Strike Watch: Globes Open Up, DGA Talks Begin, Clooney Sets Record Straight

The Hollywood Foreign Press has taken over the Golden Globes ceremony, opening it up to all media.

The DGA is starting talks with the AMPTP Saturday after two weeks of back-channel prep talks. Lead negotiator Gil Cates is "the most powerful man in Hollywood," said one AFI exec at today's AFI Award luncheon at the Four Seasons. He is also the producer of the Academy Awards, which would ordinarily have hired squadrons of writers by now to prep the Oscarcast for February 24. If the DGA talks progress smoothly, and they come to an agreement that the WGA can live with, the Oscar show will go on.

At the AFI lunch George Clooney admitted that he did call Steven Spielberg to talk about convening some kind of meeting with top players who could talk to both sides in order to restart the WGA's strike talks, and that Spielberg was amenable. After a conversation with Harvey Weinstein, however, Clooney said the New York mogul misquoted him: Clooney did not say that he would tell either the WGA or the AMPTP "you have to live with this and get over it." "I talked to Steven about getting people together into a room to settle this thing," he told me. "I talk to politicians all the time; I do not want to set two parties against each other. It's difficult enough as it is."

[Getty Images]