many people have complimented me on that position,” he says.
Ellis points to a range of initiatives he has launched to end the isolation of the some campus’ elderly residents, including redesigning the dining hall and commons area to make them more conversation-friendly; making it easier for residents to communicate to friends and relatives via the Internet and obtaining wheelchairs for non-ambulatory residents so they can enjoy the home’s grounds.
