Golden Globes Producers on Nikki Glaser, Music Choices, Lack of Clips

Nikki Glaser told Variety last week that she’d be up for hosting the Golden Globes for a third time next year, and after earning more high marks for her performance last night, producers Ricky Kirshner and Glenn Weiss love the idea.

“Nikki is such a great talent, and I think she really, truly found her place here,” Weiss told Variety on Monday morning, just hours after wrapping the live telecast. “I think she’s a perfect host for us. And I will say this, that she is one of the hardest working people I’ve met in this industry. She really cares about what she’s doing. She goes out, she practices sets, things changed right up till when we went on the air from our first rehearsal to the last. And I’ve got to give her major props for not just how funny she is, but how hard she works and what a great person she is for this role.”

So, has she been asked back for a three-peat? “We all have been focused on this year,” Weiss said. “No conversation about it. But if you ask me, what’s in my heart, I certainly hope so.”

Kirshner and Weiss spoke to Variety about how CBS reacted to some of Glaser’s more pointed jabs (including her knock at CBS News), and answered other burning questions about this year’s show — including the lack of movie and TV clips, the decision to hand out original score during a commercial break, that “Heated Rivalry” moment and some of the more unconventional winner play-on song choices.

Nikki had some real zingers in her monologue, including her dig at CBS News [“the award for most editing goes to CBS News. Yes. CBS news: America’s newest place to see B.S. news.”]. Was there any pushback for some of the jokes from the network?

KIRSHNER: I think when you start off by doing a self depreciating joke about your own plastic surgery, you set the tone of, “I’m not here to really harm people.” I was sitting next to the CBS executive during rehearsal. Glenn had heard that joke in clubs throughout the week, and we hadn’t heard it all week until rehearsal day. She did it, I was sitting with the CBS exec, and I looked over at her, and she texted a few people and said, “Yeah, it’s okay. It’s fine.”

WEISS: I’ll add to that, everything in the monologue, why she nails this so well is, we’re poking fun at everything in the industry, including ourselves. It’s just been fun. Nobody’s out here making political statements, where simply, she is simply pointing out things that are in front of us, and with that little sort of, “ooh, yeah.”

We were wondering how she might followup last year’s “Pope-ular” song, and the result was the “KPop Demon Hunters”/”Marty Supreme” “KPong Demon Hunters” mashup. How did you land on that, with the Fran Drescher twist?

WEISS: The Fran Drescher twist was a concept in the writers’ room, and we didn’t even know whether she would come and play. We all thought that it was really funny, and then she agreed to do it and came out. When she said, “your voice is so annoying” in that voice of hers, it was really a highlight for me of the whole night. I just thought that was such a perfect note.

The one pre-tape you had was the AMC/Nicole Kidman parody to introduce the podcast category. How did that come together?

WEISS: It was one of many different pitches coming out of the writers room. We want to expand beyond just coming on stage and be responsive to the idea that podcast is a new category. This was a way to have a little bit of fun with a new category and call a little bit more attention to it.

Later in the show there were fewer bits as the show started to go over. At what point did you start to get concerned that the time was getting away from you?

KIRSHNER: I don’t think we ever concerned that time was getting away. There’s a fact of math that if there’s X amount of awards, it adds up. We had a couple of no-shows, which helped, and we had some short packages near the end. I wish we could have shown fuller packages of some of the series and films. But those are decisions you make on the air, and that’s when you get off. The speeches are what the speeches are. You don’t count on a standing ovation for Julia Roberts, which was amazing. George Clooney and Don Cheadle in the last act, you had two major movie stars getting a lot of time and recognition.

Are there things that you had to pull? Besides the clips, any pre-tapes or any bits that Nikki had planned that were cut as things went long?

WEISS: There were a few beats, moments that definitely needed to be reduced or didn’t make the show. We were also very dependent on the speeches. And honestly, this was really good winners, really heartfelt moments. We were so happy with where the wins and the speeches were going, and we definitely had to compensate by losing some things that we wanted on the show. And yes, we went a little bit longer than we had hoped to. But, we were really of the philosophy that, as much as we could, to let it breathe a little bit and let people say what they need to. And people kept it pretty heartfelt, which is important.

I didn’t notice much playing off of winners until toward the end of the night.

WEISS: We want to respect the winners, and we hope that they would have respect for us and the show and the process as well. But that said, we really do want to respect them and allow them to say what they need to say. So it’s a really fine line. It’s a delicate balance. At the end of the day, did we go longer than we wanted to? Yes, but it was some really great moments of television in there.

Viewers seemed to miss the clips. You had clips for the podcast category and screenplay, but there weren’t a ton of clips during the packages with the actors. How was it decided when to show clips?

KIRSHNER: With the actors, we wanted to show them and their reactions. And Glenn took a shot of every actor. We were hoping, quite honestly, to see some of the acting more in the series and film packages. But as we got near the end, we didn’t run the packages as long as we hoped. Those are decisions you make while you’re on the air.

I know you always have the different length nominee packages. And toward the end of the night, as things are running long, you had to go with the shorter packages. You’re also at the whims of what happens on stage. Did you know, for example, that Judd Apatow was going to do a comedy routine?

KIRSHNER: There was some riffing that was not on the teleprompter there. Let’s put it that way.

Anything else you can share, that unfortunately made it ended up on the cutting room floor?

WEISS: No, because you’re gonna see it next year.

Meanwhile, were you as nervous as I was that J-Lo was about to open the envelope and announce the winner before the nomination package?

KIRSHNER: Yes! The funny thing is, people backstage near me were going, “Read the nominees! Read the nominees!” And I said, “She’s done this before. I think she knows what she’s doing.” But there’s always that moment.

It really seemed like she was about to rip that envelope open, and then suddenly something happened. Maybe a light bulb went off, and she realized, “oh wait, no!”

WEISS: We love her. We’re so glad that she was there. And as Ricky said, she’s been experienced at this kind of thing, so we weren’t expecting that. And yes, that was definitely one of those moments where you’re like, “come on, Jen, you know this.” And as you said, the light bulb went on and we got to where we needed to go.

“Heated Rivalry” became a phenomenon in the middle of you guys prepping for this show. At what point did you realize that you needed to have the stars on? And then how did they end up being paired with the UFC?

WEISS: “Heated Rivalry” has been on our radar. We’ve been tracking it for about our whole production period. But I can’t even begin to tell you how broad the lobbying became. And when I say lobbying, I just mean conversations with people of certain demographics, certain age groups, and realizing how hot this was becoming. It became something obvious to us that, especially because they haven’t appeared anywhere before in our universe, this was the perfect opportunity. And I’m really happy that they were able to work out getting in the country and all that. It was a really cool moment,

And then the UFC element.

WEISS: This is a party. It’s not the same as the other award shows. We’re all at tables. People are drinking. We’re trying to present this show in a little bit of a different way. So the juxtaposition of these two elements together, the music, the light cues, the, all of that kind of stuff. It kind of discovered itself to be, “Hey, wouldn’t this be fun, you’d never see this happening on other award shows. So let’s, let’s run with this. Let’s run with all the heat that’s around these guys and what’s going on.”

Let’s talk about the decision to give out original score during the commercial break. Not everyone was happy with that. Hans Zimmer had some choice words during the Variety preshow. Can you talk about that and when that decision was made, and the rationale behind it?

WEISS: I’ll start by saying that, you know, it’s like when people say, “How come this person was nominated,” and we don’t select the nominations. We don’t select how many awards there have been created, all that kind of stuff. So we’re being handed a certain number of things in a certain amount of time to do. But it’s sort of a bigger group discussion/decision. Here’s what we brought to it, in my opinion: I’ve seen on other shows that they literally surprise winners. by handing awards on red carpets, or different ways of doing it. We were really clear that if this had to happen, it should happen in the room. It should happen in front of their peers and everybody else. You can find [winner Ludwig Göransson’s] speech online, and it’s great. There’s 22,000 views on it right now. The best director clip has 25,000. So, people are finding it online, and it presents just like it would present on the show. If a decision like this had to be made, we wanted to do it respectfully and make sure that there’s a clip there that we have, you know, when he mentions Ryan Coogler, we have a cutaway. It was important to us that what lives online is as respectful as every other award. It’s not just a name mentioned or a throwaway. So it was really important to us to do it the right way once the decision was made to go there.

It sounds like the composers found out on Friday, which may be why they were a bit taken aback. Was it a last-minute decision?

WEISS: The organization is facilitating communication with the nominees and such, though I’m not exactly sure the thinking behind when and how they were informed.

The other thing that people are really curious about online are the song choices to play folks on. There are some genius ones, like “Return of the Mack” for Macaulay Culkin. But then there’s some head scratchers, like “Pon de Replay” for “The Secret Agent.” What went into the song choices? Was that all up to the DJ?

KIRSHNER: I think that they’re mixing metaphors. There’s a difference between a “play on” and a “winner walk up.” “Return of the Mack,” or “APT.” for Judd Apatow, were obviously clearly set up for those play ons. For the winners, we made the decision this year that we weren’t going to play thheir theme music, because sometimes those are downer songs. As Glenn said, we’re there for a party, and there’s sometimes a 60 to 90 second walk up from the back of the room, and those songs aren’t really energetic. So for the “winner walk ups,” they were just set as party music, no matter who the winner was. For the “presenter play ons,” those were more focused on who the presenter was.

Hearing my colleague Marc Malkin as one of the announcers this year, with Kevin Frazier, was a treat. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an awards show go with two voices of God… so it was clearly an experiment. How did it go, and what was the idea behind doing two voices?

WEISS: First, let me start with again, the Globes are really different because of that ballroom. And some people can be on the stage in 10 to 15 seconds, and other people it will take literally a minute to get to the stage. The thought process for going for two people is, to make an analogy to sports, you usually have a color and a play-by-play person, and when they start analyzing, it becomes a little bit more conversational. What we didn’t want to do this year is just have a bunch of statistics for one person to read, and by the time they get to the stage, you’ve been statistic-ed out.

Basically, there are two people who were both on the red carpet interviewing almost all the people that day, not to mention being very intimate through everything set visits to junkets. The thought process was, let’s look a little bit more inside, instead of just seeing somebody walk through seats and hearing music play. Let’s try to get a little added value. People watch red carpet shows to see what people are wearing, and also to hear this analysis. The attempt there was to give a little bit more to the viewer at home. The question is, and I’m sure this will be analyzed to death, does it get to be too much at one point? Do we need to scale it back? There are many different ways to do it. I think on this year’s show, we really wanted to take some chances with the music, with the commentary, with setting a tone, setting a party atmosphere. Let people enjoy it, but give a little insight along the way as well.

You brought back the map icons too. I enjoyed that feature last year, pointing out where everyone is sitting in that cramped ballroom.

WEISS: There was a lot of discussion about that. We were able to upgrade the technology a little bit and do it a little bit better and make it a little bit more theatrical with lighting and all. It’s an homage to this room being so completely different. You really do kind of get a sense of, “oh, wow, this person’s here, but that person is there.” It’s a cool fun element.