Caught in a maddening crowd
At 9 a.m. on a recent Tuesday, Eric Buterbaugh Designs was eerily quiet. The day before, Buterbaugh’s staff had been in full-throttle gifting mode as orders for his signature fabric-wrapped containers bursting with carefully cut flowers were flying out the door for Golden Globe winners, their support teams, stylists, hair people, and especially anyone having anything to do with Charlize Theron, suddenly the hottest name around town. Now, silence.
It is merely the collective deep breath before the real frenzy begins, because this is the day the Academy Awards nominations are announced, and by 10 a.m., Buterbaugh’s central command in the basement of the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills is cutting, arranging, handcrafting pandemonium.
This is the first year the Golden Globes have bumped up against the Oscar nominations. But any thought of capitalizing on the overlap was quickly nixed. When Buterbaugh suggested to the Christian Dior people in Paris that maybe they’d want to wait a day to see if their Globes dress-wearer Theron scored an Academy Award nod -- “You know, kill two birds with one stone,” said Buterbaugh -- the answer was an emphatic “Non! Non! Non! Today!” Buterbaugh snickered at his futile attempt to soften his workload even a smidgen. “On the one hand I’m crying and on the other, I’m laughing,” he said.
The Golden Globes, the Grammys, the SAG awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Oscars. In the span of two months, how many awards shows can you watch? How many could you attend? How many could you work? The months from December through February have always been unsafe for dawdlers, especially if you are a potential statuette winner, a party thrower, a stylist or an awards voter. But this year the industry is even more frenetic, because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is holding its storied ceremony a good month earlier than usual, on Feb. 29.
The academy’s decision was ostensibly an attempt to prevent the ever-increasing fervor for movie honors from diluting the Oscars’ impact.
“It was to build general public interest in our show on the theory that by late March, films released in December are 3 months old,” says the academy’s executive administrator, Ric Robertson. “But there’s excitement, and then there’s just feeling like you’re on a bender. The rescheduling has forced all the other prize galas to squeeze into the first two months of 2004 like the passengers in the famous stateroom scene in “A Night at the Opera.” Thumbing through the trades or turning on the television can leave people with the dizzying sensation that, like certain crimes, a nomination or an award is being committed somewhere every 12 minutes.
Stretched to the limit
For those who hold viewing parties, February has now become a budget-busting month. This year Los Angeles resident Dennis Smeal, who frequently has dozens of friends over to eat, drink and make fun of awards-season festivities, held only a bare-bones Golden Globe watch-a-thon because, he says, “if you have to cut back, it’s there, not on the Oscar party.”
The echo from the last agent shout-out at the Screen Actors Guild awards Feb. 22 will have barely subsided when Joan Rivers steps onto the red carpet at the Kodak Theatre a week later for her Oscar-arrivals cringefest. “You have no room for air,” says awards consultant Michele Robertson, whose controlled breathing is in the service of “Lost in Translation” and “21 Grams,” which she will promote from the Golden Globes to guild awards through to the Independent Spirit Awards and, lastly, the Oscars. “Everything is so close together. There’s a certain point where you’re working every night.”
Much of Robertson’s time has been spent trying to parse the intricate web of nomination and award announcements to reveal the influence they have on subsequent awards shows. She calls it “the dance of timing.” It’s not scientific, but it keeps her up at nights plotting to ensure her clients are on the red carpets, sitting on talk-show couches, attending the right parties, and participating in special screening Q&As.; With the time between Oscar nominations to Oscar night a few weeks shorter, the chat-show slots can get snapped up fast and celebrity burnout can be a problem. “Nobody wants to be overexposed,” says Robertson. “But there’s a certain commitment involved in promoting a film, and sometimes it’s a race of stamina.”
Last year, Robertson worked on “The Pianist,” when Adrien Brody’s Oscar nomination proved an incredible springboard for a fevered best actor campaign. “There was a window there, so we could do all this stuff and keep up the momentum,” she says. “This year, you have the same amount of nominees but you have a smaller window.”
Lessening the more extreme PR tactics is assumed to be one of the shadow reasons for the academy’s decision, as many in the Industry feel things have gotten way out of hand. “Some of the more egregious kinds of acts -- mailings and so on -- have gone away,” says the academy’s Robertson. “But I would still describe [the campaigns] from my vantage point as pretty intense.” But it’s not as if the organization isn’t feeling the pinch, either. In years past, the luncheon the academy holds to honor the nominees took place several weeks after the nominations were announced, which meant invitations could leisurely go out by mail after the announcement. This year -- with that time split in half -- follow-up phone calls had to be made.
There is also some concern that, between the late screener reprieve and the usual glut of December releases, academy members may not have enough time to see all the films before their ballots are due on Feb. 24. The academy has said, via news release, that the rate of return for nomination ballots was similar to previous years, around 80% of eligible voters. But some of those who chose not to weigh in have blamed the new timetable. “[The screeners] all came sailing in together and there was less time to look at them,” says screenwriting academy member Pat Resnick, who decided it wasn’t fair to participate in the nominating but will do a more informed vote on the final awards. Another writer, who declined to be named, also felt rushed to catch up and didn’t mail back the nomination ballot. “I’m glad for the academy if it makes their show successful, but it didn’t help voting any,” he said.
Even before the date switch, there were signs of awards show fatigue. After its inaugural broadcast in 2002, the American Film Institute decided to shuttle its peer-chosen AFI Awards to a non-televised luncheon; the Blockbuster Awards ended altogether a few years ago; and this year’s ratings for the People’s Choice Awards were the lowest in its 30-year history. But the Broadcast Film Critics Awards, with its claim to be the first televised awards show of the year, has shot up in perceived importance by dint of the number of A-list nominees and presenters in attendance.
Jeff Margolis, who produces the Screen Actors Guild’s awards show for TNT, feels confident about the continued viability of the guild’s annual fete but wonders if the public will begin to feel as stressed out as the publicists. “Before, everybody had time to do their show and there was the right amount of spacing between each event, and it all seemed to be working,” says Margolis. “This year it’s going to be interesting to see how the audience reacts to that.”
Stylist Philip Bloch, whose work is an awards fixture at movie galas, the Grammys and Fashion Week, explains the new pressure zone with, naturally enough, a clothing metaphor. “If you open up a Banana Republic every five blocks, then yeah, each store is going to sell less, but overall you’re selling more,” says Bloch, whose clients include Halle Berry and Jim Carrey.
He has noticed more exclusive deals being made early between designers like Ralph Lauren and Caroline Herrera and the stars they outfit. “It helps because the celebrity knows where their dress is coming from and they’re gonna make what they want,” says Bloch. “No one’s running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”
Bloch himself, who also does on-air commentary for E! and CNN, has vowed not to take on more than two clients this season in order to take care of them. “This one stylist in particular, she does eight, 10, 12 people, and maybe one makes the best-dressed list,” Bloch says. “Why not just do two people and end up on the best-dressed list?”
For party-throwing companies like the Patina Group and event coordinator Jeff Best of Best Events, survival is all about advance preparation. The moment the academy announced its date change, both companies started mobilizing staff and vendors. Best even cut back on the gigs he would normally accept in November and December to ready himself for the chaotic early weeks of 2004. He stocked up on Corbusier sofas, new lighting equipment, chairs and tables, not knowing what he would ultimately do with any of it. “It’s now an eight- to 10-week lead time on everything,” says Best, who handled a few Globes parties and will take on the Grammys, pro basketball’s all-star game and the Oscars. “If you haven’t ordered by now, you’re going to pay a premium, or you won’t get what you asked for.”
The folks who make a good living off this time of year won’t let their complaints get too out of hand. What most people talk about is the strange tribal quality that develops during awards season, when it’s you against the calendar or the clock and you’re seeing the same people over and over and over at industry functions. For Best, it’s the fire marshal or police officer he inevitably gets to know over the course of five different events.
“At the beginning, he’s the guy who’s controlling you, but then you’re best friends and you know everything about his family. By the time you’re done you’re thinking, ‘Is my daughter going to play with his son?’ ”
When it’s all over, March will probably find Hollywood empty. Then maybe Eric Buterbaugh -- after the last round of sculpted bouquets heaped upon award winners and their handlers is delivered -- will be able to do some celebrating to make up for the fact that his birthday now falls on the day before the Oscars.
“I figure my birthday dinner is going to be quite grim this year because so many people will be getting ready for the next night, and I usually have quite a glitzy birthday. Maybe I’ll change the date.” Then he quickly clarifies. “Of my birthday, not the Oscars!” he says, laughing.