The HFPA is now officially over, as it’s been handed over to Dick Clark Productions and Eldridge. From their press release:
Los Angeles, CA – (June 12, 2023) – Dick Clark Productions (DCP) and Eldridge have acquired all the Golden Globes’ assets, rights, and properties from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA). The transaction will result in the wind down of the HFPA and its membership. The proceeds from the transaction, plus the existing resources of the HFPA, will transition into a newly formed Golden Globe Foundation which will continue the legacy HPFA’s history of entertainment-related charitable giving.
As part of the transaction, DCP and its partners will plan, host, and produce the annual Golden Globe Awards® show and will pursue commercial opportunities for the Golden Globes across the globe. The 81st Annual Golden Globe Awards will take place on Sunday, January 7, 2024, kicking off the entertainment industry’s highly anticipated awards season.
Who will be voting members? The same members that were announced back in April as the Globes tried to be more inclusive and invite more members.
From Prime Timer:
But while the HFPA is technically no more, its voting members remain, and should they decide to stay under the new for-profit structure, they will continue to vote for the Golden Globe Awards. They’ll also be paid employees. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Under the association’s new incarnation, its employees will receive an annual salary of $75,000 for their work. Their responsibilities will include screening films and TV series submitted for Golden Globe consideration, participating in the voting process for nominations and winners, creating content for the organization’s website and managing materials related to the awards show and the group’s history.”
Todd Boehly, head of Eldridge, has brushed off criticisms of “paid awards voters,” and the old HFPA members will be eligible for a $225,000 buy-out if they choose not to remain with the new Globes venture.
They now have 310 members from all over the country so whether they stay or not. Not quite sure what “for profit” means. Figuring all of this out is like trying to unravel an episode of Succession and to be honest, it’s hard to find any reason to really care one way or the other.
But if you’re curious, Penske Media Eldridge bought DCP back in January. PME already owns Deadline, the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Indiwire and Gold Derby, among other major outlets. The Streamy Awards? Latin American Music Awards? Yup, they own it all, baby:
They also have something called Harmony, which is a live streaming platform:
As David Poland says, “Hey… they have the barn, they have the TV production company, they have all the trades in the industry to pretend they are legit… of course they will put on a show!”
So what does any of this mean? Well, it means what I’ve been writing about for the past few years, and warning about. We’re living through a major transformational shift. Our world, our country, the film industry and human civilization are all adapting to this new way of living half in the real world and half virtually.
Movies in movie theaters, not to mention network television, have been hit with three stressers at once: changing technology, COVID and, quite frankly, the “great awokening.” The internet world is different from the real world where the free market had the final say. But with media on demand and lots of wealth being concentrated at the top and on the Left, there is a sense that we’re building separate hives, or niches, that may or may not draw large crowds.
It is what it is and there is no going back. The Golden Globes really had no other option. They were backed into a corner, their business and reputation mostly destroyed (good times!) and it was much harder putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
What we had, what we’ve just watched fade to black, was a film industry that really no longer exists. Movies as we once knew them will never exist again. Streaming has won because the iphone won because Generation Z won and that is that.
The worst part of all of it isn’t even the technology. It isn’t even streaming. It isn’t even the box office catastrophe. It’s the inability to tell stories because there is no shared story anymore. We’re all too divided. Even our films that are based on fantasy tend to be aimed at a certain kind of person who thinks a certain kind of way.
There is a hesitation to tell the truth, to be offensive, to tell great stories that rock our worlds. That will change because the pendulum is constantly swinging. At some point, great stories will be told once again. But first, we have to wait out this moment, as the boomers fade away and the millennials/Gen-Z rise.
Eventually, though it will be rough going for a while, we will have shared stories again and when that happens, we’ll have great movies again. Maybe that’s this year, who knows, we’ll see.
I would put the Golden Globes on par with the Grammys — more entertainment, less influential in terms of what the Oscars might do. Then again, who knows where they’ll sit. Penske will probably buy the Oscars too at some point, put them on Harmony. It’s only moving in one direction, my friends.
I’ve been here a long time, as you know. Half of my life by now. I will be walking away at some point but before I do I have to see where it all ends up. But if I was an HFPA member, I’d take the money and run.
I’d take that $300K and I’d get as far away from this town and this industry as I possibly could. I’d be Kathleen Turner in Body Heat drinking a pina colada and being waited on by a cabana boy. I would not sit around and wait out the death rattle. It isn’t going to be pretty.
