9/27/2023 0 Comments Motion picture television fundThe MPTF’s outbreak arose in its long-term and memory care wards, where the activities of daily life require staffers to make frequent and direct contact with residents. ( The Hollywood Reporter is a sponsor of the Night Before event.) Board chair Jeffrey Katzenberg, who just launched streaming service Quibi, has for years hosted the leading Oscar weekend preparty, called The Night Before, which this year alone raised $5.4 million for the MPTF. About half of residents are subsidized by the MPTF, which is sustained by industry heavyweights its board of governors is a mix of studio heads (NBCUniversal vice chair Ron Meyer), director-producers (Christopher Nolan) and Hollywood legacies (actor Tony Goldwyn). Both the industry member and their spouse or life partner are eligible. To be admitted on campus - which features a spectrum of care levels from fully independent to assisted living to hospital-level - residents must be 70 years or older and have worked in the entertainment industry for more than two decades, with a percentage of that time spent in California. One of the MPTF’s oldest current residents, 109-year-old Ruthie Tompson, a longtime veteran of Disney’s animation department, tells of moving to California during the previous pandemic: For the first six months she didn’t know what her playmates looked like since everyone wore masks. The 227-resident MPTF campus was founded in 1921, three years after the emergence of the Spanish flu, by a group of early film industry titans - including actress Mary Pickford, who herself recovered from the disease - and financed with studio payroll deductions. In addition, nine staff members have tested positive. Residents under treatment mostly reside in a dedicated 18-bed wing on the property and a few with acute needs at nearby West Hills Hospital. So far, 18 residents have tested positive and four have died due to complications from COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, including 77-year-old Oscar-nominated cinematographer Allen Daviau ( E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple), 80-year-old character actor Allen Garfield ( The Conversation, Nashville) and Ann Sullivan, 91, a long-tenured animator at Disney. Discovery Int'l President Gerhard Zeiler to Give Opening Keynote ![]() It’s like hearing about the first guy in your Army unit who gets killed. “Until our first positive I went to sleep every night thinking, ‘OK, is tomorrow the day?’ We knew it would happen. “It feels like a war zone,” says Beitcher, who enacted distancing and screening measures on March 6, substantially before government orders to fight coronavirus at the local, state and federal levels went into effect. The MPTF’s first resident tested positive for the virus on March 31. It’s part of a safety protocol meant to protect his family as well as the residents at the Woodland Hills campus of the industry’s embattled retirement community and nursing home, which is in the midst of its own front in the battle against the novel coronavirus. These days, Bob Beitcher, the CEO of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Country House and Hospital, quarantines himself in an apartment over his home’s garage.
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