Today’s offering is, I’m sorry to say, a major bummer. And yet, like a good train wreck, it’s perversely enjoyable to watch. Bluntly titled “Golden Age Actors and Singers Who Died In Poverty”, this mini-doc covers the sad endings of a number of stars of the…er…Golden Age.  The familiar cases are all here and can be skipped over if you’ve heard their tales too often–Judy Garland, Fatty Arbuckle, Dorothy Dandridge yada yada. But there are some nifties that I didn’t know much about, especially an actress named Barbara Payton whose debauched life and pathetic death is well worth reading about in detail. I didn’t realize Bud Abbott had such an unfortunate end and the photo of Terry Thomas sick and dying from Parkinsons in a nursing home will leave you seriously depressed for a good long time (ten minutes in my case, which is how long it took me to eat lunch). It’s pretty much always a combination of booze and lost money that begins the spiral and it’s striking how young so many of these people are when they go. There’s a photo of Veronica Lake, who died at 50 while working as a waitress in a coffee shop, in which she looks considerably older–the doc cruelly juxtaposes the photo with Lake in her prime Paramount starlet years in the 1940s. The John Garfield section is also terribly sad and I won’t even go into Marie Prevost. I hope this doesn’t sound callous but…enjoy!