I think Heinlein got that wrong too, but he had no way of knowing. One of the problems of zero-G or low-G living is that it tends to cause the bones to lose calcium, leading to osteoperosis. That’s not exactly a feature in a retirement community.
And there is no evidence whatsoever that living in a lower gravity environment will lengthen lifespans.
And I don’t agree that movies filmed in space would be just a short-lived novelty. That’s like saying movies filmed under the ocean are a short-lived novelty. They aren’t. We’ve been making movies on and in the ocean since the advent of film.
There is just never a substitute for the real thing. After all, Hollywood could recreate the surface of Mars in exacting detail, but the last two Mars movies tanked, while over 100 million people flocked to the Mars Pathfinder site to see some still pictures of the real place.
And it’s incredibly hard to simulate real spaceflight and zero-G environments, which is why Ron Howard had to use the ‘Vomit Comit’ to film sequences for “Apollo 13”. But then he was limited to a filming area the size of an Apollo capsule.
A James Cameron or Ron Howard film that used a real space environment would be breathtaking. Imagine the visuals of ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’, done in real space. If you’ve ever seen the IMAX film “Hail, Columbia”, you’ll see that Hollywood can’t come close to simulating the grandeur of the real thing.