Shooting Britney

[pop analyst]

Shooting Britney

How a French journalist recruited a posse of Brazilian parking attendants and pizza-delivery guys and helped create Hollywood’s most addictive entertainment product

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/04/shooting-britney/306735/

[pop analyst]

- the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year

- 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

- The front-of-the-book snapshots in People and Us cost $50,000 to $75,000 per issue

- The larger photo agencies like X17 and Bauer-Griffin then found that they could make even more money by selling a single set of pictures 15 or 20 times over, to eight or 10 magazines, five or six television programs, and Web sites

- the Svengali-like Lufti, was obsessively text-messaging her. Now he returns her texts two or three days late. “I don’t know if that vacation weaned him off of me,” Brandy says.

- Hotel with a box of the prescription stimulant Provigil poking out of her handbag. It was Regis who noticed the box. “I didn’t think that was a big deal, you know?”

- Adnan Ghalib’s agency, Finalpixx, has marketed sets of the two of them together in choreographed outings. In January, Finalpixx offered seminude pictures of Spears, taken by Ghalib, for a reported asking price of $5 million. The pictures sold to an Australian magazine for $57,000. The relationship faltered soon thereafter.

- The story of the infamous pic of Britney shaving her haead.

The moral of the story; In the rush to accuse and make sense of the moment, we will forget a simple truth. The paparazzi exist for the same reason that the stars exist: we want to see their pictures. Happier, wealthier, wildly more beautiful, partying harder, driving better cars, they live the lives that the rest of us can only dream about, until the party ends and we are confirmed in our belief that it is better, after all, not to be them.

 

* sorry, about this mistaken post. I dont know how to post.