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Jennifer Clymer /MPTF
Take a bunch of retirees from the film and TV business, let them live together in the Motion Picture and Television Fund's Wasserman Campus retirement home in Woodland Hills, and I guess no one should be surprised that they program and produce an in-house TV channel for the other residents. Channel 22 mixes Hollywood movies and sitcom reruns with original programs created by — and starring — the retirees. Gideon Brower paid a visit for NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday last month.
About a quarter of the almost 200 active retirees participate in creating programs for the channel, assisted by a small full-time staff and a volunteer crew of local students and industry professionals. Among the shows they create are a comedy series called Law and Disorder, about a fictional Precinct 22 where the cops, victims and perpetrators are all over 80 years old; and a talk show called The Roaring 90s, which is kind of like The View but with women in their 90s."It's almost like working with a network, except you don't have to kowtow as much to the network bigwigs," says Irma Kalish, whose husband, Rocky, is a resident at Wasserman.
Irma and Rocky are a husband-and-wife team who wrote scores of episodes of shows like F Troop, My Three Sons and All in the Family. They're about to shoot the latest in a series of short films they've written for Channel 22.
"It's a sketch about two people who live in the same building and what happens to people in a stuck elevator," Rocky says.
Listen to the whole piece at the link.
