As the Golden Globes Turn

From December to April, movie awards are two for a penny. To paraphrase “Field of Dreams,” if you sculpt a 10-inch statue out of marble, glass or gold-plated pot metal, glue on a plaque that says best something, and make sure it’s light enough for Dustin Hoffman to hold aloft, stars and movie executives will come.

Every organization that can afford to host a party--or at least 29 of them, including the Florida Film Critics, the Blockbuster chain of video stores, and the Screen Actors Guild--has pushed its way into the movie awards game. Heralding the coming deluge on a morning in mid-November, 1999’s Miss Golden Globe smiled into the lenses of 10 television cameras. She was honored, she said, to introduce her successor, “The New Millennium Miss Golden Globe.”

This should have been the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.’s shining moment. For the association, the Golden Globes are golden eggs, and the television cameras were trumpeting the first award show of the new millennium, to be broadcast by NBC today. But Helmut Voss, the association’s autocratic president, was not entirely happy. He had suddenly realized that the background CNN, “Entertainment Tonight” and KABC were videotaping was a mosaic of tiny NBC logos interspersed with the insignia of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where this press conference was taking place.

“‘Nowhere does the name Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. appear,” Voss said, shaking his mane of pepper-and-salt hair. Although his tone was jovial, his next words were not meant as a joke: “We have to protect our interests.”

After years of being ridiculed as a bunch of part-time journalists and full-time freeloaders who would sell their votes for a vodka tonic and cross the Alps for a hot dog, the association has become respectable. And rich. The television contract it signed with NBC in 1996 enabled it to pay $2.1 million in cash last August for an office building in West Hollywood.

Like a former starlet who has snared a studio chief, the association is fiercely protective of its new status. In the past, members have received gifts as well as dinners from stars and studios. A month ago, when USA Films and Sharon Stone--playing on her character of the jewelry-loving muse in “The Muse”--sent $295 Coach watches to the 84 foreign press association members, Voss ordered the watches returned. He allowed his flock to keep $35 cell phones sent by Fine Line for its movie “Simpatico,” but not the free month of service that came with the phones.

Symbolically, that morning in November, it was the association that was feeding the Los Angeles Times, Daily Variety and the Associated Press with heaping trays of sausages, bacon, fruit and scrambled eggs. Not to mention Moet and Chandon Champagne.

Miss Golden Globe 2000 will have her moment in the spotlight tonight, when she hands sealed envelopes to the stars who will tear them open. Like 27 previous Miss Golden Globes, she is not known--yet. It is possible, but not likely, that someday she will win a Golden Globe of her own, like two of her predecessors, Laura Dern and Melanie Griffith. In November, however, Liza Huber, daughter of soap opera queen Susan Lucci, was only the opening act. As was television producer Norman Lear, who had come to pick up a $50,000 donation from the association to USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

Anjelica Huston, there to announce the group’s Cecil B. DeMille Award for “outstanding contribution to the entertainment field,” was the main event. Huston stepped onto the stage, opened a gold envelope and said two words: “Barbra Streisand.”

“My first thought was how amazing that Anjelica Huston comes all the way in from Malibu to open up an envelope and say ‘Barbra Streisand,’ not even a few words of patter,” said Lear, winner of four Golden Globes for “All in the Family.” “But on reflection, 15 cameras got exactly the sound bite all those shows would want. I thought, ‘Doesn’t the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. have a good measure of the times! As the century closes, everybody is grasping for their 15 minutes of celebrity, but they’ll have to settle for five.’ ”

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Long derided as a comic opera of quarrelsome waiters and shoe store clerks who occasionally wrote for obscure publications in Lithuania or Bangladesh, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. has survived into a world tailor-made for it, a world where celebrity beats fame to the finish line every time and a history of cutting corners is not shameful if you put on a good party.

The party wasn’t very good in the early days. “The only people in the room were a few South American and British journalists and the winners,” says Angela Lansbury, best supporting actress in 1946 for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” “It was a very insignificant group, like a cottage industry, but I, as a young actress, was thrilled to be given anything.”

Billy Wilder, also a winner in 1946, as director of “The Lost Weekend,” is blunter. “When they gave you the award, they were working an other things, like selling typewriters.” When his two Globes were “burnt to a crisp” in a fire, he did not think it worthwhile to ask for replacements.

In the huge black-and-white photographs that line the walls of the funky 1940s building that the 84 members of the association call home, Shirley MacLaine cuddles her Golden Globe, Hoffman thrusts his into the air, and Streisand, frizzy-haired in an earlier incarnation, holds two. When Hoffman won his first Golden Globe, in 1968 as most promising newcomer, he noted how few of the winners had bothered to show up. “This is a wonderful award,” he said, “and I’m sure if I had been here tonight, I would really have been thrilled to accept it.”

Three decades later, everyone is thrilled to win a Golden Globe. Once described by Variety as “a bush-league Academy Award affair” and chased off television by the Federal Communications Commission in 1968 because the program “substantially misled the public” by secretly notifying the winners in advance, the Golden Globes dinner is a much better party than the Oscars.

At $500 a ticket, “there are 5,000 requests for 1,100 seats,” says Ken Shapiro, who has written the Globes show for 19 years. “Like seating a wedding or a bar mitzvah, you can’t make everybody happy. Somebody important has to be seated in the second and third tiers.”

In 1995, the chairman of 20th Century Fox’s Domestic Film Group, Tom Sherak, faced the wall at the last table on the top tier. “The only good thing,” says Sherak, “was that, as every star came off the stage, they had to pass my table. Arnold Schwarzenegger does a double take and asks, ‘Tom, how did you get such a bad table?’ Then he sits down next to me and says, ‘Now it’s a good table.’ ”

For decades, bizarre award categories changed every year. There was the Hollywood Citizenship Award to Esther Williams in 1956, the year Warren Cowan delivered Jennifer Jones in return for a Best Film Promoting International Understanding award to her movie “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.”

“‘You could get a special award if you promised them a star,” says Cowan, the dean of Hollywood press agents and the man behind Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Golden Globe as the world’s “most glamorous actress” in 1957. Jean Simmons was the “most versatile actress” that year, Elizabeth Taylor the “most consistent” a year earlier. And room could always be made for a studio head’s girlfriend as “most promising newcomer,” an award that went to Darryl Zanuck’s mistress, Bella Darvi, in 1953.

“One year Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft brought a case of wine,” says Johnny Friedkin, a former Fox publicist. “Compare that with the world’s longest funeral procession, all those limousines going down Beverly Boulevard to the Academy Awards, and if you weren’t smart enough to have a sandwich, you starved before the show was over.”

Fueled by alcohol--columnist Jim Bacon remembers empty wine bottles littering the tables in 1971--stars delighted in misbehaving. In 1973, when Paul Lynde lost best actor in a television comedy series (for “The Paul Lynde Show”) to Redd Foxx of “Sanford and Son,” he stood up and screamed, “I was robbed.” Says Bacon, “‘Paul, who was a heavy drinker, did what every actor who loses wants to do. Security had to drag him out.”

“People are a tad more careful today because the exposure on television is so great,” says Larry Mark, executive producer of “As Good as It Gets,” which won best musical/comedy in 1999. Still, some actors are undaunted by making fools of themselves in front of 49 million viewers. Jack Nicholson, the star of “As Good as It Gets,” didn’t refrain from mooning the audience when he picked up his best actor Globe.

“One still always questions who and what are the Hollywood foreign press,” Mark says. “But it doesn’t matter. They are the first to separate some actors and actresses and movies from the pack.”

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Academy Award nominations are not announced until Feb. 15. The Globes are presented as Oscar nomination ballots are being sent out. For a few heady weeks in January, this small group of outsiders controls the only game in town.

Warren Cowan has been manipulating stars’ images for more than 50 years. “The single reason for the success of the Golden Globes is the date,” says Cowan. “If the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. held the Golden Globes in June, no one would come.”

It is as a harbinger of the Academy Awards that the Globes have acquired their clout. In Hollywood, art is an acceptable byproduct, but money is the goal. So long as it pleases the studios to make use of Golden Globe nominations and awards in their $1-million campaigns to win Oscars, the Globes will be important.

Surprisingly, the Globes are almost meaningless in selling movies internationally. “Some of the movies that win don’t get released abroad for five or six months afterward. And by that time the Academy Awards have come out,” says Fox’s Sherak.

But they can be extremely helpful here. “ ‘Mr. Holland’s Opus’ was a movie it was murder to get people to go to, a movie about a music teacher that wasn’t necessarily on anybody’s radar,” says Robert Cort, the film’s producer. “Disney was pushing ‘Nixon’ and felt ‘Mr. Holland’s Opus’ was going to get lost in the academy push, so why bother?” The 1996 Golden Globe nomination to Richard Dreyfuss for best actor became “an enormous advertising tool” and convinced Disney to pay attention to the movie.

Four years earlier, Disney had succeeded in winning the first best picture Oscar nomination given to

an animated film. Was the best musical/comedy Golden Globe to “‘Beauty and the Beast” a signpost for academy members? “It has come to be more and more valuable in the groundswell that builds toward academy nominations,” says DreamWorks’ Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney chairman who led a return to the studio’s glory days of animation.

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In the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. headquarters, Helmut Voss sits beneath a ceiling hand-painted with vines and red flowers. Voss’ credentials are impeccable. He has been bureau chief for Germany’s Springer News Service here and in London and has handpicked legitimate younger journalists to fill vacancies usually caused by death. Since there are more than 250 foreign journalists recognized for purposes of “all-media” screenings by the movie studios, the small size of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and its clannish nature have always been a red flag to other journalists. When Leonard Klady applied 10 years ago, he was writing for the London-based Screen International. “Anyone from the same country you were applying from seemed to have veto power,” says Klady, who was not accepted.

Avik Gilboa, an Israeli, has been a member since 1947. “There wasn’t even an Israel yet--it was Palestine.” From 1952 to 1957, Gilboa drove a cab to pay the bills.

“Editors would say, ‘You want to get paid? Isn’t it enough your name is printed in the paper?’ ”

The question of legitimacy never quite goes away. Judy Solomon, a former president of the foreign press association, writes for Maariv, one of Israel’s major newspapers. “In past years, and even now, in some countries, the pay is not comparable to what is paid in the United States,” she says, in defense of members who are not full-time journalists.

As handsome as an aging character actor, the 60-year-old Voss strokes his Sean Connery-like beard. “Being televised on NBC was a quantum leap into a different world,” Voss says. (In 1995, when the Golden Globes were televised by cable’s TBS, 7 million people watched. In 1999, on NBC, the audience was 49 million.)

“We’re treated way beyond what I think our importance is, but we’re quite happy to go along for the ride,” he says.

Voss, who recently sent a fax to association members telling them not to talk to the press without permission, seems disingenuous. “High-handed” has replaced “illegitimate” as much of Hollywood’s favorite adjective to characterize the group. The association demands its own screenings of movies and press conferences held solely for association members.

When Sandra Bullock couldn’t make a question-and-answer session, Fox was told to forget about getting good tables at the next Golden Globes dinner. When Brad Pitt refused to come to a press conference for “Fight Club,” the association canceled the event, despite the willingness of director David Fincher and co-star Edward Norton to come. When Huston was filming “The Grifters” and couldn’t get time off for a press conference for “Enemies, a Love Story,” Paul Mazursky, the director of “Enemies,” managed a lunch on the set of “The Grifters.” He was told that if Huston wouldn’t come to their event the association wasn’t interested.

“We didn’t get a single Golden Globe nomination,” says Mazursky, “but we got three academy nominations, including one for Anjelica.” Responds Voss: “This happened a long time ago and I have no direct knowledge of it.”

To ensure a press conference for “The Hurricane,” the movie’s star, Denzel Washington, left the Atlanta location of “Remember the Titans,” on a 3 p.m. plane, rushed from the airport to the theater, wolfed down a plate of hors d’oeuvres, had his picture taken with each association member (proof to doubting editors that the writer has actually been in the presence of the star), answered questions for an hour and flew back to Atlanta for a 6 a.m. call.

It is a delicious irony that this band of outsiders can, even in a small way and for a few weeks a year, intimidate the studios. And these journalists--many of them American citizens now--have major Hollywood institutions standing in line for handouts. In the past five years, the association has given away $1,639,462 to, among others, the American Film Institute and the cinema schools at USC and UCLA. In July, Steven Spielberg personally picked up the association’s $200,000 donation to the Film Foundation for movie preservation. In the best tables-are-turned story, one of this year’s supplicants is the film school at the North Carolina School of the Arts, headed by Dale Pollock, who wrote an article--not the only such piece the paper has published through the years--questioning the association’s integrity for The Times in 1981.

Perhaps because they desperately longed for the glamour they saw on the screen, these outsiders have, over the years, created the year’s most glamorous event, a throwback to the way Hollywood used to be.

Everything at the Academy Awards is decorous--when a mogul heads for the bathroom during the show, a tuxedoed extra takes his place so that the television cameras will never spy a vacant seat. In 1998, the Golden Globes simply waited for Christine Lahti to come out of the bathroom. “I was just flushing the toilet when someone said, ‘You’ve won,’ ” Lahti told television viewers as she wiped her hands on a napkin provided by Robin Williams.

“We have never been tempted to tone it down,” says Dick Clark, who has produced the Golden Globes since 1993. The party’s deceptively simple recipe mixes and mingles movie and television stars (there are also Golden Globes for television) and invites them to table-hop. Very little is scripted beyond the presentation of the DeMille Award.

“We don’t script any chitchat for the presenters,” says Barry Adelman, the show’s co-producer. “Let them say what they want.”

Of the 47 previous DeMille Award winners, only one, Laurence Olivier, asked to come to the rehearsal--”He asked two questions,” says Ken Shapiro. “ ‘Where’s the microphone and where’s the bathroom?’ ”

Since careers are not made or broken by the possession or dearth of a Golden Globe, even the losers can--and do--have a good time, something not likely to happen at the Oscars. And if the stars make a fashionably late entrance down the 427 feet of red carpet to the Beverly Hilton grand ballroom--as Warren Beatty did last year--they don’t eat. (Beatty complained because the dinner had been cleared away when he arrived a few minutes before the show went on the air. He had to wait until the caviar-laden after-Globes parties in the hotel, at which each studio spent from $100,000 to $300,000.) Since the dinner is extremely good--lobster medallion, seasonal greens salad and mixed grill trio including sea bass tonight--most stars are in their seats by 4 p.m.

Once the show starts at 5 p.m., it’s Champagne or nothing. “You’re there several hours, and you’re absolutely at death’s door with thirst because no bottles are allowed except Moet and Chandon,” says George Christy, who attends a hundred parties a year for the Hollywood Reporter. “One year, Faye Dunaway’s throat was so dry, she said she was going mad for a glass of water. Now I bring in a bottle of Evian.”

The awards themselves, though sometimes odd, are legitimate. An expensive accounting firm, Ernst & Young--the association’s answer to the academy’s Price Waterhouse--ensures propriety. No longer can a sudden recount anoint Paul Newman as “world film favorite,” as it did in 1964 when the original winner, Frank Sinatra, wouldn’t show up. The sins of the past are forbidden. The Golden Globe rules say that the DeMille Award “shall never be given to any individual on the basis of whether such individual will be present at any given awards show.”

The sins of the past are hardly forgotten, however. “It took them 10 years to live down that award to Pia Zadora,” says Gregg Kilday, a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1982 when “this little butterball” beat out Howard Rollins of “‘Ragtime” and Kathleen Turner of “Body Heat” as new star of the year, even though her movie, “Butterfly,” had not yet been released.

“By the evening’s end, giddy celebrities were turning to each other shouting, ‘Pia Zadora,’ and breaking up in giggles,” Kilday wrote at the time. It didn’t help that Zadora came a year after the group’s best screenplay award to William Peter Blatty for “Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane”; its competition included the screenplays for “Elephant Man,” “Raging Bull” and “Ordinary People.”

Blatty had invited the group to his house for dinner, and Zadora’s millionaire husband, Meshulam Riklis, was said to have flown them to Las Vegas to watch Zadora perform. In fact, Riklis only provided one night’s free lodging at his Riviera Hotel. The members were flown to Las Vegas by the Frontier Hotel to see Siegfried and Roy. (Today, on a studio junket to New York or Florida, the association pays for its own airline tickets. The studios pick up the hotel bill.)

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Although Hollywood has often felt that the foreign press members would trade their votes for a sandwich, what the group has always craved is respect. If Sharon Stone won her 1996 Globe as best actress because she sent a thank-you note to each association member after a press conference for “Casino,” she did not pay for the statue with anything but courtesy.

“The impression that some particular studio is exerting a lot of influence is totally fair,” says Art Murphy, retired industry reporter for Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. “But it’s the amount of wooing, the ardor of the pursuit, not the dollar value of dinners or receptions that counts. Miramax is an ardent wooer.”

For the past seven years, Harvey Weinstein, the head of Miramax, has smothered the association with attention, to the benefit of “The Crying Game,” “Enchanted April,” “Little Voice” and “Shakespeare in Love.”

Nadia Bronson, president of international marketing for Universal--whose “Scent of a Woman” nabbed a surprising best picture Globe in 1993--is another partisan of the association. “When it comes to movies, they are the most passionate people I have ever worked with. All they’ve ever wanted is respect.”

Perhaps they have it now.