It’s been less than 24 hours since the Golden Globes ceremony, but the producers behind the Jan. 5 kudocast are already looking at bringing back host Nikki Glaser for an encore next year. “We absolutely had a great experience with her, and think that she would be great at this in the long term,” executive producer Glenn Weiss told Variety.
So, has she already been asked back? “Perhaps!” Weiss said. “I can’t talk officially for anything. I will say, as someone who produces and directs award shows, she really found her niche here, and I think it really worked out beautifully on this show. And I would love to see it continue.” (It’s possible under her deal with Dick Clark Prods. and CBS, Glaser was already contracted to do another year if things went well — and they clearly did.)
Weiss and fellow White Cherry Entertainment partner/exec producer Ricky Kirshner lauded Glaser for providing the proper mood for the show (a huge turnaround after last year’s host, Jo Koy, struggled to find that line). “Nikki, in my mind, home run,” Weiss said. “She really prepared. She did her homework. She’s been practicing material at a clubs, sometimes four or five shows a night for a couple of weeks straight, working on this pretty hard since November. And when you have a host that’s that prepared and that dedicated and also not tone deaf, listening to what’s going on in our business and even in the room on the fly, she’s really good at this. And she proved herself to be a really good host.
“Part of what the Globes are is it’s a party atmosphere,” he added. “It’s not a traditional, stuffyish kind of environment. We do want to be loose, people in the audience do have access to alcohol, and it’s meant to be fun and a party. And Nikki, her whole tone and and her way of being is really in line with what this show is. And I think she really scored very well last night.”
Variety spoke on Monday morning with an exhausted Weiss and Kirshner, who had also just worked with Globes producer Dick Clark Prods. (which Variety parent company PMC owns in a joint venture with Eldridge) on “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” just a few days earlier. The duo shared the backstory on some of this year’s unique elements on the telecast — including the use of fun facts, the Beverly Hilton ballroom map pin drops of nominees, and yes, those wild camera angles.
The show’s fun facts came out of trying to figure out how to add more details without affecting the Golden Globes’ run time.
This wasn’t the first awards show to include nominee trivia at the bottom of the screen, but this year’s Globes took it to a turbo-charged level. “How could we add value to the show without eating more time when the presenters walk out?” Weiss said to describe their thinking. “We saw this as an opportunity to give the viewers at home a little bit more to digest, a little bit more to know about the people. I think we came in with an attitude of, how can we enhance the value to the viewer within the time frame?”
Kirshner said the team came up with hundreds and hundreds of factoids — many of which, of course, never got to air. “The hard part about that is we don’t know who’s going to win,” he said. “So if you take over 150 nominees times three or four facts each, we collected over 500 or 600 facts — only to use two or three per winner.”
Pin drops showing where nominees were sitting in the ballroom were inspired by technology used in sporting events.
Weiss said the idea behind the concept came from doing a little research with a sports-augmented reality company. Inspired by the computer-generated first down lines in football games, or how swimmers’ lanes were identified during the Summer Olympics, the White Cherry team began brainstorming. “It was birthed from, how do we use technology like this in an award show? Could there be something here?” he said. “When the thought about the unique seating at the Globes and the tightness of the room, that’s where those two ideas came together. If we do some kind of sports-like augmented reality in our event, and if people always talk about where they’re coming from and what the audience layout is, let’s try to put these things together.”
Of course, that made its own challenges, since people are constantly moving seats or tables. “There are changes,” Weiss said. “Someone’s coming, someone’s not coming. This person has to sit with the studio. This person has to sit with the network. There’s always a little bit of a chess game being played with seating that made it even more interesting — which is a kind word to our production process. We were literally creating where the pins dropped, and if they weren’t at the table, could we move them? The cumbersome combining these elements into the flow of a live award show turned out to be really challenging. It was really inspiring when we got to the finish line, and fun to execute. But damn, it was not easy.”
Those camera angles were meant to give viewers a more immersive experience — and perhaps there’s a specific reason why Seth Rogen was surprised by it all.
During his moment as a presenter, Rogen roasted the show’s experimental camera angles, which showed winners and presenters from various vantage points, often with the audience seen behind them. “It’s inelegant, it’s strange, this whole half of the room can see my bald spot,” Rogen said in his remarks. “I would have filled that in.”
Weiss said: “I’ll tell you, not everybody is gonna love everything. We wanted to bring a TV show home where people felt they were a little bit more immersed in the party, and not just watching it where the stage is here, the cameras are here, and we’re shooting it across the room.”
Instead of having the audience “feel like we’re an outsider getting coverage, we wanted the people at home to feel they’re a part of it,” he said. “Most of the presenters came through rehearsal and then understood it. If they didn’t come through rehearsal, perhaps they didn’t understand it quite as much, which might lead to a comment on the air by someone.”
Glenn Weiss, are you throwing a little shade? “Maybe just a little!” he joked. “I will say that, at the end of the day, I wish the room were a little bigger, I wish the ceiling were a little higher,” he said, referencing the limitations that come from shooting in a hotel ballroom. “There’s all sorts of things as a director you’d want to do a little differently. But the confines of this room is the reality that we’re in. I’d love the concept to have allowed us to have the camera a little bit further back from them. I’d love for us to have been able to have a higher ceiling, and do the pin drop a little differently, but we’re embracing the reality that we’re in. And trying to figure out the best way. For me, the immersiveness of putting the viewer in the party, as opposed to just covering it from the outside, was the tactical decision there.”
Speaking of Rogen and fellow presenter Catherine O’Hara, yes, it’s safe to say their riffing about Canadian porn went a little off-script.
That included Rogen’s crack about a “Mickey Mouse handjob,” which America didn’t get to hear — but the folks in the audience and the press room got to. “Yeah, some scripts come through us, and we’re prepared, and some kind of changes backstage as we’re going on,” Weiss said. “I’ll say that everything at the end of the day, it comes on, and censors do what they do, and we just continue being immersed in the party.”
Sofia Vergara heckling Jodie Foster didn’t throw the producers for a loop, but Vin Diesel’s shout-out to The Rock sure did.
“For me, it was just kind of playful,” Kirshner said of the moment Vergara shouted as Foster hit the stage to collect her win as best TV limited series actress. “I don’t think there was any moment where I was like, ‘Oh shit, something’s going wrong.’”
But when Diesel took the stage to present the prize for cinematic and box office achievement and before his speech said, “Hey, Dwayne,” there was a moment where the producers wondered if beef was about to unfold. “It kind of keeps you gripped, and even you in the press room, us in the truck, are going, ‘Wait, what? What’s happening?’” Weiss said. “At that point, there’s a live event taking place, and our job is to bring it to you and let you decipher it. What is the exchange going on between them? I think it’s really important to show what’s happening in the room.”
Glaser’s “Pope-ular” bit came together in less than 24 hours.
The song, in which Glaser teases a crossover between the films “Wicked” (with its song “Popular”) and “Conclave” (about the election of a new pope), was created in the writers’ room late Saturday.
“Throwing that together, which included a music cue, which included lighting cues and all sorts of stuff besides the comedy, that was real challenging,” Weiss said. “Where do you think you can find a scepter on a Saturday night at midnight?”
The secret weapon was the show’s 250-member production team. The art department and props team managed to secure and create all the materials for the bit by 11 a.m. on Sunday, after rehearsals had already started.
“You’re talking to Ricky and I here, but there’s 250 professionals who are really good at their jobs,” Weiss said. “And when things like that come up, last minute, we got the ace team finding it and bringing it in… And then Nikki nailed it. She absolutely crushed it. And it was a really big highlight for me in the show.”
The Cecil B. de Mille and Carol Burnett Awards were moved to a Friday ceremony, but more elements may return to future Globes broadcasts.
The decision to move the two honors to their own event freed up some time on Sunday’s show, but it meant that viewers didn’t get to see Viola Davis’ acceptance speech for the de Mille, or Ted Danson’s for the Burnett.
“I think the Globes people have made a decision that Friday night is the night they want to expand that dinner and make it an important event, which it was,” Kirschner said. “Glenn and I stopped by and just stuck our heads in, and it was beautifully done. The speeches were great. Maybe in the future, there’ll be a little more time to put the speeches on. It was the first year that was done that way. So we were just trying to get our footing.”
That decision to share the network/studio winners tally in the ballroom was meant to keep the industry crowd engaged.
“I think part of that was, was keeping the room alive and the screens alive during commercial time for the folks in the house,” Weiss said. “And at one point, a suggestion was made to do that. We didn’t necessarily feel it was appropriate to do on the air, but it certainly would be interesting for the folks in the room to see.”
