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Israel has an insatiable appetite for Hollywood stories,” said Tom Tugend, a Los Angeles stringer for the Jerusalem Post, when we interviewed him in 1999. So, apparently, do Brazil, Australia, and Senegal. Danielle Machado Duran, a freelancer in New York, reported that a Brazilian magazine had just requested an article on the movie The Blair Witch Project. Mark Riley, of the Sydney Morning Herald, had just returned to New York from Los Angeles, where he was covering the Academy Awards. Aly K. Ndaw was doing an article, “Black Americans in the Cinema,” for a Senegalese newspaper. “I love movies,” he told us. How the foreign media cover the American entertainment industry—its products and its personalities—is a controversial matter . Suddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s most respected newspapers , confessed in 2000 that some of its Hollywood stories were fabricated in Los Angeles by Tom Kummer, a Swiss journalist, who also wrote for a number of leading German magazines. His articles were filled with ersatz confidences from the stars—Whitney Houston , Brad Pitt, Sharon Stone, Kim Basinger. Kummer’s inventions included this quote, attributed to Courtney Love: “I play with my breasts, not to show off but to demonstrate a kind of revulsion. I simply transform myself into a voice for all the tormented souls of this world.” And this, ascribed to Ivana Trump: “Pimples are not really a problem. They come and they go. Skin irritations are much worse. It can only get worse when you’re turned down by a famous skin clinic.” The moral of Kummer’s downfall, according to the foreign press corps in Hollywood, is that editors should know that movie industry publicists never give foreigners that kind of access. Hollywood A subject the world loves 50 “ “The problem,” said Claus Lutterback, who had been a Hollywood correspondent for Stern magazine, “is that no one, not even our bosses, knows how Hollywood really works. They don’t know how hard it is to get any access at all. They think we spend our time at cocktail parties with movie stars. So someone like Kummer can come along and they have no control over him.”1 It was to try to gain access that eight foreigners banded together in 1943 to form the Hollywood Foreign Correspondents Association, renamed the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) in 1955. Their brilliant solution to “the cold-shoulder treatment they routinely received from the studios,” according to Louis B. Hobson of the Calgary Sun, was that “instead of writing a host of negative stories, the eight wisely chose to honour the very people who were snubbing them.”2 Or, in the words of the HFPA’s publicity department, “The group’s members felt it was incumbent upon them to give their audience their judgments as to Hollywood’s finest productions.”3 The first award for best picture was presented in 1944 to The Song of Bernadette. The next year the trophies were named the Golden Globes. The group’s by-laws cap membership at one hundred; there were ninety-four members in 2004.4 The small number of members, regardless of the quality of their output, has often been criticized—so much power to so few—especially as the Golden Globes have gained importance as a marketing tool in the movie industry. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the Oscars, has a membership in the 6,000 range. But HFPA was designed to provide access to movie stars and directors, and that access is offered to members only at press conferences now held in the organization’s West Hollywood clubhouse. And access, of course, is about keeping out as well as letting in. As Helmut Voss, of Germany’s Springer Publications and a former HFPA president, put it: “We have a certain protection system in place that safeguards against conflict. If a freelancer claimed to work for one of the newspapers in my group, I would examine those credentials very carefully.”5 “Any single member can blackball an applicant,” writes Sharon Waxman, who has covered Hollywood for the Washington Post and the New York Times and who views the HFPA with a critical eye.6 Lorenzo Soria, of Italy’s La Stampa and HFPA president in 2004, told Waxman, Personally, I would like to see the number of our members increase. I’m also aware that there is a limit to how much we A subject the world loves 51 [18.219.236.62] Project...

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