IT WAS Groucho Marx who once said he would never join a club that accepted him as a member. My own rules for club membership are a bit less stringent. I would never sign up for an organisation that would require me to, say, tattoo its logo on to my buttocks. I would probably never pay dues to a society that made me pledge to steal toys from small children. Other than that, however, I’m pretty much open to offers. And if there are free drinks and junkets with movie stars involved, then all the better.
You can imagine my frustration then, at never having been invited to join the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the shadowy yet hugely powerful group of non-American journalists that hands out this week’s Golden Globes.
Founded in 1943 by a correspondent for the Daily Mail, the not-for-profit HFPA collects a reported $5.7 million (£3.2 million) a year by selling the rights to broadcast the Globes ceremony. The gongs themselves may not be as coveted as Oscars or Grammys, but a Globe win or nomination can add tens of millions to a movie’s box-office revenues, and significantly improve its chances of bagging the Big One: an Academy Award.
As a result, members of the HFPA are some of the Most Important People in Hollywood. And to judge by the organisation’s headcount — 92 members — it’s a privilege they are reluctant to share.
In fact, the HFPA has one of the trickiest application procedures yet devised by Man. It’s probably easier to join the Saudi Arabian Royal Family. On paper, for example, my own credentials for membership would appear impeccable: I live in Hollywood, and, as a correspondent for The Times of London, I’m a member of the foreign press. In reality, I stand about as much chance of becoming a member as my great aunt. New applications are limited to only five per year, and all names must be approved by, well, everyone. Which means they are generally not approved.
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America could solve its immigration problem overnight if took a few lessons from the HFPA.
Many in Hollywood are obsessed by the closed shop of the HFPA. I had been in Los Angeles for only a few weeks before I took my first call, from a Washington Post reporter, about whether I would apply for the HFPA, and, if so, whether I would keep her up to date on my progress (I did neither).
It took me a while to work out the reason for all the fuss: members of the HFPA are given access to exclusive press freebies and movie star interviews, meaning they can turn their position as Golden Globes voters into well-paid careers. Studios that do not allow HFPA members to hobnob with directors and actors risk being overlooked when it comes to the awards.
The allure of the HFPA lifestyle was illustrated powerfully in December when Nick Douglas, a member for three years, was suspended after selling a picture of himself and the actor Tom Selleck for $50. He responded by hanging himself. According to friends, the journalist’s “soul was dying” after allegedly being denied access to celebrities, which forced him to give up his column for Big Buzz, a Belfast entertainment magazine.
The way the story was reported in The New York Times made it sound like the plot to Robert Altman’s The Player, with Douglas the victim of some noir-ish Hollywood conspiracy.
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But could the HFPA have won either way? It banned its members from selling photographs of themselves with movie stars to stop allegations of cronyism. Then it was accused of enforcing its anti-cronyism rules too strictly.
The real problem, of course, is that the HFPA is too powerful for its own good. For many in the “red states” of America, the organisation literally stands for everything that has gone wrong with the country since Pearl Harbor: foreigners, Hollywood and the press. That it has the power to celebrate a film about gay cowboys, and promote it to the rest of the world as an example of American artistic excellence, must feel like cultural hijacking — the equivalent of the National Rifle Association being put in charge of Gay Pride. Even liberal Americans are annoyed that such a small group of outsiders wields such a large influence.
Alas, for the HFPA, there is probably no easy solution. To steal from Groucho once again: if you join a club, you can expect to be beaten over the head with it.