A friend and I are meeting for a mid-afternoon lunch in Beverly Hills at Coupa Café on Canon Drive, a favorite Venezuelan restaurant with great coffees and arepas and a terrific selection of Chilean and Argentine wines.
As I walked around the corner to Canon Drive, I was startled to see the sidewalk blocked by a group of 15 to 20 paparazzi with expensive zoom lens cameras and videocams strapped around their necks and shoulders, many of them with several kinds of equipment for any occasion. A few minutes later the waiters at Coupa Café informed me that the photographers are staked out across the street from Porta Via, an Italian restaurant where Jessica Alba is reported to be having lunch!
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The paparazzi were chatting and joking amiably with one another as I walked past, sharing stories about other celebrity campaigns and their successes snapping various winning photos (i.e., profitable). Their presence was so colorful that in a humorous twist, tourists were stopping to snap photos of them!
The 200 to 300 paparazzi working in LA are not an unusual sight in this area because they follow the celebrities who generally live in the cluster of upscale cities and neighborhoods on LA's westside, such as Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Brentwood and Santa Monica.
In a similar situation about a week earlier in West Hollywood, I saw a phalanx of perhaps 12 to 15 paparazzi snapping photos and capturing video footage as they walked backwards in a rough V formation in front of Kim Kardashian, who was walking toward them on the sidewalk with a friend. There were calls of "Kim, Kim, over here, look over here" and other similar exhortations as they shuffled backwards, some of them tripping on overgrown tree roots that had lifted the sidewalk.
Given the aggressiveness of the paparazzi in stalking their targets, it might be useful if they could be incentivized to track deadly microbes or terrorists. We would probably find Osama bin Laden or the real cause of swine flu in no time. But as long as it is possible to make $1,500 to $300,000 or more for a sensational photo of the right celebrity in an appropriately compromising situation, our paparazzi friends are more likely to stay on the front lines of the sidewalks in front of Spago or Mr. Chow.
A global industry has grown up around the mission of tracking every waking movement of celebrities of all declensions. Celebrity reporting has become hard news, often given equal billing with war, famine, national politics or natural disasters. As the world of the latter phenomena becomes ever more threatening and difficult to understand, the desire for escape into the rarefied air of Olympian immunity theoretically occupied by top celebrities is now so great that deification must occasionally be granted to select members of the general public.
Shows such as American Idol (and its European and Latin American derivatives), Top Model, Dancing with the Stars (and its equivalent in other nations), Survivor, Big Brother, et al, are multi-national corporate celebrity factories, charged with producing an appropriate number and variety of safely vetted celebrity novitiates each year as both a distraction and a preventive measure.
The gloriously colorful and unpredictable Roman and Greek deities who could crush empires, change the course of wars and disrupt the laws of nature are relics of antiquity. They might inspire awe, but they would surely hurt the bottom line, and that is no longer acceptable.
