Between 30 and 45 paparazzi work Britney on any given night. The expensive cars they drive reflect the fact that Britney Spears—her marriages, custody battles, fights with her mom, new boyfriends, Starbucks runs, trips to the hospital—is a bigger and more lucrative story than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton or John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
History’s best-publicized celebrity meltdown has helped fuel dozens of television shows, magazines, and Internet sites, the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year, and helped make Britney Spears the most popular search term on Yahoo once again in 2007, as it has been for six of the past seven years. (…)
X17 is the biggest agency in the Hollywood paparazzi business. Nearly every famous picture of the world’s most famous imploding pop star—Britney driving with her son on her lap, Britney in rehab, Britney without underwear, Britney shaving her head—was taken by X17’s “shooters,” or “paps,” who work in teams under the direction of X17’s owner, François Navarre, a graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, who moved to Los Angeles in 1992 and covered the L.A. riots for Le Monde before embracing his destiny as a freelance celebrity photographer.
Navarre operates under his middle name, Regis. He is roundly despised by more traditional Hollywood paparazzi, who accuse him of having destroyed their highly individualistic business by hiring gangs of immigrant kids with digital cameras purchased on credit from Best Buy to do the work of the heroic lone photographers who once lay in wait with telephoto lenses, stalking Jackie O.
Most of X17’s paps, who number between 60 and 70, depending on the day and who quits or gets fired, are paid a stipend of $800 to $3,000 a week plus the occasional four- or low-five-figure bonus in exchange for global rights to their images, which Regis owns lock, stock, and barrel. X17 also pays weekly stipends to a dozen dedicated tipsters and occasional fees to 500 or 600 parking-lot attendants, club kids, and shop girls in and around L.A. X17 licenses its pictures to celebrity skin magazines like Us Weekly, People, Life & Style, and In Touch and their associated Web sites; to celebrity-oriented television programs like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, and Extra; as well as to newspapers and magazines in England, Australia, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Israel, Dubai, and dozens of other countries; to major television news networks like CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS, and nearly everyone else in the media business who needs pictures and video clips of Paris Hilton’s arrest or Brad and Angelina’s kids or Britney’s latest courtroom drama, which is to say nearly every major news outlet on the planet.
{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }
