A Paparazzo’s Lessons on How Stars Are Born

Just before Christmas, I became acquainted with an aspect of Los Angeles that I hadn’t experienced since moving here from London two years ago. It happened when I spent a week “on the beat” with one of the city’s top paparazzi photographers, Mr. E.L. Woody.

Coming to live in L.A. without even a passing interest in stars and the phenomenon of modern fame would have been as perverse as avoiding art and sculpture in Florence. This city being the world headquarters of celebrity-dom, I have felt fairly drenched in the stuff. But while making a documentary about Woody (as he’s known) for British TV, with no studio people around, no publicists or handlers, I felt like I was at the hard coal face of the Cult of Celebrity.

Woody is a 54-year-old Vietnam vet, an outspoken Texan who for 15 years has been in Hollywood covering the good, the bad and the ugly among the seemingly ever-increasing army of celebrities in the world capital of fame. Capturing the pattern of Woody’s working schedule meant that the day started around 10 p.m. and carried on until the early hours, the period during which he does most of his hunting. It was a world of famous-for-five-minute nightclubs, the backdoors of swank restaurants, and last-minute midnight dashes across town.

It was a landscape populated by a cast of characters--autograph fiends, amateur video jocks, flower ladies--who all seemed to know each other and who could be spotted regularly at each venue where we went to film. This after-hours version of L.A. life was in its way more colorful than anything I’d ever seen on the streets during the waking hours of my legit life; outside Mr. Chow’s, for example, waiting for Gwyneth Paltrow to emerge with a suspected new boyfriend, I found myself becoming just as expectant as Woody.

And for him, it’s a world requiring constant vigilance--he can spot the well-known face at 20 yards now, even if it’s hidden under the obligatory baseball cap and in the midst of 10 or so hangers-on. However, as he explained to us, it’s a terrain that in the past decade he has seen become more and more crowded. The new faces are not necessarily those of stars, and indeed, even if they were, Woody is the first to admit that pictures of well-known personalities on their own, doing nothing of note, are worth little to him in terms of money or effort. No, the new interlopers are his colleagues in what used to be called the mainstream, or more pompously, the legitimate media.

Since the landmark elevation of gossip and celebrity scandal into a national obsession that was undoubtedly the O.J. trial, the picture or piece of video footage most in demand from Woody and his colleagues is the one featuring a celebrity in a “newsworthy” incident or set of circumstances. Time and again throughout the ‘90s, events that would once have been purely paparazzi stories, covered in print by gossip columnists, have been given the status of serious news.

During the unfortunate Monica Lewinsky business, Woody would fight to take pictures or shoot video amid a massive, swirling sea of cameras, many of which belonged to the networks and news organizations that would routinely and, in Woody’s eyes, hypocritically point the finger at the supposedly lower-than-low paparazzi.

More recently, the huge blurring of the lines was illustrated by the recent coverage of Robert Downey Jr. A decade ago, a story such as this about a relatively minorHollywood film star and his rearrest for drug possession would in no way have been front-cover nor TV headline news. It would have been a story that belonged to Woody and his guys alone.

Woody’s experiences echo my own, though from a different point of view, perhaps. In the past five years, working in TV in England and America, one has witnessed celebrity mania escalate to a level of such intensity that nobody can quite remember anymore why it was there in the first place. It no longer seems to bear any relationship to what one could assess as reasonably being public interest.

In television, every new show or format now needs a celebrity name attached; even the president had to be interviewed by Leonardo DiCaprio for ABC’s Earth Day special. Esoteric or even vaguely unfamiliar material is jettisoned in favor of the presence of a supposedly famous face, however minor or only vaguely familiar it might be. My friends working in the print media have also found their editors to be increasingly rabid in their demands for celebrity subject matter, however trivial, and however inconsequential the personality.

In the UK, the media mania for the famous is, if anything, more intense than in the U.S., the birthplace of the very concept of modern fame. This obsession, which has a jaggedly cruel edge that Americans often find hard to comprehend, has increased at the same pace with which the traditional hierarchy of British society has declined. As the Royal family has become socially belittled in the public eye, so has grown the wall-to-wall coverage of the antics of minor TV hosts and soap stars. Perhaps the greatest gift to the British media in recent years was Madonna’s decision to live and get married in the UK; there, at last, was a real bona fide star to feed on.

The British have also recently exported to this country a London institution that has, as its basis, the celebration of the famous. Madame Tussaud’s wax museum has been for years London’s top tourist attraction, its building on Baker Street attracting famously huge lines. Now, it has a recently opened outpost on Manhattan’s 42nd Street. When I visited it over Christmas, the museum provided an interesting counterpoint to my experiences with Woody. The crowds are already big, and the new exhibit looks likely to be just as much of a draw as the original.

I’d been told that for many Americans, the notion of a wax exhibit conjured up images of a cheesy fairground attraction (a reasonable view, I’d say, having had the misfortune of touring the dreadful Hollywood Wax Museum). Walking round the new Tussaud’s with its 200 models of the rich, the famous, the good and the great, it was interesting to hear the squeals of delight from camera-popping tourists, many of whom, one suspects, were not prepared for the generally excellent likenesses on show.

But just as Woody’s experiences illustrate how celebrity and real news are now interchangeable, so in small but highly symbolic ways, Tussaud’s models illustrate the changing perception of fame. Ted Turner, Jodie Foster, Ivana Trump, Matt Lauer--all appear together with little distinction. JFK rubs shoulders with Fred Astaire, Elton John with the Duchess of York. The one thing they all have in common--the only thing--is that they are all celebrities. The famous have become interchangeable commodities. And as such, it seemed to me that the crowds, busy draping themselves over the freely accessible models, wanted more than anything to have their pictures taken with someone--anyone--famous, almost regardless of what they were famous for.

Adoration of real stars, or respect for particular achievement, is not what the current all-consuming cult of celebrity is about. The Era of the Star, in the traditional sense, has essentially passed, as Hollywood knows in its heart. Once totally obscure game-show contestants can achieve celebrity as intense as any movie star. So far as modern movies are concerned, only a tiny handful of the seemingly countless household names are capable of “opening” a film. For example, Russell Crowe, perhaps the only real movie star to emerge over the past rather lousy year, has been interviewed, photographed and gushed over in the media. But in terms of the moviegoing public, this attention has not translated into box-office power, as the failure of the highly publicized “Proof of Life” illustrates. So why is the cult of celebrity seemingly unstoppable? Perhaps it represents the final triumph of the cult of the individual, as preached and practiced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. And there is surely much in the argument that the wholesale death of ideology, of meaningful political discussion, or indeed of any kind of wider public “cause” or movement, has left a gaping hole, a void being filled by endless celebrity trivia and pseudo-news. Indeed, the day-in-day-out coverage of Washington has become a matter of personal styles and surfaces.

But the cult of celebrity seems most to symbolize a wider need for visibility. There is the growing sense that for something to exist, whether it be a personal achievement, an individual asset or a simple emotion, it must be seen to exist. In a marketing-obsessed age where how things are perceived counts as more important than how they actually are, being seen to exist means being on TV or on a magazine cover. We look at celebrities increasingly as people who have achieved existence, however they got there. And it follows that somehow, whether by emulating them, reading about them or simply being near them, we can achieve an existence too. Now, we are all part not so much of a cult of celebrity, but a cult of visibility.