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Lindsay Lohan loves being stalked by the paparazzi

- because she finds it flattering. .

The sexy teen actress claims she doesn't mind being constantly pursued by shutterbugs wherever she goes because it means people are interested in her life.

She said : "In a way, it's cool that people want to know aboutBut in another, it's weird because they don't get the full story about me me" .
Last month, Lohan narrowly escaped serious injury after her car was hit by a photographer in a high-speed chase.

The 'Mean Girls' actress was driving away from a Beverly Hills restaurant when snapper Galo Ramirez smashed into the driver's side of her Mercedes car - ripping the door open.Lindsay Lohan loves being stalked by the paparazzi

The Paparazzi: L.A.’s Overlooked Artists

Ever since a kamikaze shutterbug slammed his car into the Lohanmobile during a high-speed quest for some fresh pictures of the starlet’s newly prominent skeleton, the paparazzi vocation has been red-hot. (That sound you hear is the sigh of a Fox executive who just realized that his studio already made a cut-rate paparazzi revenge flick last year.) On Sunday, the NY Times endeavored to better understand the “car-centered…uniquely Los Angeles art” of staking out the Ivy with a telephoto lens, which is “under siege” by reckless marauders from the Continent:

Moreover, he and Mr. Huapaya see their car-centered 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,” Mr. 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.”

Pity the French paparazzi. They chase one beloved British royal to a tragic, public death, and they’re forever saddled with the stereotype of being careless drivers.
(Source)

Shooter vs. shooter in paparazzi wars

By David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner The New York Times

WEST HOLLYWOOD, California A balmy Thursday afternoon. A slow day for the paparazzi. On Melrose Avenue, 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 cellphone beeped with a tip: The television star Alyssa Milano is getting her hair done.

Ginsburg, 24, holds his Nextel in one hand, his heavy, zoom-lens-laden Canon in the other. He peers across the street at the salon's parking lot. He makes a few U-turns, 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 up the street into an empty one 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 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 black sport-utility vehicle cruises by in the opposite direction. Ginsburg instantly makes it as the ride of one Giles Harrison, a rival paparazzo who has had 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 mirrors. 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 then he parks across the street and waits on foot, ready to pounce on Ginsburg's prey.

This stakeout, like many others these days, will end badly. Milano will emerge and walk toward 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 no doubt will bring a higher price.

This much the stars and the paparazzi can agree on: The streets of Los Angeles have become a battleground. But just who is at war is an unsettled question.

To the stars, the collision in May between cars driven by a photographer and Lindsay Lohan was just the latest result of the escalating tactics of Hollywood paparazzi who will stop at nothing to get a picture. Celebrities and their lawyers have painted 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. Rather, they insist, celebrity victims like Lohan are merely collateral damage; the real battle is among the photographers themselves - pitting veterans against novices, native Angelenos against foreigners and a handful of rival companies against one another, all of them jockeying for position and profit in a wildly overpopulated but nonetheless increasingly lucrative business.

Moreover, the 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 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," said Frank Griffin, a partner in Bauer-Griffin, one of the most established picture agencies in Hollywood. "It starts off with quite a few honest, hard-working 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."

Hard-working Griffin most certainly is. But his description of honest business practices includes some accounts that others might find shocking.

He sits in his home office in the San Fernando Valley, showing off a little: not just his high-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 come to $100,000 a year. "The best ones are the ones who do it for pure greed because nothing else colors their judgment."

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's 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. "If they fly any coastal flight, I know," he says. "I can also find anybody in the world within 24 hours, I guarantee it."

He says he has law-enforcement officers on his payroll, too, and can have a license 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. "There were 10 or 12 paparazzi, maximum," he says. "There are 200 so-called photographers working in L.A. 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 only eight photographers on staff. Each is given a car and equipment, paid $3,000 a month base salary, and given a share - typically half - of the proceeds from the sale of his or her pictures. His best shooter made $300,000 last year, he says, with magazines paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars for B-list celebrities in humdrum settings 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. "A real genuine paparazzi photographer is proving the existence of a story," he says, in situations when "the talent never realizes 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 says.

Griffin has benefited as the market for celebrity pictures has exploded, and the demand is growing across the globe. "We're selling in Russia, Dubai, Croatia - I have somebody in Croatia that pays $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 came new paparazzi who find it easier to spot their rivals than to seek out their own subjects. "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." Of such poachers, he said: "It doesn't matter that the story is Demi Moore going through a traumatic experience. They just want a picture of Demi Moore wearing a funny outfit, and it'll make $200."

We are seated at a café on Robertson Boulevard - a gathering place for stars intent on being recognized and photographers too lazy or unskilled to find them elsewhere - with François Regis Navarre, aka Frank Navarre, aka François Romer, aka Regis Navarre. If the paparazzi are the underbelly of Hollywood, Navarre - he promises that is his true surname - is the paparazzi's own bête noire. He would give himself a more neutral term: entrepreneur.

He came to Los Angeles from France as a 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 Sunset Plaza, snapped a few pictures and sold them for more than $2,000 to Star magazine.

"They 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 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 like 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.

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."

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.

In Los Angeles, it seems, if you're not carrying glossies or a screenplay, then you've got a camera in your backpack. Or, at the very least, your cellphone's speed dial has the number for a paparazzo eager to know whose car you just parked, whose appointment you just booked, whose trash 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 multiethnic street gang with roots in the Philippines, called Jefrox - a scrambled reference to "the projects."

When he snapped a few pictures of Christian Slater and Navarre offered him $600 on the spot, Cousart was hooked. He apprenticed to a German, then signed on with Fame Pictures, where he learned 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 connections with studio workers.

Cousart and Huapaya see their car-centered 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, of Britney Spears. "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 pursuers. "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."

Lindsay Lohan happy enough with paparazzi

People and Celebrity News
Lindsay Lohan happy enough with paparazzi
Jul 19, 2005
Source

Lindsay Lohan loves being stalked by the paparazzi - because she finds it flattering.

The sexy teen actress claims she doesn't mind being constantly pursued by shutterbugs wherever she goes because it means people are interested in her life.

She said : "In a way, it's cool that people want to know about me. But in another, it's weird because they don't get the full story about me."

Last month, Lohan narrowly escaped serious injury after her car was hit by a photographer in a high-speed chase.

The 'Mean Girls' actress was driving away from a Beverly Hills restaurant when snapper Galo Ramirez smashed into the driver's side of her Mercedes car - ripping the door open.

Copyright 2005 BANG Media International

When Paparazzi Attack: In a theater near you

John Leguizamo

If you were as disappointed in photog-vs-celeb drama Paparazzi as we were (so disappointed, in fact, that we didn't bother seeing it), the New York Times thinks you'll be quite pleased with Crónicas, starring John Leguizamo as a fictional E. L. Woody (okay, we kinda made that up, but it's in the same vein).

Whatever, he plays a pap — the same kind that chases down Lindsay Lohan and then crashes into her for the money shot.

The character, Manolo, works for a lurid television news magazine, "One Hour With the Truth," but we quickly see through the half-truths he delivers. His cameraman approaches grieving parents draped over their small son's coffin, and moves them slightly for a better shot. Manolo asks a man who may be a serial child killer a question that is a staple of network and local news: What is he feeling? The reporter even inserts himself into a story, Geraldo-style, to stop a lynching. His own producer tells him, "You just want to be a hero."

We're just waiting for the photogs' lobbying group to issue a terse statement about how falsified the film is. Because as any lens knows, you don't move grieving parents "slightly" — you shove 'em to the ground to elicit more tears.
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paparazzi area

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