The Retirement Home Where You're Never Too Old to Rewrite the Script

Screenplays are always jamming up the printer. Stacks of scripts are scattered in the library, where the Grey Quill Society gathers every Thursday afternoon to develop the characters and plotlines for its next big project. The aspiring screenwriters meet in the quiet hills just west of Los Angeles for a creative retreat.

Except this retreat isn’t temporary, and its members aren’t young Hollywood types trying to break into the business. The retired residents of the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Wasserman campus got their big break decades ago, and not just as screenwriters or producers or directors: They were minor soap stars, home projectionists for studio executives, and special effects wizards who spent their days cutting and splicing a now nearly extinct material—film.  

"Why did you wait until you were 85 to go into screenwriting?” wonders Marvin Zenziper, an 86-year-old retiree who’s not a member of the Grey Quill Society but does like to use the printer occasionally. “It’ll be harder to produce it now.”

Yet, now is the time to chase dreams for a good number of the more than 200 TV and movie veterans who call the roughly 42-acre Woodland Hills campus home. Having spent the majority of their lives either in front of a camera or toiling behind it, many retirees are only now finding the time to pursue pet projects such as screenwriting, or television production, or pottery, or jewelry making.

Anne Faulkner, an 84-year-old working actor who still goes on auditions and most recently appeared on the HBO show Getting On, is hopeful about finishing what she calls “the great American novel,” which she began writing—and then promptly abandoned—not long after the father of her two children took off when she was 21.

“I took the script I had written years and years ago, and I said, ‘I have no idea what to do with it.’ It’s all yellow but I’m glad I didn’t throw it away,” says Faulkner, who has short salt-and-pepper curls and wears tortoiseshell glasses on the bridge of her nose. Instead, she took it to the weekly writing workshop led by Emmy-wining producer and former Melrose Place writer Peter Dunne, and picked up where she’d left off half a century ago. They say Hollywood is all about who you know: Dunne and Faulkner are now working together decades after he produced the CBS soap opera Knots Landing, the show where Faulkner got her start as a recurring character in the late 1980s. 

Faulkner never imagined she’d continue writing her masterpiece, but she also never thought she’d meet the eligibility requirements for the Motion Picture & Television Fund's retirement community. After all, she didn’t move to California until the age of 55, and she credits her SAG-AFTRA pension primarily to one person: comedian Roseanne Barr. For two seasons in the late 1980s, Faulkner played Sylvia Foster, Roseanne's coworker at the plastic factory in Barr's eponymous sitcom. 

Residents live either independently in “country house cottages” or with assistance in lodges or long-term care units like Harry’s Haven, which is designated for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients and named for actor Kirk Douglas’ father. Former residents include Maltese Falcon actor Mary Astor, Oscar-winning Gone with the Wind actor Hattie McDaniel, and House Peters, Jr., otherwise known as the face of Mr. Clean.  

Admittance can be competitive and often involves a wait list, even though retirees must be over 70 and have experience working in film and TV unions for at least 20 years—the majority of them in California—in order to apply. Some are on the wait list by choice, with more retirees opting to live at home for longer periods before moving into a retirement home, according to Motion Picture & Television Fund spokesperson Jaime Larkin. The retirement home became a center of controversy when it made the decision to close and relocate its longterm care patients in 2009 due to lack of funds. The decision was reversed three years later, thanks in part to ambitious fundraising efforts led by Foundation chair Jeffrey Katzenberg. 

Nationwide, the over-65 population is projected to nearly double by 2050, when one in five Americans will be 65 or older, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. As the older population soars, more than half are delaying retirement, and not all cite their financial situation as the primary reason. Nearly a third of workers are postponing retirement because "they enjoy where they work," and 26 percent "fear retirement may be boring," according to a 2014 CareerBuilder survey.

Frank Fassnacht does not suffer from that fear. A member of the Grey Quill Society, he also serves as an ambassador for those who live in the on-campus cottages, and helped to found the retirement community's annual shuffleboard tournament. The 83-year-old was raised in an entertainment industry family in Los Angeles, and his father served as the president of Technicolor, where Fassnacht got his start at the age of 23. About 15 years later, he dubbed the sound for 1970s television shows such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show at a company called Producer Sound Service on the Fox Studios lot.

“You never knew when you were going to get out of there, so you could never make any plans,” Fassnacht said of pulling long hours on the Fox lot. A family man who fathered a dozen children and is now a grandfather of 22, Fassnacht moved on to a more idyllic workday at Disney, where he spent his last decade in the industry as a personal projectionist for the Walt Disney Company.

Rather than pulling long hours on a studio set, Fassnacht worked in the off hours, shuttling to the Malibu beach houses of studio executives to project the dailies—raw footage shot that day. He set up shop in the home of Walt Disney’s daughter, Diane, and her husband, Ron Miller, who ran the company in the late '70s and '80s, and later for then studio heads like Frank Wells, Michael Eisner, and current Motion Picture & Television Fund foundation chair Katzenberg, who co-founded Dreamworks Studios. 

Zenziper, an 86-year-old former optical effects guru, also came from an entertainment industry family—although his job was far less conventional than most. His father, a Russian Jewish immigrant who turned his tailoring skill into a Hollywood costuming career, moved to the Woodland Hills retirement community in the 1970s, when Maltese Falcon star Astor was still a resident. “She was the oddest lady. She wouldn't talk to anybody,” says Zenziper's wife Lee, a retired insurance broker. 

Born in Chicago and raised speaking Yiddish, Zenziper is soft-spoken and dons a Lionsgate baseball cap and wire-rimmed eyeglasses. Having spent his days in a film lab rather than on a set or in a postproduction suite, he finds it ironic that he never met a director or an actor prior to retirement a dozen years ago.

“I was in the film editor union, never edited a film,” he says, speaking to the many paradoxes of the film industry and his obscure role in it. “I was in a camera union for 30-something years and never touched a camera. You know, I mean, it’s just things that make you say, ‘How is that possible?’ ”

Zenziper spent more than three decades adding special effects by hand: titles, swipes, dissolves, and montages for hundreds of movies, commercials, and trailers—sometimes up to seven different projects a day, and he estimates 700 projects throughout his career. Often the days would bleed into long nights and weekends spent at Paramount Studios in front of the Moviola, a machine that allowed him to see the film he was manually manipulating.

“Most of the people that you’re going to meet here, they were a writer or a director or they wrote a movie. They’ll tell you about the people they know, the parties they went to—but I can’t do that," Zenziper says. “I don’t think there’s an actual person that I know of that did optical line-up in this campus. I couldn’t sit down with somebody and say, ‘You know the good old days,’ because there’s nobody I can sit down and talk to about the good old days. These actors sit around and talk, they can talk for hours. Thousands of hours, all these things they were in. What am I going to say? 'You know about this dissolve I did?' ”

And while he occasionally still has nightmares about having to finish adding effects to a film under a tight deadline—it wasn't uncommon for him to fly home mid-vacation to do so—retirement has allowed Marvin and Lee to do the very thing they never had time for: go to the movies. 

“We never went to the movies until after retirement. And now we’re making up for it,” says Lee. “I went to one movie when I was five or six years old and I hated it so much I never went back.” Even when the rest of the audience has left the theater, the Zenzipers stay and watch until the very end of the credits, marveling at the seemingly endless list of names and titles made easy thanks to digital technology.

They're not the only ones paying attention to the credits. Faulkner, too, watches movies until the very end so she can put together the week's programming for the on-campus Channel 22 station and its TV Guide, where she notes which residents worked on which movies. She never thought she’d see her own name in the scrolling type at the end of TV shows like Roseanne and 7th Heaven.

Though she’d always wanted to be an actor, motherhood forced her to find a more stable occupation and a steady income. After remarrying a man she met in the local theater community, she landed a job working as a traffic clerk for a local TV station. But when she and her husband ended up as executives at the same network, the competition ended their marriage.

“And I thought, ‘Wait a minute, my kids grew up and left home, my husband grew up and left home, I don’t want to go out of this world wishing I had done something.’ So I quit this big job, cashed in my stock options, packed a bag, carried my typewriter, got on a train, and went to New York.”

The first person she saw upon arrival in New York: a plastic surgeon. “I said, ‘I just got here, I’m 50 years old, and I’m an actor and I want to look younger.' ” But fortunately, she says, “he laughed at me and threw me out and said, ‘There are people who come in here and want me to make them look as good as you look.’ ”

Within five years, all the off-off-Broadway shows paid off. After countless auditions, dozens of headshots, numerous classes for soap opera acting, and part-time jobs at ticket counters to pay the bills in between acting gigs, Faulkner scored an agent and enough commercial work to move to the promised land: California.

“It was the smartest move I ever made because I work, work, worked,” she says. “I never made it up the hill [to Hollywood] except to audition. I never looked anywhere else. I became a Valley girl—an old Valley girl.”

Even today, Faulkner looks a fraction of her age, and she’s got the energy and charisma of the most bright-eyed young starlet. A breast cancer survivor who’s undergone a mastectomy and hip surgery, Faulkner calls herself a bionic woman. She’ll be 85 in June.

The hardest part of living in a retirement community, the residents say, is getting close to people who suddenly one day aren’t there anymore. Fassnacht knows the pain firsthand: his wife, who moved into Harry's Haven when she began suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia, passed away several years ago. 

“When we lose somebody, a frame with their picture and a card is put in each house,” says Faulkner, who works at the Channel 22 TV station four days a week. She told the retirement home's administrative assistant, “When you have to get to the point where you have to put my picture up underneath it, put: ‘She finally retired.’ ”

Exterior, San Fernando Valley retirement home. The scene dissolves and the end credits roll. Fade to black.

Original article from TakePart