Malicious Content: Gossipmongers and the Paparazzi
by Jaden
The media has massacred all that was charming, exciting, and glamorous about Hollywood.
Today’s press makes me sick; they have snuffed out the allure of entertainers, making them impotent at their job to fascinate.
I want to watch a movie and not think about how the actor had a booger hanging out of her nose at Coffee Bean. I want to believe in a character and not know about the actor’s real sexual history. I want to fall in love with a story and not be distracted by the actor’s personal life.
Watching TV with an actress friend of mine, a news clip came up about a new law to try to protect celebrities from the paparazzi. They showed aerial footage of photographers running into traffic and sticking their cameras up against the car windows of Britney Spears. She couldn’t see the road or drive. The cameramen looked like blood-sucking mosquitoes. It was disgusting. My friend added that she too once almost drove over a gang of stalker photographers because they just ran right out in front of her car while she was driving. Too bad she didn’t flatten a few of ‘em and make the world a safer place.
These stalkers with an apparatus give photography a bad name. It is not freedom of the press; it is a creep with a mental illness. The press are invited to premieres and official places where they are welcome to take pictures. Trespassing on private property, stalking, and violating traffic laws are illegal acts.
Wasn’t the death of Princess Di enough? It has only gotten worse since then. Hey, let’s see how many celebrities we can murder with our cameras. BONK!
Worship and envy combine to kill.
These things exist because the public pays for it. The public pays for the pictures. The public pays for the news about whose armpits stink. The public makes this happen and they need to realize that as long as they are buying, as long as the demand is there, the goods will be supplied.
To me, our society has degenerated into something ignoble. When we should be advancing, we are digressing.
Let entertainers do their job and entertain. If you want to voice your opinion about the quality of their work, go right ahead, but why pick apart every little detail about them that you hate? Hate and envy are ugly.
To endanger lives for a stupid picture is an embarrassment to our society. Why do you care whether they wipe their babies’ butts? Or buy coffee? Or eat? Or drive? Or get in arguments with their spouses? Of course they do! They are human beings.
Why are people so hell bent on breaking down and destroying others more successful than themselves? One should be inspired and feel hopeful by viewing others’ success, not held back and angry by it.
All someone else’s success means is that you can do it too. Everything is possible. You don’t have to be a beauty queen or have an operatic voice; success is available to everyone. There are endless examples of hugely imperfect people who have excelled to great heights. You just have to find the right niche for youself.
“That’s what they get. I don’t feel sorry for them.” 
Several different people have said this to me about celebrities having to deal with the paparazzi.
Why do entertainers deserve it? Because they enjoy performing for you? They deserve a bunch of creepy people harassing them day and night? What is the logic in that?
Acting and singing are jobs, and I am telling you from first-hand experience, they are a lot harder (and more fun) than sitting in a cubicle. Can you memorize 120 pages and deliver each line with believable emotion? Can you handle auditioning for years, several times a day, and deal with the endless rejections? Can you stand on a stage, dance, and sing in front of thousands of people or two strangers? If you think celebrities deserve it because you are envious of what they do, you ought to move to Hollywood, give it a try, and see how easy it is not.
When you hear about their salaries, take into consideration that half that amount goes to the government in taxes. The more money you make, the more they take. The next chunk of it (about 25-40%) goes to their representation: agents, lawyers, and publicists. They are then left with maybe 10-20% of that enormous sum. With that, they have to pay for food, home, and family, just like everyone else. On top of that, they have to pay for clothes, make-up, and whatever else so that they look fabulous when the paparazzi catches them off guard. Taking the expensive location of Hollywood into consideration, celebrities are not as rich or glamorous as you might think.
Briefly, I was an organ in the beast, but I could only go to so many red carpet functions and ask celebrities so many personal or trite questions about their face lotions, pets, and marital plans. It was humiliating. I wanted to ask respectable questions about the film and their role in it, but for that information, I was not being paid.
There is a difference between what is news, what is a critique, and what is malicious gossip.
“The movie tanked at the box office,” is news.
“The movie sucked,” is a critique.
“The actress looked fat,” is gossip.
A nude photo up a woman’s skirt is illegal.
One is informative. Two is an opinion. Three and four are simply malicious and creepy.
Some positive respectful movie-lover sites focused on news and opinion are:
For a fresh raging backlash at the catty press by Mystery Man on Film, click to read this excellent piece about 2008 Oscar winning screenwriter Diablo Cody.
Are you a malicious consumer?
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6 Responses to “Malicious Content: Gossipmongers and the Paparazzi”
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Yowsers. What a sizzling piece of writing!
You know that this kind of negative attention from the press and the PUBLIC is exactly why I gave up my surefire career as a world renowned pop star so I become a lowly writer instead. I can’t fathom what it’s like to have every detail of your life splayed out in magazines, TV, and web sites for all the world to see. It’s no wonder these celebs are boozing, drugging, and generally heading straight for the nearest loony bin. I know it would make me crazy. Well, crazier than I am already ;)
Wow, good piece! I think it has a lot to do with what you said. They are human beings. People see them in movies and on the red carpet as something else. Because everything has to be and looks perfect. Behind the scenes nothing is of course. But because it seems perfect, people want to see them as ‘human beings.’ Making mistakes, attacking a paparazzo. I don’t think it’s always envy. It’s just their form of entertainment.
But anyway, thanks a lot for mentioning our humble little blog. :) I had to read it two times though, before I understood you didn’t think our blog was malicious and creepy.. ;)
Very interesting post, and quite true in many aspects. In a sense, because of the public’s insatiable appetite to know everything about their favorite star, perhaps subconsiously it maybe does influence them when they watch their favorite stars movie. Perhaps a bit out there I suppose, if you get what I mean….
It would be good if the law would be passed in California, that paps would have to stay a distance away from taking pics of celebs. Yet, sometime on the other side of the subject, you hear of celebrities tipping off paps as well. It is astounding today, how the trivial questions have become more important to ask a celeb rather than legitimate questions about their movie/role. It’s especially surprising when you see male interviewers asking all the typical trivial questions….there would have been a time not so long ago, that male interviewers would have been embarrassed to even ask such questions I think.
For those who may not know, interestingly enough, it so happens that actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a video he took himself on his official website, where he turns the tables on the paparazzi’s themselves!
Jaden, let me also thank you too for mentioning our movie site in such a commending regard as being respectful and positive! Perhaps some sites really wouldn’t give a dam if they were looked or thought as positive and respectful, but we do. So, thanks again, and ditto about your site as well.
Thanks folks for your good points and comments.
JAN, yes you are absolutely right, having worked for the trashy magazines myself briefly, it is true that celebrities, publicists, family and friends of the stars, do tip off the magazines with the intention of getting press. At US Weekly, there was someone who spoke regularly with Britney’s mother, which I found to be perverse. If my mother did that, I would cut her out of the will.
The relationship with the paparazzi is probably a love-hate relationship for the stars, and also must depend on who the star is and their personality. Stars need the press for their fame, but of course, it has gone too far (in my opinion). Their behavior disgusts me, and like I said, they have killed the movie-watching magick of many stars.
I enjoyed and applaud your perspective on this article.
At 56 years old, I first fell in love with the movies in the early 1950s, when the studios were raiding their own vaults, dusting off prints and selling them to the TV networks who were scrambling for product. On late-night broadcasts I saw movies made before my time, and my parents would reflect on them and of the time they were made. It has astounded me that here, decades later, some of those same movies I saw on those late-night broadcasts are being showcased with much fanfare on cable channels, and DVDs of them are being released— when I used to see them for free, the only price being a willingness to sit up late and watch those “dated ol’ flicks!”
I mention all this because in my youth, while learning to revere movies by watching the output of the studios, I discovered along the way that performers, directors, etc. were being watched over and governed by the studios, who had full control over their publicity. Only in the last few years, in reading biographies of “Golden Age” performers, did I realize that their sometimes shocking behavior was carefully “kept under wraps” least the performer and the studio fail in the eye of the ticket buyer.
They would not have faired nearly as well today. Today’s performers are unfortunately too-soon labeled “celebrity” and the paparazzi is loosed upon them. At the time when the studio system was breaking up, much was said of the artistic freedom gained by performers, directors, etc. But nowadays, watching “celebrities” lives being picked, morsel by morsel, to pieces, in the press, I think much more has been lost than gained in the dissolution of studios and their controlling, omnipotent in-house press!
Ha! damage-control was not an issue back then— there was no damage on a two-page spread in the tabloids to control!
NCEDDIE — Thank you for your interesting perspective and welcome to our little community.