Defending the foreign press

As a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., I can tell you it gets tiring reading derogatory commentary on the group, as in Sharon Waxman’s Op-Ed article. I feel compelled to put the record straight.

Waxman implies that the association is Hollywood’s dirty little secret and that the members are neither journalists nor “film experts.” She has been repeating these attacks for many years.

Association members represent some of the biggest and most prominent media outlets in the world. She cites Le Monde, The Guardian and Haaretz. No we don’t have members representing those papers. But we do have the Daily Telegraph, L’Espresso, La Stampa, El Pais, the Evening Standard, Le Figaro, La Repubblica, Cinema magazine, Panorama, Studio, Screen International and many others.

If Waxman had done her homework, she would know that these newspapers and magazines are among the most widely read in the world. Some of the newspapers mentioned have daily sales far exceeding those of The Times.

Are we “film experts”? We write about films, directors and actors, and most of us have done so for decades. Principally we cover Hollywood films and TV for overseas outlets from Los Angeles. We have never pretended to do anything else.

Let me offer a little history. For most of the last century, studios didn’t pay much attention to international media. Box office revenues from international markets never represented a significant enough slice of the pie to give the foreign press in Hollywood much access.

So, in 1942, a group of foreign correspondents set up the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. to improve their access by banding together. The Golden Globes was born out of that as a means of raising their collective voice.

Now, of course, international media are probably more important to studios than some domestic outlets. International grosses on blockbusters routinely outperform U.S. totals. “Ratatouille” has earned over $400 million abroad; “The Golden Compass” has just passed $250 million overseas. Those are just two of countless examples.

The association has many members who have worked to raise the group’s profile in order to improve our access. We have about 400 news conferences a year with film and television talent, which helps us immeasurably in our jobs.

The TV broadcast deals for the Globes, most recently with NBC, have financed the running of the association and enabled us to travel to junkets in New York or overseas, where many of them take place.

We are a nonprofit association. Ask the IRS. We donate well over $1 million a year to charities in the entertainment field, such as the Film Foundation, the Sundance Institute and numerous colleges and film schools around the country.

Do we have internal infighting? Of course we do. Name one organization that doesn’t. We are an extremely colorful mix of over 50 nationalities with different temperaments and a passion for what we do.

I often hear the association being lampooned by domestic journalists, and I find it extremely childish. We eat food at junket lunches? So does the domestic media. We travel to junkets on our own dime? Most of the world’s media travel to junkets on the studios’ dime. We have funny accents? Yes, we do. Most of us speak multiple languages.

The association’s website informs the world who the members are. So often described by absurdly xenophobic domestic journalists as “little known,” we all have a profile in our respective countries.

Waxman suggests that the Globes show shouldn’t have the profile it does, and that domestic critics’ groups — none of which number more than 50 members — should instead have the profile.

But what she fails to see is that we haven’t committed some elaborate con at the expense of domestic journalists. Hollywood studios and their talent have embraced the Golden Globes for 65 years because of the members’ commitment to reporting on the entertainment industry year-round.

We are not film experts, says the currently outlet-less Waxman. All I know is that we have made careers of writing about entertainment for many years. We love good film and TV. That is what the Golden Globes celebrates.

Mike Goodridge is vice president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. and U.S. editor of Screen International and Screendaily.com.