Unmasking the mysterious group behind the Golden Globes
By Glenn Whipp Posted Jun 30 2009
Kate Winslet poses with awards for best actress drama for “Revolutionary Road” and supporting actress for “The Reader” backstage at the 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)
They’re courted with kid gloves by Hollywood studios, mocked by many U.S. film critics and trying to leave behind a past that has included scandal and a fair share of stories that could be viewed either as colorful or embarrassing, depending on the point of view.
To the public, the 84 active members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association represent one thing—they’re the driving force behind the Golden Globes award show, a televised event held every January and regarded by viewers and participants as a freewheeling and fun alternative to the more stodgy Academy Awards.
To be sure, the Globes telecast, which, unlike the Oscars, honors both movies and television, is the HFPA’s annual shining moment. But its membership, comprised of international journalists hailing from publications both well-known and obscure, works throughout the year, holding press conferences with Hollywood’s A-list actors and filmmakers. Everyone, it seems, wants to get on the group’s good side.
“If you have a movie releasing in February, you cater to the HFPA and give them a press conference,” says one top Hollywood publicist, who asked not to be identified. “It’s not like it’s going to help your movie with worldwide coverage. But you’ve got to build a relationship with them so that at the end of the year, they’ll help you.”
That mild disdain is countered by awards consultant Barry Dale Johnson, the man behind recent awards campaigns for high-profile movies like Slumdog Millionaire. “There’s this media scrutiny of the HFPA that’s unfounded,” Johnson says. “In actuality, they’re all journalists. They’re a great group.”
The HFPA’s roots go back to 1928, when a band of Los Angeles-based entertainment journalists formed the Hollywood Association of Foreign Correspondents. The motivation, says current HFPA vice president Mike Goodridge, was gaining strength—and access to Hollywood talent—through numbers. It’s the same working philosophy that drives the group today.
“We wouldn’t have the access individually that we do collectively,” says Goodridge, the U.S. editor of Screen International and a regular columnist for the U.K.’s Evening Standard and El Cultural, the arts section of Spain’s El Mundo. “The group is of an immense help to each member professionally.”
The Hollywood Association of Foreign Correspondents was short-lived, as was the Foreign Press Society, which formed in 1935. The HFPA itself began in 1943, again as a reaction against what its founders believed to be the movie studios’ marginalization of international journalists. The group held its first awards gala two years later at the Beverly Hills Hotel, giving best picture to Going My Way and top acting honors to Ingrid Bergman and Alexander Knox.
On its Web site, the HFPA promotes a mission statement that includes fostering global understanding and cultural ties, contributing financially to non-profit organizations and promoting interest in the arts. But without the Golden Globes, the organization would have little cache in Hollywood and would see its access to A-list talent cut almost entirely.
The importance of the Globes —- and the HFPA -— is a relatively recent development. The awards were largely ignored by mainstream American media or, worse, derided, particularly after the group gave its newcomer of the year award to the unknown Pia Zadora in 1981 for Butterfly, a movie that had not yet been released and went on to bomb at the box office.
After Zadora won, it was discovered that Meshulam Riklis, the movie’s multimillionaire producer (and, not coincidentally, Zadora’s husband), had flown HFPA members to his Las Vegas casino, the Riviera Hotel, for a lavish, all-expenses paid weekend. Zadora’s trophy had the appearance of being bought.
“At that time, it was a fairly unslick organization,” Goodridge says. “It needed to be cleaned up—and it has been. Everything is very transparent, and the membership requirements are quite strict.”
Those requirements include applicants possessing a permanent, primary residence in Southern California and a paying job with an international publication of recognized standing. Applicants must be sponsored by two active HFPA members. To remain an active member, journalists must show at least four published clippings of their work yearly.
This attempt at some kind of transparency coincided with the Globes surviving the Zadora scandal and flourishing as Hollywood placed an ever-increasing importance on the marketing value of awards. Some observers mistakenly see the Globes as a predictor of the Academy Awards. “That’s not their value, awards consultant,” Johnson says.
“As you look at awards season overall from a marketing standpoint, getting a win at the Globes can help a movie at the box office and continue the legginess of an awards campaign,” Johnson says. “It’s a show that’s nationally televised, gets good ratings and has a fantastic star turnout. With a win or two, it can give a film a new lease.”
This year, Johnson points to the Kate Winslet World War II drama, The Reader, as an example of a film that received such a boost from the HFPA. The movie garnered middling reviews and was treading water at the box office before it won the national exposure that came with a teary-eyed Winslet at the winner’s podium.
“To have the marketing value of saying you’re a winner lets you stay in theaters longer,” Johnson says. “That’s why the Globes—and the other awards that lead up to the Oscar nominations—are so important.”
Goodridge says members know their place in the scheme of the awards season.
“There’s no pretension that we’re the Oscars,” Goodridge says. “The Globes are a marketing tool, there to kick-start films.”
That said, he and other members have a difficult time understanding, much less accepting, the derision directed their way by many U.S. journalists covering Hollywood.
These voices were heard in the 2004 documentary, The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret, which was broadcast in North America on the little-seen cable channel, Trio. In the film, L.A. Weekly film critic John Powers called the HFPA members “essentially just bottom-feeders around the industry, who’ve somehow been inflated to this point where their judgment is supposed to be very, very important.”
He isn’t the first to publicly call out the HFPA. Following the Globes ceremony in 1993, director Rob Reiner, nominated that year for his movie A Few Good Men, said he wouldn’t attend future shows, adding that he didn’t want to be associated with the HFPA.
“The one thing that’s most annoying and illegitimate about them is the way they conduct their interviews,” Reiner told The New York Times. “Each of these people asks to have their picture taken with you. There’s something unkosher about that. That kind of cheesiness permeates that organization.”
“It’s one thing to have an organization writing articles all over the world,” Reiner continued. “But that doesn’t seem to be the main thrust. The main thrust seems to be an elaborate scheme to have their pictures taken with you. They interview you, and then they come at you one at a time, one after another, to pose for a picture. Sure I want to promote my movie, but I don’t want to waste my time with people who are just pushing for a photo op.”
That practice -— members posing for pictures with actors and filmmakers -— remains something of a requirement at any HFPA press event. Publicists (who, for obvious reasons, asked not to be identified) call the practice “unprofessional” and “absurd.”
The HFPA’s Goodridge doesn’t necessarily condone it himself but says the photos serve as the journalists’ proof to their outlets that they have, in fact, conducted their interviews in person.
“Technically, you are supposed to take the photo with your publication in hand,” Goodridge adds.
But the HPFA’s sometimes-fawning methods don’t differ greatly from those of the North American movie-junket press, most of whom are members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, a group that has modeled its own prime-time awards show on the Globes’ format. BFCA members are often flown to New York and Los Angeles at studio expense, put up in luxury hotels and given substantial per-diem expense accounts. They return the favor by writing the nicest of things about even the worst movies.
Oh, and they ask for autographs during interviews, too.
So why single out the HFPA for attacks?
“I put it down to a xenophobic jealousy streak,” Goodridge says. “People say our outlets are obscure. We’re not obscure in our own countries. But critics don’t take the time to look into that.”
But even the harshest critics sometimes find something nice to say.
“Even though the Golden Globe people are, by and large, idiots,” Powers says in Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret documentary, “they often make better choices than the Oscars.”