Paparazzi Links & Tidbits
...The light of stardom draws mosquitos

General Links for "Paparazzi" topics"

Wikipedia Links for "Paparazzi":

Tidbits

  • Body count - Worldwide, there are an estimated 1,500 paparazzi with 800 working in Los Angeles. (This factoid comes from Fortune magazine, March 2, 2009. article titled "Money Shots" It does not specify how they arrived at this number). The Fortune article also enumerates $150 million as the amount spent on paparazzi photos and videos annually. That averages out to a hundred thousand bucks for each one of them. Presumably, these are just the full time paparazzi pros.
  • Is that a Canon or? - It just dawaned on me that virtually all paparazzi are male. Perhaps this game is too rough for girls. Or there's different brain-wiring here.
  • Bugs - The word paparazzi is the plural of paparazzo. It comes from the character name Paparazzo in the film La Dolce Vita (The Sweet Life) directed by Federico Fellini. According to Wikipedia, "Fellini scholar Peter Bondanella argues that although "it is indeed an Italian family name, the word is probably a corruption of the word papataceo, a large and bothersome mosquito". Fortune mag. (March 2, 2009) calls the name "a play on the Sicilian word for an annoying pest or insect."
  • "Faux-parazzi" - Fake paparazzi are sometimes employed by attention seekers as a means to look like celebrities. But it can be a bit pricey to hire a good wolf pack with all of them playing the part convincingly. There are in fact commercial outfits that provide this as a service.

Let's Shoot Paparazzi!
I have a mission to shoot paparazzi although I haven't exactly gotten round to doing it. So, on behalf of Hollywood Vine, I'm proposing a new idea that I hope will become a trend. I want to encourage the formation of independent "hunting clubs" that stalk paparazzi. We arm ourselves with high powered Nikons, Canons, ordinary point-and-shoot cameras and cellphone cams. Then each time we find a pack of paparazzi stalking some shell-shocked retina-burned celebrity, we join the paparazzi, preferably right when their star target is emerging from a restaurant or hotel. Then rather than shooting the celebrity, we turn around and photograph the paparazzi in action with our flash cameras aimed right into their eyes, hopefully outnumbering the paparazzi and temporarily blinding them in the process, with our Metz flashes set on "nuke". Then we take the resulting photos and post them on various web sites, including Hollywood Vine, and give them to the media for the whole world to see. I think all of our favorite stars would love it. I think the public would eat it up. And I think it could theoretically become a late night pastime for throngs of ordinary photographers who want to raise public consciousness about paparazzi. Hell, I think it could even become a Hollywood blockbuster movie. Let's do it!

I personally have nothing against the existence of paparazzi. They bring to us the unsanitized visual truth about the lives of celebrities. I don't even mind the fact that paparazzis are obsessed with garbage trivia. After all, they're just chasing the money. And the money is provided by so-called supermarket "tabloids", TV shows and high powered web sites that cater to a truly trivia addicted loser population of Americans that generally would not have lives of their own, if not for watching TV and renting movies. I'm not talking about art house intellectuals or cult film fans. A large part of the film industry is devoted to catering to these hopeless couch potato multitudes. The bottom line is that America, by and large, has a sick and pathological obsession with celebrity brown-nosing. The goal is to know who got knocked up, who gained ten pounds, who's the new boyfriend, who's in drug rehab, and who punched Mr. Paparazzo. Quite frankly, I'm not here to defend celebrities either. Acting is an honorable craft. And cheesey mythology is crap. And the day will come when the worst packs of paparazzi are stalked by the new paparazzi shooters. Or at least that's my little dream.

...The Paparazzi page started 2008 February 25 Wed.
HollywoodVine.com

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