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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, July 17th, 2009 - Comments Off on Paparazzi Ethics 101
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Paparazzi Ethics 101

This Vanity Fair article on the paparazzi team who got the final shot of Michael Jackson as he was dying (already dead?) in an ambulance gives quite a peek at what goes on in the minds of people who stalk celebs for a living. On the one hand, the piece is interesting in that it reveals something about the elusive singer’s relationship with his most devoted fans — mostly young, European women who, according to Ben Evenstad, co-founder of National Photo Group, “… would follow him all over the world. If he went to Ireland, France, Bahrain, Neverland, they were there. The same individuals. Nobody else had what he had.”
But it also reveals something of the mindset it takes to stalk celebrities for a living. Chris Weiss, who snagged the “money shot” of Jackson in the ambulance, talks in the interview about how when he was pressing his camera lens against the ambulance window as it pulled up to UCLA Medical Center, frantically snapping without knowing what was actually going on inside, Jackson’s bodyguards were practically begging him to stop: “Weiss saw a look on the guards’ faces that made him believe something was really wrong: “They were being aggressive, but it was remorseful aggressiveness. ‘Please guys, please just stop.’ They kept saying ‘please.’””
And yet, despite knowing that something serious and personally devastating to Jackson’s family — especially his young children — was obviously going on, that this was more than Jackson’s typical medical histrionics, he kept snapping away. And when National realized that Weiss had gotten a clear shot of Jackson with an oxygen mask covering his face while an EMT worked on him — either the last shot of Jackson alive, or the first of him dead — they quickly sold it to the highest bidder, OK! magazine.
What’s interesting to me about this piece is the ambivalence with which these guys talk about taking and selling this picture. There seems to be very little remorse there over the ethics of the picture itself or what they do for a living, and their regret around Jackson actually dying seems to be more about them and how they no longer have him as interesting prey to stalk than anything else. Here’s my favorite quote from the piece: ““This is what hit me halfway through the night: What do I do now? Chase fucking Zac Efron around?,” Evenstad asks. “What is the point?”
What’s the point, indeed?

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon