Shooting Stars (9 page)

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 can'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.

No one would say I haven't done some cool stuff. The problem, however, is clear: I've done a lot, but I haven't stuck with anything. Not because I'm not driven but because I'm
overly
driven. When things get boring, I'm out. I have no tolerance for boring. And Hollywood—in all its layers of darkness and light, loneliness and romance—is anything but boring.
What's at the heart of this city, this melting pot of humanity?
I know there are demons in the City of Angels; there is good and there is evil. And I'm curious to catch a little of the battle.

Above any reasoning, however, I can't erase what's been put in front of me. I've got the passion, I've got the calling, so I've got to see this through. Every once in a while in life, the fog clears and you can see that you're in the right lane, even if it's dark.

* * *

The more I work with Simon, the more I want to work with him. He is precise and calculating as a pap, and patient and forthcoming as a mentor. He never tires of my questions, and his explanations are thorough and intelligent. I am increasingly in awe of his skills and enjoying his new friendship. Not to mention, he's
hilarious
.

Simon's shoot of Nicole Richie was like a ballet. She fluttered in and out of stores; Simon danced around her. He had
the instinct
—he knew where she'd move before she was there. When I was shooting Nicole's back, he was squatted three feet in front of her getting the full-length. Nicole had
the instinct
too. She didn't make it easy for Simon; she also didn't make it impossible. She just wanted him to work for it.

Have you ever paid attention to how someone exits a store? Or which way they face when they get in and out of a car? Or where the most natural route to walk is? You do these things yourself,
by instinct
, but they're not what you notice in others. Paparazzi, on the other hand,
do
notice. They
must
notice. They need to know how people will move
before they move,
and where they will go
before they get there.

Nicole's photographs were beautiful. Movement flowed in the frames, giving the pictures a certain “tabloid” style, and one I am starting to appreciate for both its technical difficulty and its form. I notice that when a celeb is caught
in movement
, she is prettier (and most definitely
thinner
) than in real life. (I'm not exactly sure why this occurs. Maybe geometry could explain it, but I think it's the same reason the celebs stand with one foot in front of the other when on the red carpet. For some reason, it tricks the eye and elongates the body.) When the dance is over, both Nicole and Simon are satisfied. Watching them, I realize I have a long way to go.

* * *

Today, J.R. assigns Simon and me to track down Jodie Foster. I can tell that Simon isn't excited. I've learned that the tabloids don't have much interest in lesbians (“except for lipstick lesbians,” Simon says, who according to him are “every man and woman's dream”). But I had gotten a tip from a friend that Jodie drops off her kids at eight every morning at a private school in West Hollywood, so J.R. deemed it “worth a go.”

I arrive at 7:45 a.m. and pull to the beginning of the carpool line. Jodie is an easy spot in a silver Prius, and I
pick up
the follow (i.e., follow her) as she leaves the school. We go to a parking deck off Sunset and then on
foot upstairs to a gym. Simon, who arrived too late for the follow (since he does not care about Jodie Foster), catches up with us there.

When he arrives, I have not yet attempted a photograph of Jodie. A shot with my long lens in the parking garage was impossible. I had no time to position myself the necessary number of meters in front of her, not knowing which direction she was going, and in the dimly lit garage my short-and-flash (versus my long lens/no flash) would have been necessary. Short-and-flash would have meant exposing myself, and “Jodie hates paps,” per Simon, so she would have made that difficult. I was smart to hide and wait for his backup.

Of course, an inside-the-gym shot would make a great picture.
Jodie Foster climbs the Stairmaster just like Us
would sell, lipstick lesbian or not. “Should I go in for a tour?” I suggest.

“Uhh, if you want.” Simon seems surprised that I'm making such an effort.

Jodie's not hard to find in the middle of a large room filled with people and machines. She is running on a treadmill directly in front of me but
what do I do now
? I suppose I could whip out my camera, take aim, and fire. I mean, what's the worst someone could do? Escort me out. Boo at me. Tell me to rot in hell. Throw spitballs, cups of water, smelly towels. Possibly clobber me over the head with a barbell. Obviously, this is why Simon did not come along. I pretend to get a text, cut the tour short, and leave.

Simon decides that though we can easily shoot Jodie as she exits the gym (we know she'll have to take a brief walk to the elevator), it's best to wait. “No need to blow our cover for a sweaty Jodie in a grey hoodie,” he says. “Something better may happen.”

This is a new tactic for me. I'm beginning to learn the ropes, but I'm still thrilled to just spot a celebrity. I have no experience waiting for a “better shot.”

Simon goes to his car and situates himself by the parking deck's exit. He tells me to “lay low” and that he'll “pick up the follow.”

“She may know your car by now,” he says. “I'll call you in a few.”

In a few, Simon beeps. (CXN has finally gotten me a Nextel.) “I lost her, mate. Sorry. Don't know what happened.”

“Bummer,” I respond casually. Inside, I am very annoyed. I have yet to develop “game” and my stealth follow was a big deal.
How did he lose her? She wasn't going fast. And why didn't he take a shot when it was a sure thing?

Five minutes later, Simon beeps again. “Got her.”

“What? How?”

“Weave your
web
, luv. They'll fly in.”

Simon found Jodie's car parked outside a store a few miles from where he'd last seen it. This amazes me: in the clusterfuck of L.A., paps re-find people. It happens frequently. (With paps who have game that is. Like Simon. I take note.)

After Jodie's errands, none of which we are able to shoot (there was never a clear shot without being seen, and like the gym exit, the opportunities were too lackluster to
burn it
), she returns to the school and picks up her young son Kit. He looks to be about five. As we follow, Simon and I switch positions of lead car and, still undetected, follow Jodie to the Grove, the open-air shopping mall and movie theater in West Hollywood.