Penske, Can You Spare a Dime?
Our town needs disaster relief, and the once-reliable HFPA can't find its wallet. Plus: The tech bros kidnap Bond
Welcome to the Jamboree, my weekly series of quick(ish) takes on the industry’s passing parade:
Charity Case
Call me a glutton for the spectacle of self-dealing.
I know the Globes are behind us for the season, and I should just let it go, but in these days when the industry is dominated by people who just seem interested in sucking the remaining ounces of joy out of entertainment, one of the few pleasures we have left is watching, mouths agape, at the spectacle of greed and mediocrity run amok. There, the Penske-Boehly awards venture strides like a colossus.
So when we consider the question of whether the boys’ naked grab of Hollywood’s number four awards show has made it better or worse, there’s one aspect that’s much overlooked in the conversation, but given recent events, it merits a peek.
One of the much ignored, inconvenient aspects of demonizing the old HFPA was that the nonprofit thing actually did a fair amount of nonprofit work. The HFPA Foundation donated about $55 million to charities in its lifetime.
In particular, the HFPA made a special practice of contributing to natural disaster relief. A couple of headlines from olden times:
In 2018, when wildfires ravaged mostly Northern California, the HFPA quickly stepped up and contributed $300,000.
Contrast that with today and its record under new management. (To recap: coming out of the boycott, the HFPA voted to end its nonprofit status and sell itself to Todd Boehly’s Eldridge. Later, Eldridge and Penske Media formed a joint venture to run the Globes and promised that a new Golden Globe Foundation would continue the HFPA’s charitable work. That process of folding into the joint venture is ongoing and is currently under review, as The Ankler has reported, by the California Attorney General’s office for irregularities in the process.)
So you might have heard, but we actually suffered a natural disaster, right here in the neighborhood, which resulted in thousands of members not only of our community but also our actual industry to be homeless and in need.
So what has been the response of the HFPA foundation to this hometown tragedy?