In her white gym shorts and gray hoodie, Spears emerged from the Mercedes wielding a large green umbrella. “It was like a bull ready to bust out of the chute.” “She looked at me really angry, like smoke was coming out of her nose,” Ramos said. It was a suggestion Spears - who for a short time had even dated a pap - did not take kindly to. Then he recalled telling her through the window: “Maybe when you come back, we can talk to you.” “We thought maybe she had to use the restroom, so we agreed to turn off our cameras,” Ramos told BuzzFeed News. “That is when it all went to shit,” Harrison said. With the explosion of TMZ, photographers started the once taboo practice of getting out of their cars and confronting stars in person. Gone were the days of long-lens shooting, in which celebrities went about their day unaware they were participating in a photo shoot. The competition also eroded previous rules of engagement in public spaces.
Restaurants and bars regularly patronized by the stars were often crowded with paparazzi and reporters posing as casual vacationers. Some teamed up as fake couples at exclusive resorts to get candid celebrity shots. Going undercover became modus operandi for paps trying to get a leg up on the competition. Still another spent a whole day blending into the side of a hill to get a shot of Sandra Bullock tying the knot with Jesse James. When Mary Kay Letourneau was to marry Vili Fualaau - the man she was convicted of raping when he was her 12-year-old student - a pap disguised himself in a 3D Ghillie camouflage suit designed to resemble heavy foliage to photograph the event at a winery in Washington state.Īnother pap hid in a bush for a day to capture Avril Lavigne getting hitched to Sum41 singer Deryck Whibley, and one tried to hire a cherry picker to get high enough in a tree to shoot Julia Roberts' nuptials to Danny Moder in Taos.
“We were making more money than we knew what do with,” he said.Īll that money drove paps to extreme lengths to get the photo. Harrison rattled off some of his own examples: $10,000 for a snap of Ben Affleck buying books on poker, $20,000 for Britney Spears getting her nails done, $10,000 for Faith Hill drinking a milkshake at Johnny Rockets. They were accompanied by "kill fees," in which an outlet paid top dollar for celeb photos - not to publish, but to keep them out of the hands of competitors. Bidding wars that pushed prices into the six figures were frequent. The ensuing competition fueled a frenzied demand for “Stars Just Like Us” photos to fill the surge in magazine page counts. A short while later, other celebrity magazines launched - In Touch Weekly, Life & Style Weekly, and OK!. The boom began in 2000, when Us Weekly went from monthly to weekly and started a head-to-head war with People magazine. “It was like a gold rush," Harrison said. The big payoff at the time was still in the story-driven photos - baby bumps, new couples, affairs, arrests, vacations, stints in rehab.īut soon, the stars became “just like us,” and everything changed. So I would go down to the Baywatch set and take pictures of Pamela Anderson, sell it, and roam around town.”Īt first, there was little interest in Harrison’s brand of photography.
Being in L.A., a lot of things were being filmed. “That just seemed to be where the money was. “No one was just roaming the street finding celebrities and taking pictures of them,” Harrison said. Harrison wasn’t good at “doorstepping” - waiting outside a celebrity’s home and then tailing them around town - so he developed his own niche, one that would come to dominate the tabloid circuit. “Maybe there was five of us,” he told BuzzFeed News. When he started his career as a pap in 1995, Harrison said there was hardly any money to be made. At a husky 6 feet 8 inches tall, Giles Harrison cuts a formidable figure, especially when he’s wielding a foot-long, 500 mm lens.