A new documentary looks at the performers who reside at the Actor's Fund Retirement Home.
Bernard Flood played the horn with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Tessie Moreno shared a dressing room with Josephine Baker. And Rosetta LeNoire learned how to tap dance on a street corner from Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.
This may be as close as these retired performers ever came to stardom, but you wouldn't know it at the Actors' Fund retirement home in Englewood, N.J., where they swap stories of glory days and continue to perform.
"We started swinging," Flood recalls in "Curtain Call," which airs on Cinemax at 7 p.m. EDT Tuesday, "and I've been swinging ever since."
The 38-minute film, nominated for an Academy Award this year in the short-subject documentary category, gives a touching, bittersweet look at the entertainers, none of whom enjoyed the kind of fame that would allow them to retire in mansions by the sea.
"I wonder how I got so lucky," reminisces Pamela Duncan, who said casting directors likened her to Rita Hayworth and put her in hundreds of films, including the cult horror flicks "The Undead" and "Attack of the Crab Monsters."
"These are the people that are the heart and soul of show business, basically," said Chuck Braverman, the film's producer-director who interviewed dozens of the 108 residents of the home in 1999. "You couldn't have the big stars without all the supporting players."
Braverman made the film with executive producer Peter LeDonne, who left a career in theatrical advertising to make a film he first saw as a tribute to the Actors' Fund, which helps ailing or financially disadvantaged members of the entertainment industry.
The New York-based nonprofit organization, which takes donations from private foundations and entertainment-based unions, provides such services as career counseling, low-income housing and health insurance.
Eighty percent of the residents of the Englewood home need the Actors' Fund to help pay to live at the home, which charges $2,700 to $5,700 a month, depending on the level of medical care they need.
LeDonne said he decided to focus on the Englewood home after finding a new story and character for his film every time he returned.
The film begins with Flood, who lost a leg to diabetes, singing "All of Me" to fellow residents in a common room, then switches to his memories of vying for playing time in a band with the jazz great Armstrong.
"If you got a chance to get in there, you'd get in there real quick and he got you out of there real quick," Flood said, laughing. "If you stayed there much longer, he'd blow you out of there."
LeNoire, who later became known for playing Mother Winslow on the ABC sitcom "Family Matters," began performing at age 15 with Robinson, who she said was a homeless man who slept near her stoop in New York before he became famous.
The Cuban-born Moreno, who danced in the Ziegfeld Follies with her sister and later in the Folies-Bergere in Paris, recalls being angry that she had to share a dressing room in the 1920s with Baker because she was black. But after five minutes with the singer-dancer, Moreno said, "we were best of friends."
The energy of Moreno, who still shimmies around the retirement home in dressy clothes and dyed-brown hair, is typical of many of the home's residents, who read from plays together and put on shows regularly.
Some are still bitter, though. Actor Gaylord Mason speaks with barely restrained anger of the time he was replaced in a play by Kirk Douglas after an arrest for an alleged homosexual encounter in Detroit. The calls stopped coming afterward and friends told him he was blackballed in the industry.
The film's only minor distraction is the time spent interviewing officials at the home and other supporters, who repeat themes the residents express better in their own words.
An exception is theater actor Brian Stokes Mitchell, who came to perform songs from "Kiss Me, Kate" at the home and spoke of his career starring in Broadway plays that first were performed when the residents were in their primes.
"They are the people that I have built my career on," Mitchell says.
The film also focuses on the frailty of the performers, many of whom have Alzheimer's disease. And Flood and Mason are among three residents who have died since the filming of "Curtain Call."
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