[Blind Gossip] This one is about an actor doing a good deed… but it might rub some of you the wrong way.
There is an old movie theater in a little town in California that was on the verge of shutting down. It’s the kind of theater that still showed films on reel-to-reel equipment. The townspeople worked hard to raise the money needed to get it upgraded to run digital films so that it wouldn’t go out of business, but they fell short of their goal.
At the last minute, a well-known television and film actor swept in and generously contributed a bunch of money. It was enough money to put the town over its goal to save the old theater. Huzzah! The theater was saved and the townspeople hailed him as a hero!
Nice guy, right? Maybe. Maybe not.
At the same time he was doing this, he was going around begging for money for a project that would directly benefit… him. He claimed that he couldn’t afford to finance the project himself, and that he needed the public’s help. While some people gladly contributed, others (including some of his peers) thought that it was completely inappropriate for him to beg for money from common folks when he is a rich and famous actor who could easily have put up the money himself (or raised it from industry insiders).
If someone rich and famous can’t or won’t fund their own project, is it appropriate for them to be funding someone else’s project at the same time? Is this actor a hero for saving the old theater… or just a greedy actor taking money from the public and then shuffling it around to make himself look good?
