Free Shooting Stars by Jennifer Buhl Page A

have an outstanding citation.” (“Really, for what?” I ask, honestly surprised. There is no response.) Eventually I realize he’s trying to get me to admit to something, anything I might have hiddenin my closet. Finally, he leaves with the threat, “I’ve written down your details.” I’m pretty sure he can’t do anything with “my details” and is just trying to intimidate me, but he’s succeeded. I won’t sleep tonight.

Chapter 5
    After spending two years driving around the streets of L.A., I think it’s unlikely the paparazzi will ever become as bountiful as the Los Angeles police force.
    Still, we are too many.
    According to Simon, the proliferation of paps, and in turn gangbangs, has occurred over the last four or five years. Simon started papping before the proliferation and has seen the business transition both in ethnicity—Europeans to Hispanics—and in numbers—from fifty to five hundred.
    â€œI just don’t like the way they’re taking over the business,” Simon says about the gangbangers. “Why can’t they come in moderation? Fuck it, they pull in the cousins and the brothers and the uncles. They’re like locusts, they are.”
    Although it sounds harsh, his harangue is told with a hint of love. Simon is the nicest guy in the business. Everyone says it. He never gets upset when his job is jumped or when someone blocks him out. “That’s the game, luv. Gotta accept it,” he tells me. Even when the police hassle him, Simon just says, “Cops got a job to do too. Let’s move on.”
    But new paps, myself included, pose a problem for the veterans, or old-school paps as they like to call themselves. French and British “classically trained” newspaper photogs—Aaron, Simon, and most CXN paps—are considered old-school. Their predecessors came to the United States in the ’80s and ’90s and basically started the American paparazzi and tabloid industry. Many of them pulled in half a million dollars a year.
    New-school paps—Latinos for the most part, mainly Mexican andBrazilian 7 —started to shoot in the early 2000s. But they did not come with organized, cumbersome work visas like the British and French. Rather, they came in droves. These paps were just “here,” ready to work. Then they recruited their families and their friends and their friends’ families. New-school paps stole shots—and paychecks—from the Europeans and overall drove prices down by increasing the supply of pictures on the market. So when a celeb might have gotten shot once a month by an incognito pap before, now she was getting shot once a week, or more, and by several guys at once. As you can see, the increase in paparazzi has not been good for anyone, celebrity or paparazzi. (It is, however, good for you, the public. You now have much more to see. Free enterprise at its finest.)
    The addition of new-school paps has also changed the rules. For example, Simon tells me that it used to be when you rocked up to a doorstep and someone else was already there, you’d leave. Staying would be considered jumping, and bad etiquette. But nowadays there are just too many paps and too few celebs for that to be practical, and jumping protocol has changed.
    Today, “jumping” means moving in on a story when the celeb and paparazzi have already left the doorstep. The story—i.e., the celeb and accompanying pap (or paps)—is either on the road or at a location.
    Most likely, a story will not get jumped if it is not in town—i.e., not in Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, or another area of high pap concentration. If a story gets jumped outside of town, then it is a pap’s right to block other paps if he or she is able. On the other hand, if a story goes to town, or as it passes through town, jumping is a pap’s biggest threat. The paparazzi blanket town, so if you and