Is It Too Big a World After All?

A former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., who exited the organization under a cloud two years ago, has come back with a vengeance--setting up her own organization of entertainment journalists to offer an alternative to its 54-year-old rival.

The 8-month-old International Press Academy, founded by Mirjana van Blaricom, will hand out its own awards--the Golden Satellites--recognizing achievement in film, television and interactive media. Winners will be announced Jan. 15, four days before the foreign press association’s glitzy, network-televised Golden Globe Awards, which have gained increasing clout in recent years.

The new group, Van Blaricom said, should provide its worldwide roster of 150 American and foreign journalists with increased interview opportunities and access to stars. To join, a journalist must cover entertainment full time, be accredited by the Motion Picture Assn. of America and, beginning next year, pay $75 in annual dues. The goal, she added, is to create a more open, broader-based, “less easily manipulated” operation than the HFPA, which has 85 Los Angeles-based members who write for foreign publications. The HFPA says it admits up to five new members a year, each of whom must be sponsored and voted on.

“In a global economy, domestic and foreign entertainment journalists shouldn’t be separated,” said the Yugoslavian-born Van Blaricom. “The Directors Guild wouldn’t refuse to admit Bertolucci because he’s Italian or Coppola because he’s American. Our membership will be 100% professional, in contrast to the HFPA, in which many of the members are car dealers, accountants--only part-time journalists whom Hollywood caters to because they give out awards. The industry is kept hostage by those little Golden Globes.”

Though the HFPA acknowledges that some members have outside jobs, its president, Phil Berk, said that all 85 active members have written at least six stories in the past year, the standard for MPAA accreditation. An additional 12 “affiliates” do not vote or attend screenings but are invited to the Globe festivities, he added.

“We’ll make no attempt to prevent this group from presenting awards of its own,” he said. “I personally don’t believe it poses any threat to the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. or the Golden Globes. We’ve had bumps along the way but our problems have been resolved.”

In recent weeks, the upstart organization has approached the studios asking for screening invitations and videocassettes. But given the importance of a Golden Globe in the Oscar race, as well as the IPA’s rookie status, Hollywood is adopting a wait-and-see approach.

“No one wants to antagonize the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., whose win list corresponds to the Oscars more than any other group,” said a veteran studio publicity consultant who polled the majors about the new group. “Though they’re not sending Van Blaricom’s group any movie videocassettes, some are inviting them to screenings to avoid potential embarrassment. Suppose a ‘Shine,’ a ‘Crucible’ or an ‘English Patient’ got bypassed in the nominations? Even if no one pays attention, at least they’ll have a shot.”

When she was president of the HFPA in 1992-93, Van Blaricom said, she was “shocked” to find that only 15 of the members could produce a resume. The single fax machine had a crooked drum and archives were kept in shopping bags. The group has come some distance since the 1968 Federal Communications Commission called its voting procedures “irregular,” she acknowledged--but membership is still limited to a “privileged few” invited to press junkets at the discretion of foreign distributors whose interests they serve.

“If you write an article they don’t like, you don’t get invited the next time around--so where’s the freedom of the press?” asked Van Blaricom, who spent 20 years covering film for newspapers in Croatia and Slovenia. “And writing a handful of articles . . . what kind of standard is that? The bylaws, set down in 1945, are hopelessly out of date.”

It was one of those bylaws that led to Van Blaricom’s suspension from the HFPA. Claiming that she had been paid to organize charity events for two potential foreign film Globe nominees--”Rampo” and “Vukovar”--the group said she should have disqualified herself from the voting. Producing letters from the filmmakers, the former president denied she had received payment for the work and chalked up the incident to “pure harassment and jealousy.”

Berk declined to discuss Van Blaricom’s suspension, but denied her claim that HFPA members are succumbing to pressure. “To my knowledge, there has been no instance of a studio or publicist complaining that they didn’t like a particular story--and I go back 21 years,” said Berk, a correspondent for the Argus group, South Africa’s largest newspaper chain. “And we discourage any attempt by anyone with an agenda to influence our vote.”

Though some in the industry still roll their eyes at the mention of the HFPA, the veteran publicity consultant defended the group. “The members go to screenings, they read material. . . . At press conferences, they no longer ask whether an actor sleeps with pajama bottoms,” he said.

To bolster its own credibility, the IPA distributes members’ resumes, which document work for news outlets ranging from the Hollywood Reporter to CNN. Two journalists listed as members, however, said they have reservations about the operation and don’t plan to vote.

“Sending a bio was merely a courteous response to a courteous invitation rather than any conscious decision to align myself with a particular organization,” said Michael Medved, film critic for the New York Post. “I never had a problem with the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.--I don’t need any more enemies in this town.”

After attending a meeting at the IPA’s Beverly Hills office, a freelance journalist had a change of heart. “I never realized that the group had a specific agenda, presenting itself as an alternative to the HFPA,” he said. “A number of us were turned off by the prospect of giving out awards. Hollywood does enough patting itself on the back.”

One person who is standing firm--and then some--is Nebojsa Calic, a San Francisco-based art gallery owner who has contributed “close to six figures” to his friend Van Blaricom’s venture.

“There’s not enough foreign representation in Hollywood and this organization can bring it about,” he said from Paris. “These journalists feel strongly that competition is good. [The IPA] can get the Golden Globes to clean up its act . . . or else to go down.”

Calic commissioned the 14-inch bronze statuette of a woman holding a satellite dish. (“A marriage of classic and modern,” Van Blaricom said.) Nominations will be announced Dec. 17 and awarded at a press conference the following month.

“We’re the new guys on the block and no one expects to be embraced immediately,” Van Blaricom said. “But if the business is serious, they’ll recognize us in the end. Entertainment is the great American export and Hollywood deserves better. I respect the People’s Choice Awards more than the Globes--at least they don’t pretend to be something they’re not.”