Hollywood closes retirement facility? Where’s the Katzenberg telethon?

Am I the only person confused at the embarrassing news that the Motion Picture & Television Fund had run out of money and had to close its long term care and acute care facility in Woodland Hills? This means 100 elderly sick people are being turned out on the street, a third of the staff fired, a hospital shut down.

Why does no one in the media seem to remember that the retirement home just opened an expensive, gleaming new facility two years ago? Who is responsible for this poor planning, allowing a new facility to be built while the operating budget sunk into the red?

And another question: where was the hue and cry over the closing of this facility? Shouldn’t someone have put on a telethon to raise $10 million – about half of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s salary circa 1988 – to save this critical service for aging members of the Hollywood community.

Lew Wasserman, for whom the campus was named, would have a word for this: a shondah.

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