New Kids on the Block to Receive Star on Hollywood Walk of Fame
Blockheads, here’s another milestone to get excited about: New Kids on the Block will soon join the elite on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next month, right up there next to fellow Boston natives Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. Surprisingly, there are no Afflecks on the Walk of Fame yet.
A large ceremony will take place on October 9 on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. The exact location of the star will be 7072 Hollywood Boulevard between Sycamore and La Brea Streets. The ceremony, expecting a large turnout of fans, will be live-streamed at 2:30 p.m. EST on walkoffame.com.
The selection, which involves a nomination process, was led by a local fan named Melissa Buja, 40, of Leominster, Mass. She worked with the producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Ana Martinez, through the nomination process.
“The process involves a committee that meets once a year. We have a deadline by the end of May. Anyone can be nominated,” Martinez says. Once nominated, each nominee is compared with credentials: “awards, Grammys, American Music Awards for these guys. And also philanthropic work is required.”
The process for NKOTB, however, actually took much longer than anticipated.
“The first time I submitted the application was back in 2011,” Buja says. “The next step was for the management team to sign off on [the paperwork] in order for it to go to the committee. Flash forward to New Kids’ Fenway show, I did my VIP, and in talking to Donnie [Wahlberg], I told him he needed to get this form signed. He directed me to Jared [Paul] who was like, ‘We’ll get it done, we’ll get it done.'”
He ended up missing the deadline, so when Buja resubmitted the application in 2012, she mailed the forms directly to Paul out in Los Angeles. He then signed, and, voila, successfully mailed them back directly to the Walk of Fame.
According to Martinez, the committee votes on 200-300 applications per year, meaning they can only choose three to four nominees per category (Motion Pictures, Television, Recording, Live Theatre/Performance, Radio). “The fans have been on me for two years,” Martinez says. So it’s definitely a decent turnout for the New Kids group.
“It’s been a dream of mine since 1994,” Buja says. “But the guys earned it themselves.”
