The Golden Globes is going to air this week on NBC after a year-long hiatus in the wake of an ethical scandal over its parent company, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Can its comeback stick?
The Golden Globes is going to air this week on NBC after a year-long hiatus in the wake of a scandal over its parent company, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Can its comeback stick? Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times Company Town reporter Stacy Perman, and L.A. Times film business reporter Josh Rottenberg
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Gustavo Arellano: It’s one of the entertainment industry's most well-known award shows.
AP Clips: “Welcome.” “Welcome to the Golden Globes.” “Welcome to the 75th annual Golden Globes and Happy New Year, Hollywood.” “We are going to have some fun.” “Let's have a laugh at your expense, shall we?”
Gustavo: But the Golden Globes are one of the most problematic award shows, too.
AP Clips: Many talented people of color were snubbed in major categories. Um, unfortunately there's nothing we can do about that. The Hollywood Foreign Press are all very, very racist.
Gustavo: After a 2022 L.A. Times investigation revealed that the group that runs the Golden Globes — the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. — committed multiple ethical lapses and had no Black members at all. Many in Hollywood boycotted the awards. Then NBC even took the Golden Globes off the air.
But tomorrow… it’s baaaack.
AP Clip: NBC says the Golden Globes will be back on TV on Jan. 10th.
Gustavo: The return of the Golden Globes this week is its way of telling Hollywood: “We've changed. No. Really!”
Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.”
It's Monday, Jan. 9th, 2023.
Today, has the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. done enough to fix its reputation or are the Golden Globes too tarnished to ever truly shine again?
Gustavo: Stacy Perman is a Company Town reporter working on investigations and enterprise stories in the entertainment industry for the Los Angeles Times, and Josh Rottenberg covers the business of film for the L.A. Times. Stacy, Josh, we haven't had the two of you on together since the very first week of “The Times,” so welcome back.
Josh Rottenbern: Thanks. Good to be here.
Stacy Perman: Thanks, Gustavo.
Gustavo Arellano: So in February of 2021, just a week before that year's Golden Globe ceremony, the two of you published a bombshell investigation about the operations of the Hollywood Forum Press Assn., which is the group behind the awards show. Stacy, remind us of what the investigation discovered. All the lowlights — what happened?
Stacy: Well, the investigation started because a Norwegian journalist sued the organization. She had applied for membership multiple times and was denied. And she said that the organization, you know, she alleged in her lawsuit, that it operated like a cartel, that it kept out qualified journalists like herself, and you know, levied a number of allegations.
Kjersti Flaa: I do not think that, uh, HFPA members, majority of them, wanted to change. They were just forced to change because they were told, if you don't change, it's over.
Stacy: So Josh and I, that was kind of our starting point.
Stacy: And what we found was an organization with lots of questions. The group is made up of foreign journalists: Their credibility was a question. But we also found bigger things like self-dealing. They're a nonprofit. They were sitting on $50 million in cash at that time, and they created a whole system of committees and tasks to pay these volunteer members. There were questions about votes and how junkets that they were paid to go to may or may not have influenced them. All sorts of ethical lapses. And something that got a terrific amount of attention was the fact that at the time there were 87 members and not a single one was Black.
Gustavo: Yeah, the investigation got a lot of attention. But Josh, how did Hollywood react to all of this?
Josh Well, the investigation and, particularly like Stacy said, the reporting of the fact that the group had no Black members, it sparked a chorus of criticism that was certainly beyond anything Stacy and I expected.
Josh: Within days of the story being published, you had #TimesUp and powerful industry figures like Ava DuVernay and Shonda Rhimes calling for the HFPA to undertake major reforms. You had stars like Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo publicly blasting the group. And over the next few months you had publicists banding together in an unprecedented way to, essentially boycott the HFPA and deny them access to talent. And, as the HFPA was kind of fumbling through their initial efforts at reforms, the bottom really started to fall out of their support. Eventually Hollywood's biggest studios and platforms — Netflix, Warner Bros., Amazon, HBO — they all said that they were cutting ties with the group until it cleaned up its act. And you even had, to cap it off, Tom Cruise saying that he was going to return his three Globes trophies.
Josh: Finally by May of 2021, NBC, which has aired the Globes since 1996, decided that the situation was just untenable and they announced they were pulling the show off the air for 2022.
Gustavo: I mean, Stacy and Josh, your stories nearly ended the Golden Globes once and for all, and because of that, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. vowed immediately that they were going to change to save themselves. What were some of their very first moves, Stacy?
Stacy: Well, the first was that they made this very public announcement, this vow, that they were committing to transformational change.
Helen Hoehne: Change in governance from top to bottom. But that’s not it. We also passed a brand-new set of policies, banning the acceptance of gifts, uh, restricted paid travel, and also new grievance procedure. The members will also finish their training in diversity, equity and inclusion, and also sign a new code of conduct.
Stacy: But I think from the beginning, there were just, one misstep after the other. You know, you have this organization that while publicly was committing to change behind the scenes, there were members who had been there for decades that felt really criticized and put upon that they were the victims, that they were being forced to reform when they didn't need to. And I think a lot of that came from the fact that for decades, you know, a lot of people in Hollywood joked and mocked the awards. Even, you know, Ricky Gervais from the stage.
Ricky Gervais: We were gonna do an “in memorium” this year, but when I saw the list of people that had died, it wasn't diverse enough. It just, no, it was mostly white people and I thought, nah, not on my watch.
Stacy: And they had scandals in the past. But they all sort of blew over. And I think they thought this would just be another one of those times where they'd get some bad press and everybody would move on and we'd, you know, continue on the red carpet, business as usual. But that just didn't happen. I mean, they did hire an equity and inclusion consultant from USC. He quit within weeks. Um, that happened around the time, the heels, we reported that a former president of the organization, an eight-term president, had sent out an email to the group that likened Black Lives Matter to a hate group. You know, there was all sorts of fumbles. There were calls for them to disband the group and have them reapply under much more strict requirements. There were a lot of outside agitation and they just weren't interested in it. I think what really popped for them, what really hurt, was when the publicists boycotted, because that basically cut off their oxygen to celebrities. They were used to having these exclusive events, these exclusive press conferences, this access that nobody else had to talent, and that was cut off and that became a huge shift for them and just made them sort of Hollywood pariahs for the past 20 months.
Gustavo: So after these initial stumbles, did the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. actually make any substantive change?
Stacy: They did. I mean, they hired consultants and lawyers. They did bring on a full-time C-suite member. They changed their bylaws. They had these very antiquated bylaws that, you know, this might be too in the weeds, but you needed a two-thirds majority to do anything, to make any change. That shook that up. They brought in 21 new members, six of whom were Black. They changed certain policies. They were no longer allowed to take gifts. There were curbs on their travel, and more recently they added 103 international voters. These are not members, but these are voters. So that changed the composition of the group. It diversified the group both geographically and ethnically and in terms of gender. That was important. So they have made, definitely, a number of changes.
Stacy: Todd Boehly, who is the CEO of Eldridge Industries, he's a billionaire. He owns, you know, stakes in the Dodgers and now the Chelsea football team in London and the Beverly Hilton and Dick Clark Productions and a number of entities, stepped in to become interim CEO.
Todd Boehly: It had the combination of, you know, the business model that was changing, challenge governance and a sense of power, which ultimately resulted in, you know, kind of the catastrophe that we all witnessed.
Stacy: Josh and I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago. And he acknowledged that there was a lot that needed to change.
Todd: And it took a crisis in order to make change.
Stacy: So, traditionally, the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. has been a nonprofit organization made up of volunteer members who are foreign entertainment journalists based in Los Angeles. Now it's a for-profit. It's private enterprise. Members are employees. They're paid salaries of $75,000 a year.
Todd: So how do you make people accountable? Well, you transition the organization from a not-for-profit with non-accountability and bad governance into an organization where there's real accountability, you know, employee-based, like, accountability.
Stacy: They're going to have paid vacations, dental and medical, just like any other employee. But it also means two things. It means, as a for-profit and a private for-profit at that, it's less transparent. Their financials will not be available. Their tax reforms as a not-for-profit are available publicly, as are any not-profit. So there'll be less visibility in the machinations and the operations of the organizations. But also, I think this is a key point: As employees, they're at-will employees, so they can be fired for cause or without cause at any time. I think that's one prong of accountability. I mean, if you're an employee, you have stakes in the organization, you have an investment in doing well and continuing on in order to get paid. So, that's his definition of accountability,
Stacy: You know, for years the HFPA had these exclusive press conferences that they set up with different television shows and movies and, a number of the members would use those press conferences to get commissions, to get articles, to get paid essentially. And so they became a real cornerstone of a revenue stream for several members. But, the system broke down because it also became sort of, if you ask any publicist, you know, it was never written in stone, but it was a sort of unwritten rule that if you were going to be considered for a Golden Globe, you had to participate in these press conferences, which is one of the reasons the, you know, it broke down and that the publicists really wanted to abandon this longtime standing tradition. And so I think what Boehley is saying, when you take that off the table, it sort of removes some of these incentives for potential conflict.
Todd: Now by making them not reliant on press conferences and I take away, you know, kind of the conflicts of interest that were embedded in the organization that might have created the opportunity to be swayed by things other than, you know, just being authentic and having real integrity.
Gustavo: Josh, what are critics of the Hollywood Forum Press Assn. saying about these changes?
Josh: Well, I mean, whether everything they've done adds up to a really reformed group is kind of in the eye of the beholder. In terms of diversity, you can say that they certainly made strides. They now say that they're more than half female and more than half racially and ethnically diverse, but some of their longstanding issues remain. In terms of transparency, this was always a very secretive group. But now that it's a private for-profit company, we're gonna have even less sort of visibility into how it's run. The journalistic credibility of some of its members is still, frankly, kind of questionable. And a number of the members whose behavior the industry found kind of problematic are still there. And like Stacy said, the ownership by Todd Boehley, who has financial stakes in the trade magazines, which cover award seasons, in the indie film company A24, which has movies in contention for the Globes. All of that raises questions about conflicts of interest. So ultimately, you know, the upshot of all the reforms is that the Golden Globes has turned itself into a for-profit group of paid professional voters. That is something that Hollywood hasn't really seen before and that I think a lot of people still feel a little uncomfortable about.
Gustavo: How did Boehley respond to this criticism about, you know, planned payments for members?
Stacy: Well, it was interesting. I mean, he sees them as employees and, you know, we got a hold of the contract. The contract explicitly outlines their duties, which are to watch films and television shows, nominate them and vote on them. And as Josh said, I mean essentially this makes them paid voters. They're being paid $75,000 a year.
Stacy: He saw this as just, you know, employee duties. That was the way he looked at it. He didn't see a conflict, he didn't see a problem. He felt that this was a way to kind of shake off the old yoke of problems that girded the organization for decades, and to make them accountable was to make them employees.
Todd: I think this is a mechanism about becoming professional, right? And you know, I think if you look at what is the things that make professional organizations professional, I don't think it's anything other than proper checks and balances, good governance and mechanisms to ensure that the organization is evolving with the times at a very professional standard.
Gustavo: More after the break.
Gustavo: So Stacy and Josh, the investigation that the two of you did, the fallout from it, the attempts at transformation, there's a lot right there, but now the Golden Globes are back on TV this week. So Josh, how is Hollywood at large feeling about this? Are they cheering, sneering or just like, eh, over it?
Josh: I'd say a lot of people in the awards ecosystem are pleased to see the Globes make a comeback. But I'd say if Hollywood on the whole is cheering, at least so far, they're doing it pretty quietly.
Josh: When the HFPA announced its nominations last month for this year's Globes...
Golden Globes Clip: Good morning and welcome to the announcement of the 80th annual Golden Globe Award nominations.
Josh: … the reaction was fairly muted.
Golden Globes Clip: Best performance by an actor in a limited series, anthology series or motion picture made for television: Taryn Egerton, “Blackbird.” Colin Firth, “The Staircase”...
Josh: The morning of the nominations, we reached out to 60 nominees across the various film and TV acting categories, and in the end, only one person was willing and available to get on the phone to talk about their nomination, and most didn't respond at all. The one person who was available to get on the phone to talk about their nomination was Niecy Nash.
Golden Globes Clip fades up: Niecy Nash, “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”
Josh: And she talked about how moving and important it was for her to be nominated. So, you know, this award still is meaningful for a lot of people who are nominated. It's still a milestone in their career and something that they can use as a kind of springboard to other opportunities.
Josh: But a lot of people still seem reluctant to be seen kind of publicly embracing a group that was so recently being shunned and whose reputation has been tarnished to some degree, and it still remains to be seen how many nominees and other stars are gonna show up on the night of the show. And that's, I think, really when we'll see just how ready the industry is to embrace the Globes again.
Gustavo: So who do you think is actually going to show up then?
Josh: Well, we know that, uh, some people are showing up. I mean, Jerrod Carmichael is going to host and, uh, we don't know what he'll say, but he, he is going to be hosting and we know that some nominees like Steven Spielberg and the cast of “The Fabelmans” are going to be there. Daniel Craig is apparently going to be there. And, you know, they've announced some presenters, and they're certainly highlighting the sort of diversity of the presenters. You know, this is all a testament to the fact that, kind of behind closed doors, the HFPA has been holding meetings with publicists and studios, really for months, to try to thaw relationships and convince the industry that it has made significant reforms and, um, you know really try to persuade them, “Look, this is good business for everybody.” Everybody in the, uh, awards ecosystem has a stake in the survival of this show.
Gustavo: Why do you think this skepticism continues, Stacy? The stereotype of Hollywood is that they always want to throw parties for each other. They always want to get any little amount of award. So here's something that's been going on for decades and now it's back. And now they say, “Hey, everything's much better. You can trust us now.” And yet still, there seems to be almost like blasé attitude to it now.
Stacy: Well, I mean, I think if you look at the fact that it took 20 months for them to get to this point. It's, it's a rather long time. I think Hollywood, particularly publicists and talent, have a long history of interactions with the HFPA that gives them pause. You know, the board, the president, the majority of the actual members remain the same pool of people. So there are those questions, and you're kind of in this gray area now. So you've Todd Boehley and he's announced all these changes, but not all of them have been implemented yet. I think, you know, this year is kind of a strange year. It's kind of a, a wait station, whereas next year, you'll see more of those factors put in place, and then you can have, you know, sort of a track record to look at. I think also a lot of people in Hollywood are kind of nervous to go down the red carpet. You know, those that show up and be asked an opinion. “Why are you here? What do you think?” You know, nobody wants to raise their hand, especially in a nice ball gown on a red carpet on a night that they're being honored and asked these kinds of uncomfortable questions.
Gustavo: So the owner of the Golden Globes now, Todd Boehley, what does he have to say about all the skepticism surrounding this latest iteration?
Stacy: I mean, interestingly enough, he acknowledges that there's skepticism. I think he told us you can't win over everybody all of the time, and it's kind of theirs to lose, it's theirs to prove that they have made strides and that they are moving forward and that they do want to be a viable part of the Hollywood universe or the ecosystem.
Stacy: So, yeah, I think he took a fairly forthright, kind of humbled position, you know, realistic position that this is going to take time. There's no magic bullet.
Gustavo: More after the break.
Gustavo: So, Josh, NBC renewed the Globes telecast for so far just a year. So we're going to see if it's a real lasting comeback or not. But since it is back on TV, what does its return mean for other awards shows like the Oscars or the SAG Awards?
Josh: Well, the Golden Globes has for years been a kind of key stop on the road to the Oscars. And, um, at a time when a lot of kind of awards hopefuls have been struggling at the box office, whether it's “Tár” or “The Fabelmans,” studios really kind of need awards shows like the Globes more than ever really, to help bring marketing attention to their movies. I mean, there's a reason that studios and networks have historically invested millions of dollars every year into trying to get Globes nominations, and that kind of fundamental dynamic hasn't changed even with all the controversy. But at the same time, the viewership for awards shows in general, whether you're talking about the Emmys or the Oscars or the Grammys, they've all been trending downward for years. Some people think that they're in kind of a death spiral. For a long time, the Globes were able to kind of buck that trend. NBC aired the Globes on Sunday night. The lead-in was usually a Sunday night football game, and that pretty reliably delivered an audience in the neighborhood of 18 million viewers a year. It certainly helped that this was the first award show on the calendar. That it had a reputation for being fun and loose and boozy, and it covered both film and TV. Ratings for the show in 2021, just the week after our investigation came out, were down sharply. Only about 7 million people watched it that year. And this year, I think it's really anyone's guess how many people will tune in on a Tuesday night for an awards show that they haven't seen for two years.
Gustavo: For the two of you, what would success look like for the Golden Globes this year?
Stacy: I think success would look like the Golden Globes of yore. You would just have a huge population, a huge galaxy of stars and celebrities show up. It would once again be the party of the year and it would deliver blockbuster ratings for NBC. And that's a tall order, I think, on both scores, particularly now.
Josh: Yeah, I mean, just in the two years since the Globes have been on the air, the entertainment landscape has only gotten more fragmented. And the number of people who seem eager to tune in at a certain time to a certain channel, to watch celebrities give each other awards, that seems to have continued to shrink. So if the Globes is going to succeed, it's going to have to give the audience some reason to tune in. Some entertainment value that it can't get anywhere else. And that starts with celebrities showing up and lending their star power to the show and investing it with a sense of kind of glamor and legitimacy.
Gustavo: And then finally, if the Golden Globes fail, what's next for it?
Josh: Well, if the show flops and if NBC decides to end its long relationship with the Globes, Todd Boehley and the HFPA, they've already talked about trying to find a potential new distribution platform, whether it's another network or a streamer. And, you know, given how many scandals the HFPA has survived over the years, and the amount of money that's at stake for all the different players who touch the award season, you know, I don't think most people would bet against them. But I remember back when NBC announced it was pulling the show off the air, in 2021, I remember Matt Damon was asked about this and he said something to the effect that the world doesn't need to mourn the death of an awards show. And I think that's true. You know, for stars, there is a lot of glory and ego gratification in the getting of a shiny trophy. For the studios and networks, there is a major marketing tool at stake. But at the end of the day, the world has bigger problems to deal with than the future of the Golden Globes.
Gustavo: Josh, Stacy, thank you so much for this conversation.
Stacy: Thanks, Gustavo.
Josh: Thank you.
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.” David Toledo, Kasia Broussalian and Kinsee Morlan were the jefas on this episode. It was edited by Heba Elorbany and Mario Diaz mixed and mastered it. Our show is produced by Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicholas Perez. Our fellow is Helen Li. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto, Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arrellano. We'll be back Wednesday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.