Shooting Britney“Yayo, what’s going on? What’s going on?” he says. When he gets off the phone, he shrugs. “I’m getting crazy, working this,” he says. “I don’t give a fuck, man.” The previous day, MBF got some shots of Britney in her car arriving at the Beverly Hills 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?” Felix says. With 35 photographers camped outside her house, and the voices of her lawyers and self-styled pimp-daddy ex-husband and monster stage mother all arguing for space in her head, it is easy to see how the pop star might look for outside support. It is not uncommon for Britney to stay up late reading the X17 message boards, or so Sam Lufti told Brandy. The source of the pop star’s fascination is not hard to locate: She needs to secure her ass in the car with the seatbelt. Look how the belt is behind her. Fool. X17’s photographers say that Britney Spears frequently comments on the pictures they post on their Web site. They also suggest that the pop star sometimes goes out a day or two later and restages unflattering shots. “Forever, she has been in on the joke,” says Harvey Levin of TMZ. “She has also been severely mentally ill for a while.” 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. Security has been enhanced today. Another metal detector has been added to the eighth floor where the hearing is being held,” reports a big, handsome celebrity gossip reporter in a suit outside the Superior Court building at 110 North Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Perched on stone lintels above his head are three weird figures representing Mosaic Law, the Magna Carta, and the Declaration of Independence. The reporters for Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight, and for E!, Fox News, CNN, and other networks take turns doing stand-ups and interviewing their local experts on chapter 22 or 23 of the Dickensian courtroom drama in which the pop star gives birth, loses custody of her children to her ex-husband, and now makes a complete hash of her attempt to get the kids back. “Your laundry is out in front of everyone,” the Access Hollywood woman explains to her viewers. “It’s very embarrassing.” Diagonally across the street, the core of the decayed downtown is wrapped around Frank Gehry’s undulating, steel-clad concert hall, which looks like a giant steel-capped molar in a mouthful of rotting teeth. Passing office workers, many of whom are black, stop and shake their heads. Downtown is part of their city, which, despite all the talk about drugs and gangs, still goes to church on Sunday and most emphatically does not endorse the loosey-goosey morality of the Hollywood set. “We are all sinners,” one woman shouts. “Leave that poor, poor girl alone.” Bystanders who use shouts and curses, and sometimes bottles and fists, to keep the paparazzi from their prey are referred to as “heroes.” Two years ago, everyone wanted to be a hero, but now it is rare to get more than two or three a night. Here, where celebrity sightings are less common than in Beverly Hills, the local population of heroes is still relatively untapped. Pages: <prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 next> David Samuels is the author of Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of essays and reporting, and The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Adventures and Fantastical Lies of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, both published this spring.
What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte. |
Search
|
