Paparazzi's ruthless new recruits

Two-fifteen, a balmy Thursday afternoon. It's a slow day for the paparazzi.

On Melrose Avenue, just east of La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, Steven Ginsburg's Toyota 4Runner idles in front of Bhava, the kind of hip salon whose patrons are wealthy, famous, or the recipients of televised makeovers. Minutes ago his mobile phone beeped with atip: Alyssa Milano, a star of the television series Charmed, is getting her hair done.

Ginsburg, 24, holds his phone in one hand, his heavy, zoom-lens-laden Canon in the other. He peers at the salon's parking lot across the street. He makes a few U-turns, steering with the heel of one hand, surveying the scene. The layout is far from ideal. The best viewpoint is from directly opposite the salon, but those parking spaces are taken. So Ginsburg pulls into an empty one further up the street to wait for a better spot to open up. Tense minutes tick by. Ginsburg, who quit bartending to become a photographer five years ago, waits quietly. In the back seat, David Vibbert, 34, who joined up with Ginsburg only last year, is getting antsy.

"What's amazing," Vibbert blurts out, "is that another paparazzi hasn't jumped on our job".

And with that, their luck is gone. Not 30 seconds later, a big black SUV cruises by in the opposite direction. Ginsburg instantly recognises it as the ride of one Giles Harrison, a rival paparazzo who has got into clashes with other photographers and was caught on camera punching one in the face.

"Don't look," Ginsburg says, his eyes following Harrison's truck in his mirror. Sure ' enough, Harrison's truck goes only a few yards before pulling a U-turn and rolling slowly by. And another U-turn. And two more. And now he parks across the street and waits on foot in the salon's parking lot, ready to pounce on Ginsburg's prey. This stake-out, like so many others, will end badly. Milano will emerge, her silky brown hair catching the mid-afternoon sun, and walk towards her car. Ginsburg will squeeze off a few acceptable shots. But Harrison's tall, hulking body will show up in the last several frames, as he darts into Ginsburg's line of sight, just a few feet from Milano's face, taking pictures that will no doubt bring a higher price.

This much the stars and the photographers can agree on: the streets of Los Angeles have become a battleground on a scale that may even horrify Britain's paparazzi.

But just who is at war is an unsettled question. To the stars, the collision in May between cars driven by a photographer and the actress Lindsay Lohan was just the latest result of the escalating tactics of Hollywood paparazzi who will stop at nothing to get a picture. Emboldened by the sudden willingness of law-enforcement officials to take complaints seriously, celebrities and their lawyers paint a picture of paparazzi as criminals, stalkers and provocateurs at the wheel, using their vehicles as weapons, if necessary, to catch a celebrity looking ugly, angry or upset. To the paparazzi, however, this portrayal is utter nonsense, at best the result of stars seeing something happening in their rear-view mirrors and falling to understand it.

Rather, they insist, celebrity victims like Lohan are merely collateral damage; the real battle is among the photographers - pitting veterans against novices, native Angelenos against foreigners and a handful of rival companies against one another, all jockeying for position and profit in an overpopulated but increasingly lucrative business. Moreover, the dwindling few who adhere to an unwritten code of Los Angeles paparazzi - that the ideal picture is one that a celebrity does not even suspect has been taken, shot by a photographer who is neither seen nor heard - say they are being given a bad name by hordes of untrained or corner-cutting paparazzi who are loath to lie in wait in cramped cars for hours or days and are willing to make their presence known, even to jump out at celebrities on the street, if it means a chance for quick cash.

"It's much like the gold rush," says Frank Griffin, a partner in Bauer-Griffin, one of the most established picture agencies in Hollywood. "It starts off with quite a few honest, hardworking prospectors who strike it rich now and again. And then you get the hangers on, the camp followers, the hookers, all the rest of the garbage that comes along because they think the streets are lined with gold."

Griffin is most certainly hard working. But his description of honest business practices includes accounts others might find shocking. He sits at dusk in his home office in the San Fernando Valley, a dimly lit room except for the glow from his computer, his flat-screen television, and half a dozen other state-of-the-art gadgets. He is showing off not just his hi-tech toys, but the quality of his information. "That's the thing that's valuable," Griffin says, explaining how his cash payoffs to tipsters can amount to US$100,000 (NZ$145,000) a year.

"The best ones are the ones who do it for pure greed. Because nothing else colours their judgement."

He opens a drawer, pulls out a few stacks of paper. Here, he says, are this week's scheduled movements of every famous passenger of a major limousine company in Los Angeles. He has an employee of the limo company on retainer, with bonuses "if there are results". Here, too, are what Griffin describes as the passenger manifests of every coast-to-coast flight on American Airlines, the biggest carrier at Los Angeles International Airport. "I get the full printout," he says. "If they fly any coastal flight, I know. I can also find anybody in the world within 24 hours. I guarantee it. If they don't mask the tail number on a private plane, I'll find it."

He says he has law-enforcement officers on his payroll, too, and can have a car number plate checked in an hour on ' weekdays, 20 minutes on weekends. (The release of drivers' information was limited in California after a stalker used information from the state's Department of Motor Vehicles to find and kill the actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989.)

The extent of Griffin's reach might alarm public officials; certainly it should give pause to every celebrity. He pulls out a photocopy of what he says are the transcribed notes of a top film actress's examination by her doctor, and points to a reference to her breast implants. Griffin, who is British, came to Los Angeles 15 years ago and cut his teeth working for $50 a day on assignment for the tabloids. At the time, the city was wide open. "There were 10 or 12 paparazzi, maximum," he says. "There are 200 so-called photographers working in LA now. They come to town thinking that just because they have a camera, they are photographers. And they're given instructions that, 'You don't come back at the end of the day unless you have a picture, and I will pay you in cash."'Griffin says he runs his agency differently. It has eight photographers on staff. Each is given a car and equipment, paid US$3,000 (NZ$4,350) a month base salary, and given a share - typically half - of the proceeds from the sale of their pictures.

His best shooter made US$300,000 (NZ$435,000) last year, he says, with magazines paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars for B-list celebrities to tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most sought-after pictures. That kind of money comes with big-game photos, which require patience, fortitude, and cash. "If my photographer becomes part of the story, it's no longer a story," he says. "A realgenuine paparazzi photographer is proving the existence of a story - a new boyfriend, a new husband, illicit lover, a set of circumstances, proving a story in a picture - where the talent never realises they've been photographed.

"The notion that assaulting stars on the road would produce better pictures, Griffin insists, is ludicrous. "It doesn't make any sense getting a picture of some deer caught in the headlights," he explains. "People would much rather see a kissing-and-cuddling set. They'd much rather see a happy couple kissing in public."Griffin has benefited as the market for celebrity pictures has exploded: new magazines seem to start up every few months, and demand is growing across the globe. "We're selling in Russia, Dubai, Croatia - I have somebody in Croatia that pays US$2,000 a month. It's not bad. We're selling in Singapore, Hong Kong; eventually we're all going to mainland China."

But with new markets and new publications comes new paparazzi who find it easier to spot their rivals than to seek out their own subjects. "It used to be easy, but now the competition gives me a bad name and costs me money," he says. "They find out we have a good story and they follow our photographers. Finding one of our guys is as good as finding a celebrity story. My guys are coming back a bit deflated because I've sent them out on a job and five photographers have recognised their vehicle and jumped on the job. "It doesn't matter that the story is Demi Moore going through a traumatic experience," he says of such poachers.

"They just want a picture of Demi Moore wearing a funny outfit, and it'll make US$200. You can take a few pictures like that and make $2,000 a month. There are guys out there that are satisfied with that."

We are seated at a sidewalk cafe on Robertson Boulevard - the gathering place for stars intent on being recognised and photographers too lazy to find them elsewhere - with Francois Regis Navarre, aka Frank Navarre, aka Francois Romer, aka Regis Navarre. A man of many aliases, and many epithets. If the paparazzi are the underbelly of Hollywood, Navarre - he promises that is his true surname - is the paparazzi's own bete noir. Though he would give himself a more neutral term: entrepreneur. He came to Los Angeles from France asa correspondent for Le Monde in 1992, then stayed on as a stringer. He switched to photography in 1996, hoping to shoot celebrity portraits. But he soon surmised that publicists stood in his way: they would never say "No", but would never make good on a "Yes".

Then one day he noticed Alicia Silverstone - at the height of her fame - at Sunset Plaza, snapped a few pictures and sold them for over US$2,000. "It created a little monster," he says, smiling. Soon he had assignments from the tabloids, then a helper, then a computer system, then a small arsenal of cameras and a fleet of cars. Now he lives and works in Pacific Palisades, just down the street from Goldie Hawn. His profits ballooned, he says, after he discerned a loophole in the way the business was done: while agencies such as Bauer-Griffin and Fame Pictures would promise big percentages of sales to photographers, someone offering instant cash for a photo could buy it for much less. Today Navarre,43, manages what is regarded as the largest paparazzi enterprise in Los Angeles, X17, with 20 to 40 photographers working at any given time.

Many are from Europe, South America and Africa, though he says his roster includes a Malibu lifeguard uniquely positioned to catch famous sunbathers. He says he looks at 300 to 3,000 pictures a day. "It's very simple capitalism," he explains. "I take a risk: a picture can be worth nothing. Or the next day it can be worth a lot. But suddenly all these guys are coming to me, selling pictures or information." Navarre quickly made X17 the destination for rival photographers seeking to make extra money on the side - at the expense of their own agencies. "The paparazzi hates to be paparazzied - but we are doing that to them," Navarre says, with some pride. "That's competition." Navarre disdains the old guard's ethos of stakeouts and invisibility. "I couldn't do it," he says. "I never stayed in the car for an entire day. It's not the ' market anymore, anyway. They want stars to look at the camera and smile. They want to have the feeling you have an appointment with Britney at the supermarket."

But Navarre admits to being a bit concerned by the level of competition he has helped spawn: he says he made no profit in May or June. Everybody, he says, is jumping on one another's pictures, and he has told his shooters to ease up. He says he has responded to reports of the police investigation by making his photographers sign new contracts absolving him of any liability for their actions and stating that they have broken no laws. He has no employees, he says; he buys photographs from freelances. And he is trimming his fleet of cars as leases expire. Yet Navarre is creating new paparazzi all the time. "You never know," he says. He noticed that a homeless Vietnam veteran, begging on a local street corner, had a rapport with the celebrities driving by. So he gave him a 6.3-megapixelcamera worth $3,000. "And he turned out to be good," Navarre says. "He'd been at this corner a long time."

In Los Angeles, it seems, if you're not carrying 8x10 glossies or a screenplay, then you've got a camera in your backpack. Or, at the very least, your mobile-phone's speed dial has the number for a paparazzo eager to know whose car you just parked, whose appointment you just booked, whose hair you just washed, whose rubbish you just picked up. Arnold Cousart or Sergio Huapaya may well be at the other end of the phone call. Cousart, 33, with his spiky hair and Filipino ancestry, and Huapaya, 31, with his baggy shorts and tattoos, are the face of the newest, homegrown generation of Los Angeles paparazzi. The actress Reese Witherspoon once asked Cousart if he was a member of some Chinese gang, he says.

She was not so far off: he and Huapaya came of age together as members of a multi-ethnic street gang with roots in the Philippines, called Jefrox - a scrambled reference to "the projects". By their early twenties, they say, they had left the rough stuff behind and landed steady jobs. Huapaya at a suppliers to the film studios, Cousart at a photo-processing lab convenient to West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. "All these paparazzi would come in and they'd all do 6x8 prints and they'd overnight the pictures to the magazines," says Cousart, recalling the predigital days. "Frank Griffin would have this stack of cash and he'd give me US$50 to make sure I didn't show his pictures to any of the other guys."When he snapped a few pictures of Christian Slater and Navarre offered him US$600 on the spot, Cousart was hooked, and he began an odyssey through the local paparazzi trade. He apprenticed to a German, then signed on with Fame Pictures, where he learnt how to shadow a car and paid close attention to how the proprietor, Boris Nizon, ran his business.

Finally, he struck out on his own with JFX Direct - a nod to his old gang's name - enlisting Huapaya, who quit his job but took with him his knowledge of the film lots and connections with studio workers. Later, they spent a year selling their pictures through Navarre's agency. But by 2003, they were on their own, with Cousart's wife handling worldwide-rights sales from their home. Cousart has lent a helping hand to other ex-gang members, hiring some and placing others - including one who had just recovered from gunshot wounds - at rival agencies.

He sees parallels between the two kinds of street life: he urged another photo agency to hire a graffiti artist he knew because graffiti artists "are meticulous about what they do," he says. "You give this guy a camera, teach him the job, and he's going to be good at it. He'll polish the lens."Their street connections also give JFX access to a tight network of Angelenos that extends to seemingly everywhere in Hollywood. Call it the homeboy advantage.

"We can find just about anything," Cousart says, bragging about how, on an out-of-town assignment, his rivals once drove aimlessly around looking for a film location, and he was able to pinpoint it with one call to a buddy back in Los Angeles. Or how he and Huapaya easily - and illegally - penetrated Universal Studios the other day to get exclusive pictures of a scantily costumed Jessica Simpson shooting a music video from The Dukes of Hazzard. Trespassing laws are one thing. But the old-school, unwritten code of paparazzi conduct is something Cousart takes seriously.

"We have to take care of this business because we live here," he says. "You don't rape and pillage your own village. The guys from France, Italy and England, if they do something bad, they can go home. We are home. We can't run anywhere else."

Moreover, he and Huapaya see their car-centred paparazzi ways as a uniquely Los Angeles art form, one worth protecting, and which is under siege. So they acknowledge, they have developed a reputation for punishing paparazzi who drive too aggressively - with a particular eye on the French. "Britney's not going to drive crazy," Cousart says, by way of example. "So you don't have to be right on her tail. But there's going to be that one photographer on her bumper. So we call each other, the other teams. Whenever we're in a follow with the French guys, we say make sure they don't get in the front. We try to block them out, because they drive like idiots."

Cousart says he regrets the way this might look, "like we're outlaws, taking the law into our own hands." But he says it is necessary, though it is also rendered futile whenever a celebrity decides to elude her pursers. '"If she's going 100, someone's going to go 100 with her," he says. "Either you pull off the story, or you hold everyone on the team back and you say, 'Let them be'. But the other guys are not going to let them be."

- INDEPENDENT