How one man made an Oklahoma town the unlikely capital of the awards statuette. Now, he's set his sights on Oscar.
Via: societyawards.com
The biggest stash of Golden Globes isn’t in Hollywood, but in a warehouse in a tiny town in the northeast corner of Oklahoma called Grove (population: 6,623).
Society Awards’ warehouse is at the end of a 50-foot hallway, the walls and ceiling of which are coated in a thick, vinyl, gold wallpaper. Gold chandeliers hang from the ceiling, and gold sconces line the walls.
This is all according Society Awards’ CEO David Mortiz; I’m taking his word for it. I’ve never been. Neither have the organizers of the Golden Globes, or any of the other shows for which Society Awards manufactures trophies. The hallway is there for those people, though, should they ever decide to visit the facility.
“Nobody ever, uh, comes there,” Mortiz says after describing the hallway. He is speaking on the phone from Society Awards headquarters in Queens, New York. “But just in case they do, it will be a really nice, um, hallway.”
It's touches like these that earned Society Awards the privilege of manufacturing the Golden Globe, the MTV Moon Man, the MTV Movie Award, the Clio, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and many, many other awards.
Society Awards' David Moritz.
Via: societyawards.com
“We don’t yet make the Oscars — we hope to soon — but we make pretty much everything else,” Mortiz says. (Chicago-based R.S. Owens Company, which makes the Oscars statue as well as the Emmy, was acquired by Indianapolis-based St. Regis Crystal in November.)
Moritz, 31, was born in New Jersey but attended high school in Grove, before moving back to the tri-state area to attend NYU, then Cordoza Law School. He studied entertainment law, but shortly after graduating he got the idea of getting into the award manufacturing business in his head.
