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Paparazzi Fodder

Posted on August 10, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

Nobody knew who she was or where she had come from but everybody knew what she looked like. Photographs of her buying milk, leaving the supermarket, walking up the stairs to a friend’s home, kneeling on the street to play with a neighbour’s child in a pram were splashed all over the supermarket tabloids. To look at her was to imagine she was a superstar. Nobody knew exactly what she did. The agents didn’t know whom she was being represented by and the studio heads were bawling out their assistants because this new girl hadn’t been introduced to them yet. She had more covers than Brangelina, more rumours than Lindsay Lohan and everybody was waiting for one of three things. An upskirt picture, a topless picture or a sex-in-an-ill-advised-place picture.

The scene that greeted her appearance in an inside page of Variety was the type of reaction that was becoming increasingly commonplace around the City of Celluloid Dreams. One of the most ferociously competitive studio heads in the business summoned his Head of Marketing and tossed that day’s copy of the industry bible onto his desk where it skittered to the edge and fell face down before the man had the opportunity to properly take notice of the piece that had irked the boss. He stood there for a moment, debating whether he should go under the desk to get the magazine and against his better judgment he just stood there. A vein was already throbbing in the studio head’s temple – never a good sign – as he said, “Tell me about this.”

The HoM tried to turn his head to the appropriate angle to get a look at the piece in question but he knew the magazine had flipped over so he was looking at the wrong page. The studio head put his fingers to his temples and growled, “It’s not radioactive Tom, you can pick it up!”

Tom did. He quickly turned the magazine over and looked at the smiling headshot of the woman which sat atop the headline, ‘Who Are You?’ Tom held the magazine up, not knowing that it was a move guaranteed to piss his boss off and said, “This? Yeah I checked the last time your office asked about her. She’s a nobody.”

The studio head’s face went red and Tom had the good sense to take a step back so that he wouldn’t get as much blood and brain on his clothes if the big man’s head exploded. “Julia Roberts was a nobody once. Also Halle Berry, Kate Winslet, Scarlett Johansson and that Megan Fox girl were all nobodies. This is a nobody with a great press agent. What’s wrong with you? You’re Head of Marketing! Not Head of Up Your Own Ass! Get out of my sight and don’t let me see you again until we have a meeting with her.”

Tom felt the need to make one last ditch effort, “But she’s not represented by any of the major agencies. She has no track record.”

The studio head’s eyes went dark and his teeth were bared as he hissed, “lonelygirl15 had no track record before YouTube. This girl has visibility and no known representation. We fast track a project featuring her, we pay her scale, keep the points and ride one out. If she ‘becomes’ something she’ll owe us and we can squeeze two more out of her before a real price tag turns up. What part of all of this is new to you?”

Tom was on his phone making calls even before he had left the mahogany-paneled office. He did however get to hear the boss barking at his secretary to get him the head of one of the scariest agencies on the phone. It wasn’t long before he was ripping the head off one of his own minions for not knowing who the girl in all the pictures was.

The quest to find the girl continued among the agencies. The studios had been the first to ask and as time passed executives from music companies and advertising agencies also wanted to know how they could get a hold of the girl.

And then one day, word spread through the paparazzi ranks that she would be spending some time on a yacht. In the most blatant example of privacy violation yet, a live feed turned up on the internet that covered her every move from the hotel she was staying at, through her drive to the marina, to her actually walking down the pier and climbing aboard the boat.

There hadn’t been this level of live coverage…ever. This wasn’t cutting to a helicopter shot of the venue every so often so people were provided the illusion of having seen the whole picture. This was cutting between cameras covering the geography between her downtown hotel, the marina and the car-borne cameras that followed her in traffic. At first analysis it looked like there were tens (if not hundreds) of camera crews deployed for the coverage. The scale of the presentation added gravitas to the quest to capture the first images of a beautiful woman’s breasts. Needless to say there were breathless viewers glued to their computers from Tokyo to Trinidad, united by technology and the human instinct for voyeurism. When the people in the business stopped to think about it for long enough they realised how impressive it was that it had all been achieved with consumer cameras and DIY technology hacks.

Periodically, viewers were afforded a view of the paunchy, large lens-wielding photographers who had lined the marina and were jockeying for improved vantage points.

When she set foot on the boat the anticipation level rose. The people as well as the photographers remembered the mistakes made with the Cindy Crawford pictures (not enough clear views of her tits) and mentally scanned other picture sets from the past - Elle McPherson, Victoria Silvestedt, Gisele Bundchen…the list went on and there were good and bad things about most of them. Here was the opportunity to do it right. The girl was new, she didn’t have the savvy to know how to deny the ‘boys’ the money shot and there was no reason at all why she might not decide to sunbathe completely in the nude.

Swollen beads of anticipatory sweat lined the brows of those that peppered the marina and close to thirty minutes passed before she stepped out onto the main deck. The murmur that rose was not that different from the roar that would have accompanied the arrival of a sporting team into a large arena. It was a momentous occasion in several ways, even if the lay millionaire who happened to be in the vicinity didn’t get it. It was yet another paparazzi deflowering of an unsuspecting individual who had chosen life in the spotlight. It was the moment men like Billy James lived for.

Nobody knew what his real name was but famous folk had been laid waste by his probing lens on several occasions. He peered through his viewfinder and got a bead on the shadowy entrance to the main deck. He fired off a series of shots of her arrival while some of his peers were mopping their brows. In the mad scramble that ensued he was the only one who got usable first images of the girl no one knew emerging from the cool dark interiors of the boat.

She looked completely oblivious to the men with an eye on her every move. She laid her towel down on the deck chair and shimmied out of the gauzy pencil skirt she was wearing. A million pixels recorded the revelation of her shiny black bikini bottoms. Anybody with a working set of eyes could tell that her ass was fantastic, even though the bikini briefs were far from the level of risqué favoured by celebrities and celebutantes looking to put their best cheek forward. The vaguely hippie t-shirt came off next and several battle-hardened men sighed. As far as they could tell, and their long-range lenses could tell a lot, she was all natural and well-endowed. She brought her sunglasses down off her forehead and settled onto the deck chair. Her stalkers settled down to wait.

Billy James snapped a few shots of the other boats, gulls in flight and the surrounding scenery with his spare camera while his main instrument remained trained on the girl getting her rays in plain view of human and paparazzo.

An hour had passed before she sat up and reached behind her, unclasped her bikini top and allowed the cups to fall towards her waiting palms. She arched her back and as the still and video cameras captured it all they all noticed that something was wrong. It was sort of hard to tell but it appeared that there were holes in her breasts. Since her bikini bra had covered a fair bit it had been difficult to tell before but once her breasts were bared there was no way to hide the holes that looked like the scars left by cigarette burns all around her nipples. Billy James went in as close as his lens would allow and the audiences watching at home as well as the people at the marina realised that something was moving inside those holes.

When the creatures slithered out of their openings and made their way down her belly most of the gathered paparazzi freaked out. Three of them fell into the water. Six felt faint while two actually passed out. One of them had an actual heart attack and nearly all the other conscious ones threw up. Billy James had to close his eyes and take enormously deep breaths to calm his nerves. When he finally opened his eyes she was nowhere to be seen. Unknown to him, those people who were still able to watch at their computers were treated to the pure horror on his face.

Not too long after that day, posters appeared all over New York and Los Angeles and eventually in all the major art destinations around the world. They advertised an exhibition called Framed with the tagline Turning The Tables On The Paparazzi with a picture of Billy James’s nauseated face staring down on motorists or subway commuters all around the world.

People thronged the exhibition that featured video and pictorial surveillance as well as behind-the-scenes photography and video of a model referred to only as Ava being prepped to pose as a paprazzi fodder as a precursor to the stunt that involved cutting-edge prosthetics and careful timing. The stated objective of the project was to give attendant paparazzi and the public at large a sense of exactly how revolting it was to be invading a person’s privacy.

The success of the exhibition had a curious side-effect. It was open season on the paparazzi. The average person on the street began slapping, shoving, spitting on or telling off members of the fraternity. The most common refrain shouted at them by members of the regular public became, “Get a real job!” and for the first time in a very long time, the sales of supermarket tabloids dropped noticeably.

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