For the past few days, workers have been busy building an elaborate set to make sure Sunday's Golden Globes news conference looked like an event-- and not a press conference. But now that the Peacock has pulled out of producing Sunday's semi-soiree, those fancy sets are being torn down.
Details are still leaking out, but as Variety reported earlier today, a financial conflict between NBC and Dick Clark Prods. was at the heart of today's decision to make the Globes news conference a non-exclusive event.
NBC had agreed to pay nearly $3 million to DCP in order to help the production company recoup the pre-production costs already incurred in putting together. But then, according to an NBC insider, DCP demanded a license fee of between $1.5 million and $2 million in order to let NBC keep its exclusivity.
Because the annoucement was set to be broadcast under the auspices of NBC News, Peacock insiders flatly rejected the idea. What's more, since NBC was already set to lose millions in ad revenue, Peacock partisans felt it added "insult to injury" for DCP to ask for what would essentially be "pure profit," one person sympathetic to NBC's side said.
DCP has just issued a statement confirming that money was at the heart of the matter:
"NBC wanted to have an exclusive three hour broadcast special disguised as a news conference that would bar all other media, and yet was unwilling to pay a nominal license fee to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Dick Clark Productions. The HFPA and Dick Clark Productions felt this arrangement was unfair and unacceptable and therefore opened up the event to all media."
Stay tuned for more....
--Josef Adalian
$2 million is a "nominal" fee? Man, am I ever in the wrong business.
Posted by: Jimmy S. | January 11, 2008 at 04:23 PM
I have an idea for the Globes-have David Letterman have the live broadcast as part of his show-he just signed with the WGA...if CBS does, Les Moonves owes me....
Posted by: Ron W | January 11, 2008 at 05:58 PM