Michael De Luca was backstage at the Dolby Theatre when the inconceivable happened: The wrong movie was named best picture at the Oscars.
“I heard fellow producer Jennifer Todd next to me,” says De Luca in his first comments about the most infamous moment in Academy Awards history. He spoke exclusively on KCRW’s The Business radio show, set to air March 2.
My Oscar Book:
“It was like the Hindenburg report. I literally heard, ‘Oh my God! He got the wrong envelope!’ And then it was slow motion. You perceive things slowly as the adrenaline rises and the cortisol floods your system.”
De Luca rushed to the hotline that linked producers and key staff. “We have a producers’ table backstage, and that’s where Jen and I were. It’s where we watched the whole show. My concern was getting host Jimmy Kimmel up there and saying, ‘Goodnight, everybody.’ But to Jimmy’s credit, he was already on the way. He was sitting with Matt Damon to do the scripted final bit. It was going to be a kicker with Matt, and he saw what was happening and jumped onstage.”
The subsequent chaos — the two minutes and 30 seconds from when presenter Faye Dunaway announced, La La Land, to producer Jordan Horowitz stepping forward and revealing, “This is not a joke,” and that Moonlight was the winner,
Backstage players quickly understood what had gone wrong: An envelope containing Emma Stone’s name as best actress had been given to presenter Beatty instead of the one with best picture.
Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs — facing a second storm of criticism after the previous two years’ #OscarsSoWhite outcry–came backstage with Academy CEO Dawn Hudson to gather a team to answer questions. “After it was over and everyone was crowding backstage, I ran into the theater to scoop up my wife and kids and brought them back to my production office,” says De Luca. “By the time I went back to the green room, Dawn was already in conversation with the players, just trying to figure out what happened. Everyone was shaken. Everybody looked white-faced and the blood was just drained from them.”
That scandal has cast pall over the Oscars and especially over the reputation of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Academy’s accounting firm for 83 years, as well as its managing partner, Brian Cullinan, whose “human error” was cited as reason for the mix-up.
Overshadowing Other Shocking Moments
The fiasco was unprecedented in 89 years of Oscar history. It immediately overshadowed such notorious moments as Sacheen Littlefeather’s surprise appearance in 1973 to decline Marlon Brando’s award for The Godfather, or the streaker who tried to upstage David Niven in 1974.
Much to Boone Isaacs’ and Hudson’s fury, nobody was prepared to accept blame, which instead seemed to accrue to Beatty and Dunaway.
Beatty himself seemed upset in an email two days after the show: “Rather than for me to respond to questions from the press about the Academy ceremony,” he wrote, “I feel it would be more appropriate for the president of the Academy, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, to publicly clarify what happened as soon as possible.”
After the best picture mix-up at Sunday’s Oscars, producer Michael De Luca talked on KCRW’s The Business radio show, March 2.
Breaking down the Oscars night flub, when presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the best picture instead of the correct winner, Moonlight, De Luca was “heartbroken” over the moment.
“We really had empathy, being producers ourselves,” he said of himself and co-producer, Jennifer Todd. “Just what that must have felt like for the La La Land team, and then the Moonlight team being robbed of their full moment in the sun, it was heartbreaking.”
“It’s one of those mistakes everyone says will never happen. We didn’t in our wildest dreams think we had to have a conversation about what if the worst thing that could ever happen happens. Even when someone brought up, what if this happens? Everyone’s like, ‘Don’t worry about it, they have protocols, it’s a fool-proof system.’ I think they said the same thing about the Titanic and icebergs. It’s fine, it’s never gonna happen, don’t worry about it.’”
After the mix-up and amid the chaos, the scene backstage “became like Murder, She Wrote, instantly, of like, how did this happen?”
In the blame game after the onstage mistake, De Luca commends Beatty: “I actually think Beatty is the unsung hero here, completely heroic,” he said. “I think he was showing her [Dunaway] the card, like, ‘hey are you seeing what I’m seeing? I think a mistake’s been made here.’ To me, they are heroes and completely in the clear.”
He learned after the fact that the two accountants in charge of the envelopes also memorize each category’s winner. “If I was in that job, and I know I’m Monday morning quarterbacking, which I detest, but I feel like if it’s my one job, if I heard the wrong name, I’d walk directly to Warren Beatty and say ‘you got the wrong envelope, here’s the right envelope,’ and make charming moment out of it.”
Spielberg’s Reaction:
The day after the confusion, he got many emails congratulating him on a well-run show, but one call came immediately. “I did get one instant phone call from Spielberg, who watched the show with friends at screening room and thought it was great, and it was real pep talk. I love him for it, it was really appreciated.”
Moonlight should have been the lead story
“I would have loved the story to be Moonlight, this little film that has nobody traditional in it, but it celebrates African-American LGBT culture, won best picture. It’s tremendous landmark and underdog story, and that should have been the lead story.”
