Part– not all– of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s 2012 finances have been published. I say part because the HFPA pulled a neat trick. They’ve separated their charitable donations into a different 501 c 3 that is not registered with GuideStar and hasn’t been published. That’s another story.
From what has just been published we can glean a couple of interesting notes: Dr. Aida Takla O’Reilly, president in 2011-2012, gave her job title a 38% raise. She made $84,612. The prior president, Phil Berk, had a salary of $61,000. Not bad. Dr. O’Reilly had only made $3,445 in 2010 when she overlapped with Berk as president. According to the Form 990, O’Reilly worked 30 hours a week. The four other officers, listed at 20 hours a week, made an average of $40,000 in 2011-12.
Altogether, the HFPA officers picked up about $50,000 in total increases in 2011 over 2010.
More importantly: HFPA spent a whopping $12.3 million in legal fees for their ongoing conflicts with Dick Clark Productions and NBC. That’s $2 million more than NBC paid them to license the Golden Globe name. You see, NBC is in ironically funding the HFPA’s legal fight to escape from them and from Dick Clark Productions. Without the annual NBC license fee, HPFA would have no money. They only took in $1,739 in membership fees in 2011-12.
HFPA did manage to spend $1 million in travel in 2011-12. That’s interesting since the studios pay their freight just about everywhere, from Cannes to Venice, to Telluride, Sundance, and so on.
What about the $1,570,000 HFPA announced in summer 2012 as charitable donations? For the first time the group has split into two 501 c3’s. The donations are not listed on the Form 990 which was filed in May under Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Instead, they claim to have donated the total amount to an entity called Hollywood Foreign Press Association Charitable Trust. But GuideStar has no separate listing for that entity. If there is a filing, it hasn’t turned up yet.
