Cellular celeb sightings in a jaded city

The hunt begins on Prince Street. David Friedensohn is packing a new camera phone. He’s on a “snaparazzi” expedition through SoHo, the trendy downtown shopping mall of the retail elite.

Shoppers are pouring over the sidewalks, competing for faux cashmere scarves from street vendors and edging their way into the Apple store.

The intent is to paw through the crowd and find a celebrity, any celebrity, capture the image and phone it in, so to speak, to 2,021 members of NYC Celebrity Sightings, an invitation-only Web community of people who swap photos through their cellphones.

These knockoff paparazzi are certainly not as obnoxious and most definitely not as mercenary as the real thing. They don’t earn a cent for their grainy photos and, in fact, pay about $25 to share a shot.

Still, you have to wonder about the readiness of those little gadgets in so many eager hands. Could they, will they, fracture a delicate zone of privacy that New Yorkers have long afforded the city’s most famous inhabitants, from Dorothy Parker at the bar of the Algonquin to Jackie Kennedy in church on Park Avenue to Bill Clinton scarfing pastrami at Katz’s? This city isn’t prone to gawk. But the new technology is tempting.

Members of NYC Celebrity Sightings insist they don’t stalk, ogle or intrude. They may pretend to dial as they point and shoot, but it is only so they can share.

Similar groups have existed elsewhere -- in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami -- but most faded. Only New York’s is active, perhaps because so many celebrities are drawn to its street life. NYC Celebrity Sightings launches about 150 photos a week in cyberspace: Winona Ryder at Marc Jacobs, Robin Williams on a street corner, the Olsen twins shopping.

A woman known by the handle BIGRAISIN started the group about five years ago and continues to monitor it, mysteriously screening people before they are invited in.

“This is not celebrity chat,” the website warns. “Please no minor celebrities, no fake celebrities, no friends who you think should be celebrities!” BIGRAISIN isn’t shy about kicking people out.

“It’s almost like bird-watchers reporting, ‘Oh, I just saw a ruby-throated hummingbird in Central Park.’ ” says Friedensohn, chief executive of UPOC Networks, a wireless service connecting communities of cellphone users, including NYC Celebrity Sightings. “Instead of ornithologists, they’re celebrity-ologists.”

Friedensohn has run UPOC for only five months. He joined its exclusive celebrity-hunting community a month ago. In fact, before the SoHo expedition -- encouraged by me -- he had only contributed one text message about a Brooke Shields sighting. But emboldened by his mission for the fourth estate, Friedensohn sets out on the trail.

First he searches the way-cool Prada store on Broadway at Prince Street. He looks down the curving zebrawood floor that slopes from street level to the basement and surveys an army of mannequins, their heads all turned in the same direction. On the ground floor he inquires whether any celebrities have been in the store shopping today.

“Of course,” a salesclerk says, reeking of attitude. “Minnie Driver, a few others, can’t remember, always somebody.”

Friedensohn doesn’t bother to punch him out. “Now, Minnie Driver,” he confides as he moves on to women’s shoes, “she’s the type of celebrity I could walk right by and not even recognize.”

Frankly, any of the women sitting in their stockings waiting to try on $400 T-straps could be famous, as far as I’m concerned. They all look the same. Sleek, bored, expensive.

“Yeah, everybody looks glamorous in New York,” Friedensohn says. “Which is a little why I find NYC Celebrity Sightings so distracting. You’re walking around always trying to figure out if that’s somebody you should know.”

On Mercer Street at John Varvatos, a luxury clothing store for men, Friedensohn again asks about celebrities. This salesclerk is less snooty, but he’s not naming names. Yes, tons have been around, he says: “Are you from out of town or something?”

At nearby Marc Jacobs, a long-haired store greeter informs Friedensohn that David Blaine and Owen Wilson dropped in that afternoon.

While in the store, Friedensohn checks out a couple of handbags. He’s thinking of buying one for a female friend. At 43, frankly, this guy seems a little too engaged in real life, running a company, parenting a young son, organizing a social circle, to be a snaparazzi.

Isn’t this the preoccupation of tweenagers and young adults who have nothing better to do than play with their cellphones and drool over Lindsay Lo-mein?

Peter Shankman, also a member of NYC Celebrity Sightings, gets a little defensive at this line of questioning. In a phone interview, during which he admits to watching CNN, e-mailing on his “crackberry” and playing with his cat, he insists snaparazzi, in New York at least, are a better class of people.

“We’re not hanging out in front of red carpets,” says Shankman, a 32-year-old publicist. “If I’m walking down the street and I happen to recognize Big [Chris Noth] from ‘Sex and the City,’ the context is not stalker. It’s ‘Hey, there’s Big with a latte on 57th and Fifth.’ Don’t tell me someone is so pathetic they’re going to run over there to see him. No, it’s about, ‘Oh, check it out. Big’s in our city.’

“In New York it’s all about us anyway,” he adds. “We’re living in the city of record and we’re all part of that.”

After two hours of combing the asphalt jungle, Friedensohn’s trap is still empty. It’s getting dark and the camera phones don’t yet have flashes. Our last stop is the Mercer Hotel, chic Manhattan sister of the Chateau Marmont. The lobby is teeming with Jennifer Aniston look-alikes and a sprinkling of tourists. And there in the corner is ... Owen Wilson. With a big, sweet smile, Wilson looks amiable enough, having a drink with two friends. He also appears to be looking around, confirming the universal truth that celebrities like to gawk too.

Friedensohn pulls out his camera. It’s new. He fumbles with it. Shoot, shoot, I urge him in a panic. We’re kind of faraway, but he fires over my left shoulder. “I’m nervous,” he says. “It’s like when you’re out fishing and you get a pull. I don’t like it. He looks like a nice guy. I wish I had my dog. Then I could ask him if I could take a picture of him with my dog for my son.”

But wouldn’t that be a baldfaced lie? Friedensohn says at least he’d be getting permission.

We examine the photo. It stinks. My left ear is bigger than Wilson’s entire face. We finally have encountered the prey and Friedensohn’s rifle turns out to be a popgun.

“The technology is really new still ... “ he mutters.

As long as New York is filled with people like me who think every cute guy with shaggy hair and tight jeans is a sitcom star, a camera phone will not present a danger to New York’s famous.

But wait until these phones get better and into the hands of enough twentysomethings with endless chutzpah.

Still, there is such a thing in New York as a zone of quality. New Yorkers know the difference. Yes, as the television commercial illustrates, every girl at the table will pull out her camera phone when Steve Tyler walks in the restaurant. But nobody would bother De Niro in Tribeca. (Only Annie Leibovitz has that privilege.) Or Isabella Rossellini, who is often seen walking her dog through Central Park. And what yenta would even dream of pulling out her Nokia in line at Zabar’s and snapping Philip Roth?

No, the camera-equipped phone is for a culture that eats its young. That’s why, on the red carpet or pointed at an “it” girl, it’s a weapon. But for almost everyone else, it fires blanks.

The New York, N.Y. column runs on Mondays. Geraldine Baum can be reached at geraldine.baum@latimes.com.