Instead of focusing on Hollywood’s boldface names, the new TMZ Selfie Tour gives someone else the star treatment: You. In its first expansion since launching celeb-spotting rides in 2011, the company seeks out some of the city’s most iconic buildings and backdrops while offering to help those who plunk down $59 improve their selfie game.
The daily tour, which launched Oct. 16. was the brainchild of TMZ Senior VP, Business Development & Growth Stuart Alpert, who says the idea bubbled after discussions with TMZ founder Harvey Levin about how ways to expand the tour offerings.
“A few months ago, I was out and about in Hollywood and West Hollywood,” Alpert tells The Times, “And I’d see all these young people taking selfies at all these iconic locations — like the [Paul Smith boutique] pink wall — I thought it was fascinating. So I thought that this was something that could be so much fun — making the next extension of our tour product a curated tour of a lot of the iconic spots in Hollywood, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills [and down] Melrose where our guests can get their own selfies with context and narrative from the tour guides.”
I tell Alpert that sounds like the tour is giving the A-list treatment to landmarks. “That’s right,” he responded emphatically. “And it gives our guests a chance to be a star in their own right in front of these locations that so many other influencers and celebrities have taken photos in front of. And along the way we’re also giving some tips here and there; how to get your best shot, where to stand.”
As inane as a selfie tour sounds, it’s not the first effort to leverage the look-at-me compulsion (Museum of Selfies circa 2018, I’m looking at you). And when you really think about it, the notion of swapping out celeb-spotting for landmark drive-bys makes sense. After all, Hollywood’s elite are slippery as eels in the wild, busy people with things to do and places — most often away from bright red tour buses — to be. The Capitol Records Building and Rodeo Drive? Not so much.
How is the new tour different from the long-running TMZ Celebrity Tour? Instead of several departures daily, there’s just one departing at 2 p.m. And it’s slightly longer, clocking in at 2½ to 3 hours, which allows for getting on and off the bus. It’s got just a handful of stops — nine in all right now — and goes roughly in the opposite direction from the flagship tour (down the Sunset Strip through West Hollywood to Beverly Hills, then looping back down Melrose past Paramount and back up to Hollywood). Many of the spots are instantly recognizable landmarks; buildings and signage with links to the industry while others lean more into the selfie side. There are some baffling omissions (like the Hollywood sign, which seems like a no-brainer), but Alpert said some of those had to do with logistics and time constraints.
It also skews slightly younger, says TMZ’s social media manager Jaysn Lewis. “Not as young as you’d think, though,” Lewis says, noting that the tour tends to attract those “in the 30- to 35-years-old range, compared to the mid-50s for the [original tour].”
As someone who lives within about a five-minute drive of all of the stops on the tour, but takes a lousy selfie, I found the prospect of learning to up my phone photography game compelling. If the TMZ Selfie Tour could help me look like even slightly less than a ham-handed buffoon in pictures of my own taking it would be worth the price. So, with the bar set just that low, I headed off on a Friday afternoon to snap some celebrity-level selfies.
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Before embarking on our voyage, I had a chance to chat with the tour’s affable guide, Eunice Elliott at the TMZ kiosk just inside the Hard Rock Cafe on a tourist-heavy stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. She explained that her selfie expertise came from her stint as a morning news anchor at a Birmingham, Ala., TV station.
“Before I went on the air, I would always take a selfie as a way of checking my hair and makeup,” Elliott tells The Times. “So I’ve learned a few things. One is that it’s the angle — it’s always the angle. Another is to say in your head — not out loud but just in your head — ‘I know you see me.’ Have that ‘I know you see me’ energy.”
With that as my only preflight instruction, I made my way to the bright red, 25-seat, open-sided TMZ tour bus.
“I’m your tour guide,” Elliott says to the group, “but think of me as your personal paparazzi.” She looks at us, 17 in all, ranging in age from early 20s to early 60s and asks the million-dollar question: “Who here would consider themselves a pretty good selfie-taker?” When a single hand jabs the air in affirmation, Elliott smiles.
As the bus starts to move, she launches into her spiel, which includes reminding us to tag our posts with #tmzselfietour. “When you use that hashtag, I’m able to pull that immediately from your Instagram and put it up on the screen,” Elliott explains, pointing to the handful of small, flip-down video screens over the bus seats. “And then we’re going to have a little contest to see who feels like they got the best selfie from each stop. And I do have prizes!”
As the bus lumbers down Hollywood Boulevard toward the first tour stop, Elliott punches a few buttons and a pre-recorded video begins: “How to grab the best selfie in five easy steps.”
The owner of a WeHo sex-toy boutique has opened the doors of an ambitious three-business, two-story, one-stop vice shop on Santa Monica Boulevard.
The bus rolls up in front of the Capitol Records Building and disgorges its cadre of selfie seekers. “Five minutes for this stop,” Elliott advises. Racing against the clock, I twist my iPhone all kinds of ways trying to find a framing that includes both my head and the entirety of the building behind me while keeping Elliott’s pre-stop advice top of mind. (“The further away you are,” she’d told us, “the more of the building you’ll get.”) The best of my efforts makes me look like a pelican’s neck pouch sporting sunglasses. By 2:33 p.m., we’re back on the bus, rolling toward our next stop.
“They need chargers on this bus,” says Candice Evans, a 23-year-old from Claremont. She’s not wrong. I loan her mine.
Our driver, Vargas, stops just short of the Paramount Studios Melrose Gate and we scuttle out, not trying to seem too eager to take pictures of ourselves again so soon. I try to remember some of the selfie tips and cock my head slightly to the right, like a dog who thinks he hears a treat bag opening three rooms away. I’m not totally happy with the result. But it feels markedly better, and there’s enough of the gate centered behind me that it mercifully pulls focus from my boiled-potato head.
Few of my fellow bus riders seem to be scaling the same steep learning curve that I am (well, except the one guy who hasn’t gotten off the bus at all yet). They whip out their phones with confidence, extend their arms to the right distance and tilt their heads just so. When their selfies pop up on the bus’ video monitors they look like natural-born influencers. I decide that the next time Elliott offers her assistance to help set up — or even take — a selfie-stop photo, I’m going to take her up on it.
Passing Pink’s Hot Dogs prompts Elliott to pose the query that has roiled the internet and divided many a family: “Is a hotdog a sandwich?” The bus is unable to come to a consensus. The philosophical gymnastics turn out to be a good warm-up when we arrive at our third stop — a pair of colorful wings painted against a pink backdrop by artist Colette Miller, as part of her Global Angel Wings Project. A beautiful piece of street art to be sure, but sans yard-long arms, one that’s nigh impossible to capture as a selfie.
TMZ Selfie Tour
$59 per person
departs at 2 p.m. daily from
6801 Hollywood Boulevard
tmztour.com
Fellow bus-rider Blair Moon offers to snap my picture, and suggests I extend my arms and drop my wrists to mimic the arc of the wings. As I do, he snaps away, resulting in a humorous shot I’m not totally unhappy with. But as I get back on the bus, I muse aloud: “When is a selfie not a selfie?”
Before we scramble to post up in front of the Instagram-famous Paul Smith pink wall, Elliott offers some advice. “Try some ‘I know you see me’ energy out there,” she says. I try mightily, but my efforts at capturing the perfect shot are thwarted by the shadows cast by the bright mid-afternoon sun. Watching my struggle, Elliott asks for my phone. I hand it over and look away, ashamed at my failing. That’s when she takes the kind of photo I want on my funeral easel; I look cool and confident, and thanks to the way I’ve placed my hands on my hips and turned my face to look just past the camera to the left I seem a good 30 pounds lighter. I decide I’m going to be all about the “I know you see me” energy all the time.
By the time we arrive at the Beverly Hills Shield, the busload of selfie seekers seems to have lost its energy, having been mired in rush-hour traffic so long, Elliott jokes it should be its own stop on the tour. Not me, though. I keep looking at the not-selfie that Elliott took of me trying to reverse engineer what made it work. We’re off and back on the bus in five minutes flat.
A smartphone selfie captures Cooper Terle, 27, far left, with Blair Moon, 26, both from Hollywood, in front of the pink wall at the Paul Smith Store on Melrose Avenue . (Blair Moon)
Raquel Morales, 60, of Los Angeles, takes a selfie in front of 800-pound “Peace and Love” statue designed by Ringo Starr, former member of the Beatles, on Santa Monica Blvd. in Beverly Hills. (Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
We hit a flurry of stops — first a three-for-one, giving us shots at Insta fame in front of a palm-tree-lined street, Ringo Starr’s “Peace & Love” sculpture and a Beverly Hills sign, and then a two-fer, via Rodeo and the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. At the first of these I ask my charger-borrowing buddy what she thought of the selfie tour.
“I like it,” Evans says, “because it’s interactive. You’re hopping on and off the bus instead of just sitting there the whole time.”
By the time we hit our last stop — the Beverly Hills Hotel — even the most recalictrant seem to be enjoying the challenge of upping their selfie game, and everybody seems to be bonding. Someone makes an offhand mention of “Zoolander,” and, before you can say orange mocha frappuccino I’m throwing my best blue steel look with a complete stranger in front of the hotel’s instantly recognizable, flora-flanked green-and-white sign.
This is where Elliott drops some more hot selfie knowledge on me. “Try focusing on the sign first — then yourself,” she said. “And remember you can use the side button [to take the picture].” Mind. blown.
As the tour began to wend its way back to where our navel-gazing tour began, I started swiping through the myriad photos. While none of them were spectacular (my pink wall not-selfie not withstanding) the ones I took toward the end of the day felt like a marked improvement over the earlier ones. But even after filling my phone with 179 photos of Hollywood-related signage and world-famous building facades over 2½ hours, there was a hole that no amount of self-instilled star power could fill: an old-fashioned celebrity sighting.
Then Elliott pointed out the open side of the bus toward the corner of Sunset and Doheny like Ahab spotting Moby Dick. Necks craned and eyes swiveled as a black SUV with tinted windows inched into traffic.
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“It’s Judd Apatow!” she said. “Hey, Judd Apatow!” Elliott brandished her nearby video camera (all the TMZ tour guides have them in the event of in-the-wild encounters) and aimed it out the window. The figure in the back, all but obscured by the tinting, waved gamely through an open one-third slice of window as the SUV slid by us. Was it actually the director and screenwriter, the guy who gave us “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up”? It could just as easily have been any random dude in an Uber Black. Still, it felt like I was, just for a few minutes, celebrity-adjacent. Judd Apatow, or whoever we had convinced ourselves was him, and I were sharing a traffic jam.
I forget all about our close maybe-Apatow encounter when I get a text from my sister in Vermont: “Dude — saw your picture on Instagram — have you lost weight?? Or is it a really good photographer?” She’s referring to my #pinkwall post. I eventually admit it’s the photographer, but realize I’ve just gotten irrefutable proof that Elliott‘s “I know you see me” energy is doing something.
That, coupled with the way TMZ’s new tour pivots from one type of celebrity adjacency to another makes me think they’re onto something. Does it really matter, in the era of the endless scroll, whether the famous person or thing you’re throwing peace signs next to for your friends likes is Judd Apatow or Brad Pitt or a studio gate? A pink wall or a Beverly Hills road sign that’s just as instantly recognizable?
TMZ clearly seems to think so. That’s why, when I spoke to Alpert, just 12 days after the first Hollywood-based selfie bus rolled into service, he was already in full expansion mode.
“Our next venture is probably going to be extending this selfie tour concept to Las Vegas,” he says. “We’re already in discussions to develop that with our partners Big Bus Tours. And then Washington, D.C., we also have our eye on that.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but I swear I could feel Alpert’s “I know you see me” energy right through the phone.
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