Shooting Stars

by Jennifer Buhl

  But that’s a problem. As previously noted, I need to meet a man. And being around all that testosterone lately (especially Aaron’s), this is becoming even more obvious.

  Barring one short-lived romance, I haven’t had a serious boyfriend in over four years. I date here and there, mostly there, and don’t sleep around. None of us do. We think too highly of ourselves.

  My friends and I were all raised the same. We developed high self-esteem and a sense of entitlement which assured us that we deserve greatness out of life and out of the partners we choose. Each of us wants it all: a fulfilling career, a wonderful family, health, happiness, and excitement. “Settle for nothing less,” says Georgia.

  But my eyes are a few years wiser, and more jaded. And I’m beginning to doubt my claim on “entitlement.” I deserve as much as the next person, maybe even a little more (I mean, damn I’ve tried hard), but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen.

  * * *

  The contrast between my personal life, in which, dare I say, I like to think I could be one of the celebrities who live nearby, and my professional life, in which some would probably say I stalk them, is a bizarre juxtaposition. Without a doubt, I am beginning to struggle with the feeling of being “just like them” at home, but their slave, or worse, at work.

  “I’m gonna bitchslap you.”

  “You’re gonna what?” I splutter, stunned. I don’t know exactly what “bitchslap” means, but I’m sure it’s not nice.

  “I said, I’m gonna bitchslap you,” he says again. He doesn’t say it loudly—others aren’t far away—but he says it boldly, and he looks me dead in the eyes.

  “Hang on a second. Why don’t you say that for my video?”

  I put down my camera, rummage through my back seat for my point-and-shoot, then turn it on video and start recording. By then, I’m noticeably unnerved and shaking. I point the camera at him.

  “What did you say, Seal?” I think to use his name for sound-bite purposes.

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Did you tell me that you were gonna bitchslap me?”

  “No, I never said that.”

  “I think you did.”

  He moves away. I figure he realizes he doesn’t want to be here, not with video. Seal’s a monster of a guy—a dark, towering man with a cut-up face. No doubt he would knock me out with one bitchslap. But I know I’m in no danger now that I have a video camera.

  He leaves and enters a building. I suddenly realize it’s some kind of school. Ahh, that’s the wrong I committed. I was trying to photograph him in front of his kids’ school. And for a minute I feel a bit badly about that. It was a Saturday, and we had gone to an empty parking lot. I didn’t realize it was a school lot—there were no kids around and no signs indicating it was a school, at least that I noticed. Since I’ve never worked him, I did what paps always do and followed the celebrity to where he parked.

  Seal and Heidi, married at this juncture, are papped frequently and they don’t seem to mind it—or at least they put up with it. But paps inform me later that Seal is a control freak, and his terms are that you can photograph him if you stand off school property shooting onto it, but you can’t enter the lot. Actually, those terms are quite reasonable; I just didn’t know them at the time. In my opinion, Seal could have just said, “You gotta leave—this is a school.” Instead, he said, “I’m gonna bitchslap you.”

  I will come to find it infrequent that a celebrity gives me flack. They know the game (and are often in on it, as you’ll come to realize). Besides, they prefer the police or the public do their dirty work. Seal’s British though, and Aaron says that across the pond, the paps and the celebs hash it out on their own. He says there are plenty of brawls that never make the news.

  Still, the Seal altercation was rather unusual. I will come to find that of celebrities, generally it will be women who give me a hard time. For any number of reasons, female celebrities seem to take out their frustration on their female paparazzi counterparts. Once, Hilary Duff—who loves it most of the time—berated only me with insults when a half dozen male paps are also shooting her. Another female pap, Carol, said she had Marcia Cross get in her face—right up to her nose, so as not to be recorded on the nearby video—and whisper, “Fucking trashy bitch.” The worst I ever heard about came out of Nicole Richie’s mouth. She reportedly told a girl pap, “Your pussy stinks,” when the pap came within earshot. Ouch!

  But in this case, Seal, fully male, was the one to berate me.

  In the end, I got the shot and the video, but nobody bought them. The tabloids didn’t like the look in Seal’s eyes, Bartlet told me, and they weren’t interested in what he “may have” said to me.

  But I know what he said, and I have made a point to never see Seal again. Paps are people too, and now I know one way that celebrities can get us to leave them alone: be really, really mean.

  * * *

  Speaking of mean, let me introduce you to the heroes.

  “Heroes. Miserable rats,” mutters Simon.

  Heroes are what paps call people who should be minding their own business but mind yours instead. They are the people who believe they’ve made the world a better place because of their heroic acts. Heroes are the guys (and girls) who call us “bottom feeders,” tell us to “get a real job” and to “leave the stars alone.” They block for the celebrity even when the celebrity doesn’t want to be blocked. Sometimes heroes are the valet guy and sometimes they are the security guard. Often, though, they’re just a bystander.

  Simon was on a Starbucks’s patio getting heckled by a hero while he waited for Tori Spelling to exit. When she came out, she looked straight at the hero and said, “Shut up.” Then she looked at Simon and said, “Thanks.”

  Everybody loves Tori.

  Paris is the ultimate hero-buster. She flat-out tells security guards to get out of the way when they’re blocking our shots. Whenever I need a confidence boost (often), I work Paris. She walks unhurriedly, doesn’t have an unattractive angle, and drives an easy-to-spot, baby blue Bentley with no tint. The only problem with working Paris is that normally it turns into a gangbang. She really does consistently drive down Robertson slowly in her Bentley picking up paparazzi until she has a line of twenty cars following her. But Paris is a self-made star; she knows what she’s doing. She leveraged her looks, money, her “Hilton” name, and us to get there. Frankly I’m in awe of her. She can do little wrong in my book.

  * * *

  To be clear, Hilary Duff is no Paris Hilton or Tori Spelling.

  Actually, none of the paps are too sure what Hilary is doing these days, post–Lizzie McGuire, or why she still sells. Aaron says she might sing now. “She needs us and she knows it,” he comments. He also tells me that she used to call the paps when she was going out, so not to feel sorry for her when she gets moody.

  Her doorstep (i.e., “she”) leaves early, and I am there. Hilary is being driven in her Range Rover by a security guard. In no way can my twenty-year-old station wagon keep up with the V-trillion engines most celebrities have; the guy blows me again and again.

  I circle the neighborhood looking for the car, and by happenstance, not skill, continue running back into it. Hilary is apparently going somewhere nearby. After I re-find the Range for a third time, security gets frustrated, pulls over, picks up his phone, and calls the police. It’s funny, I’ve never had anyone call the police on me, but I have no doubt that’s what he’s doing.

  Instants later, one of L.A.’s finest shows up. This is my first of what will be way too many interactions with the Los Angeles police force. The officer blocks my car—“They love doing that,” Aaron says—and starts in with the hassle: “Your registration is invalid.” (No, it isn’t, or you would give me a ticket.) “You have an outstanding citation.” (“Really, for what?” I ask, honestly surprised. There is no response.) Eventually I realize he’s trying to get me to admit to something, anything I might have hidden in my closet. Finally, he leaves with the threat,
“I’ve written down your details.” I’m pretty sure he can’t do anything with “my details” and is just trying to intimidate me, but he’s succeeded. I won’t sleep tonight.

  Chapter 5

  After spending two years driving around the streets of L.A., I think it’s unlikely the paparazzi will ever become as bountiful as the Los Angeles police force.

  Still, we are too many.

  According to Simon, the proliferation of paps, and in turn gangbangs, has occurred over the last four or five years. Simon started papping before the proliferation and has seen the business transition both in ethnicity—Europeans to Hispanics—and in numbers—from fifty to five hundred.

  “I just don’t like the way they’re taking over the business,” Simon says about the gangbangers. “Why can’t they come in moderation? Fuck it, they pull in the cousins and the brothers and the uncles. They’re like locusts, they are.”

  Although it sounds harsh, his harangue is told with a hint of love. Simon is the nicest guy in the business. Everyone says it. He never gets upset when his job is jumped or when someone blocks him out. “That’s the game, luv. Gotta accept it,” he tells me. Even when the police hassle him, Simon just says, “Cops got a job to do too. Let’s move on.”

  But new paps, myself included, pose a problem for the veterans, or old-school paps as they like to call themselves. French and British “classically trained” newspaper photogs—Aaron, Simon, and most CXN paps—are considered old-school. Their predecessors came to the United States in the ’80s and ’90s and basically started the American paparazzi and tabloid industry. Many of them pulled in half a million dollars a year.

  New-school paps—Latinos for the most part, mainly Mexican and Brazilian7—started to shoot in the early 2000s. But they did not come with organized, cumbersome work visas like the British and French. Rather, they came in droves. These paps were just “here,” ready to work. Then they recruited their families and their friends and their friends’ families. New-school paps stole shots—and paychecks—from the Europeans and overall drove prices down by increasing the supply of pictures on the market. So when a celeb might have gotten shot once a month by an incognito pap before, now she was getting shot once a week, or more, and by several guys at once. As you can see, the increase in paparazzi has not been good for anyone, celebrity or paparazzi. (It is, however, good for you, the public. You now have much more to see. Free enterprise at its finest.)

  The addition of new-school paps has also changed the rules. For example, Simon tells me that it used to be when you rocked up to a doorstep and someone else was already there, you’d leave. Staying would be considered jumping, and bad etiquette. But nowadays there are just too many paps and too few celebs for that to be practical, and jumping protocol has changed.

  Today, “jumping” means moving in on a story when the celeb and paparazzi have already left the doorstep. The story—i.e., the celeb and accompanying pap (or paps)—is either on the road or at a location.

  Most likely, a story will not get jumped if it is not in town—i.e., not in Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, or another area of high pap concentration. If a story gets jumped outside of town, then it is a pap’s right to block other paps if he or she is able. On the other hand, if a story goes to town, or as it passes through town, jumping is a pap’s biggest threat. The paparazzi blanket town, so if you and your story are spotted and jumped in town, there’s not much you can do.

  Once a pap is jumped by another pap, the risk of the story being jumped again goes up exponentially. The more paps on a story, the more likely it is that other paps will spot it, or call in their friends. Once jumping starts, it doesn’t take long to accumulate a gangbang.

  Here’s what it’s like to run across a celebrity gangbang, which I will become quite familiar with in the ensuing months:

  You’re trolling. Neil George, a trendy Beverly Hills salon, is on your troll route. Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie, Cameron Diaz, and other celebs get their hair done at Neil George. Every time you pass the salon, by instinct, you look for celebrities’ cars that are parked or paps standing outside. If a celebrity’s car is there, the paparazzi are going to notice. And if you spy paps, you know you’ve found a story.

  You park, pay your meter, grab your short-and-flash, and walk over. No one says hello. No one looks at you. No one smiles. You see these people every day, but you’d prefer never to see most of them again.

  You stand around (you never sit) for one, two, three hours (hair extensions, which the celebrities love, take forever). All the while you try to ignore the buzz from loudmouth paps cackling at one another’s juvenile jokes.

  Eventually, Bozo Bystander walks by. He insists on knowing who’s inside.

  “Who you waiting on?” he says. He addresses the group as a whole but tries to make eye contact with one of us.

  Our first tactic: ignore him. We avert our gaze. No one wants to respond. A group of twenty acts as if they don’t hear the guy.

  He asks again, louder this time.

  Again, we ignore.

  Sometimes he leaves, which is good for all of us. But sometimes he persists. He repositions like a gnat, from one ear to another. “Who’s inside?” he keeps saying.

  Someone can’t take it anymore. The pap who breaks responds with a made-up celebrity name: Kate Brando, he might say. Bozo is confused. Should I know who that is? Maybe I’m the idiot?

  The reason we don’t tell the pedestrian the truth—“Christina Applegate, Sandra Bullock, Natalie Portman”—is not because we’re being obstinate; rather, it’s because we’re conditioned for Bozo Bystander’s response. We know what he’ll say. He’ll call us either “losers,” “bottom feeders,” or “parasites.” Or he will sneer, “Get a real job.” And then, as we’d only hoped in the first place, he will leave, feeling he’s done his good deed for the day by making us feel stupid.

  The ground you stake at the gangbang is crucial, and you don’t move around a lot. Like a lion, you’re fully dialed in to where everyone is in relation to everyone else, and “the prey”: Where are the holes in the crowd? Where is the competition? Which way will the star walk? A strong undercurrent is flowing, and everyone is taking it in. The reason you know this is because the minute you infringe upon someone else’s space, you feel it. It might be subtle—a look, a growl—or it could be more—a shove—but one way or the other, you’ll be told you’re in another’s territory.

  By this time, the sun has moved a million miles over your head. You may have waited half a day already. You’re exhausted.

  Finally, the star exits. Everything goes down in about fifteen seconds. The guys closest to the star make themselves as dense and sticky as possible, blocking out anyone they can. They try to keep their bodies close together and between the star and the rest of the mass. They use ultra-wide-angle lenses (16mms), which have the ability to snap a full-length from about three feet away but often distort the image into a banana shape.

  Once the star drives off, the paps take flight in a matter of seconds, getting on the follow or moving to another story. Rarely do I follow: the guys have had hours for the testosterone to build in their bodies, and it will be nasty.

  When I look at my shots after this kind of gangbang, I may have twenty. All of them with at least one pap, or part of a pap, in them. If I have two clean headshots where I can crop out the pap/pap part and I haven’t chopped off the top of the star’s hair (which she’s just had done), then I think well done.

  Side note: On extended gangbangs when we, in mass, follow the celeb as she is shopping all over town, the celeb will usually engage us. After a period of time, she will ask something along the lines of: “Don’t you guys have enough yet?”

  A sensible question. If I were her, I’d wonder the same. But the fact is, no. We usually don’t. What the celeb doesn’t understand is that getting a full-length with all her eyes and teeth and feet and forehead in frame, and without other people, is no simple task. Melrose Avenue is not a red carpet, and we c
an’t “go long” and form lines. By golly, we’re in the trenches!

  * * *

  When I tell my mom my gangbang stories, she tells me to quit. “You aren’t gonna meet any quality guys in this paparazzi business,” she says. “Why don’t you get a job as a secretary in a law firm?” In other words, why don’t you leave the nasty paps to their nasty ways, and find an agreeable husband elsewhere? A nice thought, Ma, but not all that helpful.

  The girls want me to quit too. They tell me I’m being affected: “You’re so negative these days. You never used to be like that.”

  I get where they’re coming from—my skin’s not nearly as tough as it needs to be—but they don’t quite get me either. Yes, I’m overwhelmed. Paparazzi-ing is arduous, intimidating work, and it’s not easy being a female or a neophyte in this cutthroat industry. It’s true, frequent failures and demoralizing lows engulf me, but the highs are insane. And the adrenaline nourishes me. Papping is giving me back an energy and excitement for life that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s flat-out FUN! Besides, I know I can do it. And do it well.

  The fact is, I need to live in the moment—I have always needed that—and right now, life is giving me “a moment.” I identified at a young age that time is my most precious resource. If I waste time, I feel like I’m wasting life. That’s why I don’t have a nine-to-five structured career: I can’t bear to waste eight hours a day if I don’t love what I’m doing. I’d rather have no money. Don’t get me wrong, my résumé is impressive. I’ve been quite successful professionally. I was once a CPA. I was a software consultant too. But those white-walled office jobs where I had to respect status quo were a dreadful fit for my personality. I got paid well, but what was the point if I thought I was wasting my life? When I quit the corporate world, I moved to Belgium with a boyfriend and went back to school for an MBA. Graduate school was not something I needed professionally; it was just a way to escape my previous reality, and at the time, not knowing anything other than white-collar professions, it seemed like a good choice. In retrospect, I wish I’d studied physical therapy or bartending or something I could have actually seen myself doing. Two years later I returned to the States, split with the boyfriend, and started looking for a new career. CNN was based in Atlanta, where I was living, and looked like a fun place to work. Since my new criterion for a job was it must be fun, I set my sights on the network. It took me six months to get hired, and it was worth the wait. I loved it. I found my passion in media and journalism: creative work that was also a business. My jobs as a field and guest producer were challenging, rewarding, artistic, and editorial. But after three years, wanderlust got ahold of me again, so I quit CNN to travel. I backpacked through Turkey, India, and Thailand, and then made my way to New Zealand where I picked up freelance production jobs as I could find them while continuing to live as a traveler (i.e., in hostels). After a year in New Zealand, I went to Australia to work on a movie set before circling back through Asia and Europe and returning home two years later. That’s when I landed in L.A.