No Golden Globes Show, Just a News Conference (original) (raw)

Jan. 8, 2008

LOS ANGELES Are the Golden Globes, the annual movie and television awards given out by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, really news?

They are now. In an attempt to engineer a work-around on a writer’s strike that is playing havoc with the awards season, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced Monday that the festive awards dinner will be replaced by a news conference at 9 p.m. Eastern time next Sunday night to announce the actual winners of the 65th annual Golden Globes awards.

“We are all very disappointed that our traditional awards ceremony will not take place this year and that millions of viewers worldwide will be deprived of seeing many of their favorite stars,” Jorge Camara, president of the association, said in a statement.

There may be parties and some celebration for the winners later, but the red-carpeted, black-tied event itself will not go on, brought down by the threat of pickets from the Writers Guild of America and the vow from the members from the Screen Actors Guild not to cross those lines.

With Monday’s announcement, a measure of stardust of Hollywood’s awards season came falling to earth, pulled down by a continuing labor war. Reaching any kind of accommodation with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association would have meant that the writers would have been reaching some sort of agreement, however temporary, with NBC. Because the association handed over production of the awards broadcast to Dick Clark Entertainment some years back, however, it had very little room to maneuver. In both Los Angeles and New York, publicists, studio executives and journalists spent all of Monday, handing rumors back and forth. The anxiousness had to do with the lateness of the hour. (A countdown clock ticking away on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Web site did not help steady the nerves. At last check, it registered six days, one hour, six minutes and 51 seconds to show-time.)

With less that a week to prepare, the nominees had very little time to plan their respective tactics: Would they be dressing up and hitting the carpet, or watching a boilerplate news conference on television, with none of the glitter and ceremony that generally accompanies the Golden Globes? Stars may still be dressing up and going to parties, but the nationally broadcast main event has gone dark.

Attention will obviously now turn to the Academy Awards ceremony, scheduled to be broadcast by ABC on Feb. 24, an event that is far more precious to the industry. Whether the Oscars, which some see at the crowning achievement in entertainment, can proceed without a union confrontation has become an open question, assuming the writers strike now in its tenth week has not ended by then.

Other than a clutch of media types, there will be no live audience for the Golden Globes. The format is designed to side-step the need for written presentations, presumably removing the event from the jurisdiction of the striking Writers Guild of America West and eliminating the prospect of pickets.

The fate of the Golden Globes ceremony was sealed when writers refused to grant an agreement that would have let the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Dick Clark Productions proceed with the show, which stars, with near unanimity, had promised to boycott rather than confront marching strikers.

In a letter to members on Sunday night, Patric M. Verrone, the president of the West Coast writers guild, said an assurance by the Screen Actors Guild that its members would avoid the Golden Globes show had “brought real pressure to bear on the conglomerates.”

NBC, which had planned to broadcast the Golden Globes ceremony, is majority-owned by General Electric and is one of a handful of big corporations that have broken off negotiations toward a new contract with writers. The writers guilds have been trying to force those companies back to the bargaining table, while the companies have said they will not return until the writers drop a number of proposals they view as unreasonable.

Still unclear was whether the glittering parties that normally accompany the Globes many of them within the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., where the ceremony is usually held would go forward.

In any case, the decision to junk one of the most festive parts of Hollywood’s yearly awards ritual came as a shock to many of the players who usually join the fun.

“It’s really lousy,” said Scott Rudin, a producer who has credits on “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men,” both of which have been nominated for the Globes’ best drama award. He added: “A lot of us who make the kind of movies this group tends to reward have a lot of affection for them.”

In an unusual lobbying effort, a dozen Hollywood publicity agencies including 42 West, ID, PMK/HBH and Rogers & Cowan joined in sending a letter to Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal, saying that their clients would not cross picket lines to attend the Golden Globes. Behind the scenes, Hollywood power players like Mr. Rudin and Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, urged NBC executives to let go of this year’s broadcast, freeing the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to proceed with a live ceremony that stars might have attended without fear of picket.

In the end, NBC held fast to its right to proceed with a broadcast, cornering the press association into a difficult choice between staging a show with empty seats perhaps damaging their credibility with the viewing audience for years or simply dropping the event.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a nonprofit organization of about 85 international entertainment journalists, last year received net income of approximately $6 million from the ceremony’s network license fee, table sales and other receipts, according to statements filed with federal tax authorities. Much of that income, which has helped finance donations to film education programs and others in the past, may evaporate with the stripped-down broadcast.

Michael Cieply reported from Los Angeles, and David Carr from New York.

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