The Hollywood Foreign Press has settled– er, surrendered– to NBC and Dick Clark Productions. The Golden Globes will continue to be produced by the network and DCP after a judge ruled in favor of them. The HFPA appealed, and were about to lose everything. The HFPA also spent in excess of $12 million in legal fees, lots more, on a losing proposition.
This is on the eve of the annual HFPA lunch where they donate a million bucks or so to various charities, announce their officers– usually the same ones as last year– and try to put a good face on their various scandals.
However: since January I’ve been waiting for an explanation of where $1.5 million went in the summer of 2012. The HFPA parked the money in a charitable trust that is no longer registered with the government as a 501 c 3. They may have done the same thing in the summer of 2013, but that tax filing isn’t available yet. I broke this story in January and asked for an explanation.
Meantime the folks at GuideStar, which monitors charities and foundations, is looking into it. Giving money to charity is the way the HFPA maintains its primary 501 c 3, and gets away with paying no taxes on the $7 million plus it receives from NBC.
More: now comes another interesting part since the HFPA officers are all supposedly receiving big raises this summer. President Theo Kingma, a photographer, I’m told will get bumped up to $100,000. Kingma is a nice guy, but really, this whole thing is insane. Critics groups around the country arrive at the same nominations as the Globes without any pay whatsoever. And those groups are composed of professional critics with real credentials, unlike a lot of the goofy HFPA.
