After getting a double transplant in 2015, Santa Clara University grad Steve Whitney started a foundation to raise awareness about organ donations, and now he’s back on the transplant list.
Steve Whitney, who was raised in San Jose and graduated from Saratoga High School and Santa Clara University, has built a career as a producer helping to turn compelling stories into movies. His credits include “Girl, Interrupted” with Angelina Jolie, the remake of “The Amityville Horror” with Ryan Reynolds or “A Wing and a Prayer,” a 2015 documentary about pilot Al Schwimmer and a covert effort to smuggle fighter planes and other weapons to Israel in 1948.
Now his own story has turned into a real-life medical drama, with Whitney fighting for his life — for a second time. In 2015, Whitney was visiting the Bay Area when family members told him he didn’t look well. He eventually wound up at Stanford University Medical Center, where he was told that his kidney and liver were failing and he needed a transplant. This was a shock to Whitney, who had run two marathons, never smoked and considered himself in good health for a man then in his mid-40s. He was in and out of the hospital for the next six months and was told he had 30 days to get a transplant or he would be recommended for hospice care. “I had no knowledge of transplants. That was something you saw on ’60 Minutes’ and not something I ever thought I’d be in need of,” Whitney said in an interview last week. “I got the transplant with three days to spare.”to raise awareness about organ donation by supporting nonprofits that provide organ donor registration services or conduct medical research to advance transplant procedures. In 2017, the foundation threw a big music festival on the banks of the Mississippi River in Iowa — the state where Whitney was born — to raise money and register donors. “It was a great event” featuring Sublime and Robbie Krieger of the Doors, Whitney recalled. Then in early 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was hitting the United States, Whitney developed a cough. Then, he was at the gym working out one day and couldn’t catch his breath. He went back to Stanford, where doctors were mystified by what was causing Whitney’s lungs to fail. “Eventually, it kept getting worse and worse until they said I needed a transplant,” said Whitney, now 51. “I couldn’t believe I was going through this again.” It looked bleak, Whitney said, after Stanford doctors told him they were taking him off the transplant list because they didn’t believe he would survive the operation. He applied to 18 different hospitals, and one — Northwestern — said it would take on his case. But while he was in the process of getting approved to go to Chicago, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles also accepted him into its transplant program, and that’s where he is now and back on the transplant list waiting for a donor. It’s not lost on Whitney that he might be the beneficiary of his own efforts to increase organ donor registration, a case of the good karma he put in the world coming back to him. And he’s optimistic about his chances, attributing it to his faith and his strong family. Earlier this year, he made a deal with jailed music producer Suge Knight to produce a movie about the life of the Death Row Records co-founder, with filmmaker Nick Cassavetes. “You’ve got to be optimistic that even if something does go wrong you’ll have the strength to see it through,” he said. “I’m always just thinking about tomorrow and setting goals. I’m supposed to be doing this movie in September.” Composer and conductor Henry Mollicone, shown in 2013, died at age 76 on May 12, 2022 after a battle with cancer. (Dai Sugano/Mercury NewsComposer and conductor Henry Mollicone, the one-time music director of San Jose’s Civic Light Opera and founder of the Winchester Orchestra, lost his battle with cancer on May 12 at age 76. His wife, Kathy Mollicone, said one of his best-known works, the “Beatitude Mass,” played softly in the room as he passed. Mollicone had an international reputation thanks to his opera, “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” and he was known locally for his compassion to help the homeless. “Beatitude Mass” was written especially to raise money for that purpose, with concerts raising hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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