The Motion Picture & Television Fund -- a charity started by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and other Hollywood luminaries to care for entertainers who fell on hard times -- said Wednesday that it was closing a hospital and nursing home by year's end.
With more than 500 hospital admissions last year and about 100 long-term residents, the Woodland Hills facilities have been a $10-million annual drain on the fund's budget for the last four years. The fund administrators projected the shortfall would only grow as a result of the deteriorating economy.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, January 20, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 54 words Type of Material: Correction
Actors' hospital: A Thursday article in Section A about plans to close the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills said actor Jean Hersholt planted 48 acres of walnut and orange trees at the site. When Hersholt found the property for the facilities in 1940, the trees were already there.
The origins of the "motion picture home," as it is commonly referred to by people in the entertainment industry, date to 1940, when actor Jean Hersholt, who played Shirley Temple's grandfather in the film "Heidi," planted 48 acres of walnut and orange trees in Woodland Hills on the site of the future Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, opened eight years later.
Residents have included DeForest Kelley, who played Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy on "Star Trek"; Dick Wilson, of Mr. Whipple fame; and producer-director Stanley Kramer, whose credits include "High Noon" and "Judgment at Nuremberg." He died there in 2001 at 87.
The closures, which will cost 290 workers their jobs, will not affect about 185 residents of the fund's independent- and assisted-living facilities and six area health centers that serve some 60,000 industry workers.
Founded in 1921 with the motto "We take care of our own," the fund began with a coin box in Hollywood into which industry workers deposited spare change. It grew into one of Hollywood's favorite charities, with a $120-million annual budget.
But even modern-day Hollywood's biggest names couldn't script a happy ending for the hospital and home. DreamWorks Animation SKG chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, filmmaker Steven Spielberg and stars such as Jennifer Aniston, Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Reese Witherspoon each year host an annual pre-Oscar fundraiser bash at the Beverly Hills Hotel for the home.
Katzenberg, chairman of the MPTF Foundation Board, said the fund concluded that it had no choice: "Although we are in good shape today, the acute-care hospital and long-term-care facility are generating operating deficits that could bankrupt MPTF in a very few years."
The decision wasn't getting great reviews Wednesday.
