Brangelina

I am working on a memoir (of sorts), about my experiences working on cruise ships and as a paparazzi, and a few other things, and here is a sample chapter from this work in progress.

I had been working on Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt for quite a while. I had spent weeks out in Alberta, Canada, hanging around the fringes of the heavily guarded set for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which Brad Pitt was filming, following them around and staking out the remote and secluded lodge they were staying at on the banks of the Red Deer River.

The door had been blown off by a scoop some Paparazzi, known henceforth simply as paps, from Los Angeles, had landed, with a full set of Angelina taking flying lessons at the remote Red Deer Regional Airport and sneaky paps from all over were creeping around the countryside looking to get the illusive photos of them together.

There are two types of pap; there are doorsteppers, who stand around outside of places that famous people frequent (such as their homes, bars, restaurants, or hotels), and there are surveillance paps who try to get shots of famous people without the famous people knowing their photos have been taken.  I was mostly the surveillance type, sneaky.

But whether you are a doorstepper or surveillance pap, the lifeblood of your game is information. Paps rely on tips from disgruntled employees of a celebrity tipping them off, a valet attendant, a hotel receptionist, or even the celebrities themselves providing tips about their own movements to ensure coverage in the media so as to stay popular and relevant. Sometimes, information comes from the most unlikely sources, but wherever it comes from, it is always welcome.

Now that The Paps knew Angelina and Brad were together somewhere in the vicinity of the airport and the movie set, the hard work got underway, and the game was on.

There is not much to report from what happened in Alberta, as with much of the lonely life of a pap, it was spent alone, smoking cigarettes, sipping cold coffee, and waiting for something to happen. I was in a gas station diner, eating some eggs and bacon, and struck up a conversation with the counter waitress. She liked my English accent, eyed my camera bag stuffed full of expensive-looking cameras and telephoto lenses, and asked me what I was doing in a diner. I said I was a pap, looking for where Brad and Angelina were staying (Angelina’s sighting at the nearby airport and subsequent intense media coverage that had propelled Springbok, Alberta, onto the global stage was big news in Springbok).

The waitress glanced around, leaned forward conspiratorially, and told me in hushed tones the name of the rural road and plot number where they were staying, and winked. I smiled, scribbled down the new information on a paper napkin, and finished my breakfast and coffee, leaving a $20 tip.

And so I made my way out into the wilderness along gravel tracks, deeper into the bush, and came to the Red Deer River, and drove further along the trail until I came to the plot number and Brangelina’s secret hideaway. The first thing a pap does is to make sure they are alone, with no other paps there to spoil the exclusivity of any potential images. 

I was alone, which was good, but now the monotony of the job took over, knowing I had literally hours and hours of sitting, and waiting, and watching, waiting for something worth taking a photo of to materialise.

I think, over the time I was a pap, which was quite a while, I perhaps actually worked, taking photos, maybe for about one or two minutes. The work came in three-second bursts (where 30 images could be taken) before the subject disappeared from sight. And that is the trick of being a successful pap – having the stamina to be able to sit for days, urinating in bottles, eating garbage packaged food, staring, and waiting for the thing you are waiting to happen to actually happen.

Not much happened while I boredly waited for something to happen, but on the second day of staking out Casa Brangelina, a patrol car from the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment arrived. I had been spotted by Brangelina’s security, and they had pulled an old trick; they called the cops.

Who knows what the security said (probably that I was a dangerous psycho), but two RCMP coppers turned up and asked me what I was doing. From my experience working as a pap, the cops don’t like getting heavy with anyone connected to the News, even paps, whose link to actual news is tenuous at best.

The cops asked me what I was doing, and I said I was minding my business. Unflustered, the corporal asked me what business I was minding, and I flashed my press pass from the agency I worked for, and that was that. The RCMP coppers knew that Brangelina was where they were and also knew why I was where I was and that I was breaking no laws. They wished me a good day and were off. But this was only the opening salvo from Brangelina’s security detail.

I sat and waited, smoking another cigarette, wishing I had brought more food with me, listening to country music on the radio, when I noticed two men walking towards where I was parked. I locked the door. One of the men was beefy, with a shaved head and wraparound Oakley sunglasses, and looked ex-SAS,  and also looked like he meant business. The two of them walked around the car, taking photos of me, telling me, mockingly, that my cover, obviously, was blown and I would get no business out in the bush by the Red Deer River. And they were right, this time.

I spent another week loitering around until I heard that Angelina had been spotted back in LA, and the game out near Springbok, Alberta, was over.

Months passed, and I was down in Miami trawling the beach, looking for celebs frolicking on the beach to snap and spending nights doorstepping nightclubs and chic restaurants along Miami Beach. I had some success, including a nice shot of Lindsay Lohan (who was approaching the zenith of her pop-culture saturation) and a nice photo of singer Craig Davis coming out of a club on Fontainebleau Beach, and then I got a text: Get down to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, Angelina is shooting the Good Shepherd there, and Brad is going to be with her. And the game was back afoot!

This was a time of peak Brangelina, with constant, swirling rumours in newsrooms and photo desks worldwide that Angelina was pregnant with Brad’s baby, and a race was on to get the first photos of what was referred to as “The Bump” – irrefutable evidence of pregnancy to feed the ravenous media frenzy.

Upon arriving at the Caribbean island, more information arrived, with the hotel (the Hilton) that they would be staying at. I was travelling with another pap as my partner, where we would split up from different vantage points, doubling the chances of gaining a shot and splitting the commission from anything sold 50/50. We checked into the Hilton and began scoping the joint out, but there were no signs of Angelina, or Brad, or anything else at all. The hotel seemed largely deserted. There was another Hilton on the island, and we assumed that we were at the wrong one.  As we stood at the hotel reception checking out, our fortune changed.

The beefy ex-SAS-looking man from Red Deer River arrived to check in with another man. Beefy didn’t pay any attention to us or recognise me, but I recognised him. I whispered in my fellow pap’s ear that we were in the right place, and we checked in again.

Now that we knew we were in the right place, our surveillance operation could begin. As it turned out, we wouldn’t need to do any surveillance due to some additional good fortune on our behalf. That evening, we sat in the deserted dining room, eating our meal, two paps, the literal sworn enemy of any privacy-demanding celebrity, when Beefy and the Exec Assistant arrived for dinner.

They asked for a table well away from everyone else, which was us, as we were the only people in the dining room. The waitress refused bluntly, telling them they had to sit at the table next to us as all other sections were closed, and so grumpily, Beefy and his companion sat beside us.

It is worth mentioning that the two of us didn’t look like regular tourists. We looked shifty and pale-skinned, like we drank too much booze and smoked too many cigarettes, and didn’t take care of ourselves. Beefy looked like a British ex-special forces soldier, and the exec assistant looked like they were obviously a personal assistant for some Hollywood A-List celebrity.

We sat, trying to make small talk, in shock that we had got so far behind enemy lines undetected, but the best was yet to come. Beefy and the exec assistant ordered some drinks and food and then dialled into a call with someone back in Beverly Hills on speaker, and they went through the entire itinerary of Brangelina’s time in the Dominican Republic, including a helicopter flight from Santo Domingo to Port au Prince in Haiti for a charity appearance with Wyclef Jean.

We sat flabbergasted and stoney-faced as we eavesdropped, taking as many mental notes of important times and dates as Beefy and the other man conducted their call, oblivious to us listening in.

Of course, having this goldmine of inside information paid us no real benefit over the coming days.  The first obstacle was the presence of the elite presidential guard, provided by the President of the Dominican Republic, as Brangelina’s personal bodyguards whilst they were on the island. It is one thing to flash your press credentials to a couple of RCMP coppers in Alberta, Canada, where there is freedom of the press, etc., and a completely different thing when dealing with armed, highly trained soldiers in a country with no such freedoms of the press, whose sole mission is to stop paps from snapping their principles, and who looked like it would be an easy task for them.

We had hired a jeep, but our attempts to follow the presidential guard convoy as they travelled from the hotel to pick up Brangelina and entourage proved futile, as the convoy’s tinted black SUVs disregarded every traffic law and breezed through red lights and the traffic opened up before them and swallowed us up behind them, snarling us up in traffic.

Operating / snapping in the hotel was off-limits due to the omi-presence of the highly suspicious presidential guard, so we would have to find a different way to skin this cat. The most obvious place to start was the set of The Good Shepherd, and so that is where we started. Things didn’t go to plan there either. 

In the movie, Santo Domingo was playing the part of Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) in the Congo. The perimeter of Parque Duarte, where the filming was taking place, was surrounded by armed uniformed soldiers, and no visitors or onlookers were welcome.

We split up. I went one way, and the other pap went the other way, looking for weakness in the perimeter or a soldier we could bribe with cigarettes and a few pesos. We had bought walkie-talkies from an electronics store and were dressed (somewhat) like tourists. 

I wandered around the far side of the plaza, glimpsing the set being prepared and seeing Robert Deniro, the movie’s director, discussing shots with the cameramen. I played it cool. As I wandered around, I saw faces I knew. I saw the paps who worked on the Caribbean island of Sr. Barts, whose photographs of celebrities on the beach and yachts graced celebrity magazines. I saw paps from New York and Toronto, all trying to look like a tourist,  looking for a room with an open window above the plaza they could bribe their way into. I continued wandering around until I noticed a Bodega at the northeast of the plaza, where above it, I could see an open balcony looking down on the square where the scene would be shot with a near-perfect and paparazzi-friendly vantage point, and had to move fast.

I walked to the soldiers and told them I needed to visit the bodega to get cigarettes and was allowed through. I entered the shop and pulled a handful of pesos from my jeans. 

You speak English? I asked in a hushed, clandestine voice. The shady-looking man behind the counter nodded. You own the apartment above? He nodded. If I give you this money, will you let me up there and not let anyone know I am there? He nodded.

We had a deal. He took the handful of pesos and led me to the stairs at the back of the shop, up to the apartment. My heart raced as I followed him up the stairs, so happy with myself. I was going to get a scoop, and my photo of Angelina with her “baby bump” would be on the front pages of every magazine and newspaper and every celebrity news website around the world in a few hours. I felt giddy…

The door was slung open, and I stepped into a rancid, stinky apartment with several shirtless men leaning against the walls, high on crack. Standing by the balcony doors was another English pap and a female American reporter from a glossy celebrity magazine, who both looked at me with a mixture of shock, horror, and dismay.

The pap was working exclusively for the reporter’s magazine, and they had arrived together at the bodega shortly before me in the hope of getting the exclusive shot of Angelina and were feeling, until I arrived, just as happy as I had been moments ago.

With high-stakes jobs like this one, it is important to have exclusivity; as if other paps have the same shot, the value of the images tumbles. If a pap has an exclusive and the celeb is much in demand, the price goes up and up as the bidding war to use the images intensifies.

The reporter was furious and immediately began moaning and berating our shady host for double-crossing her and allowing another pap inside the apartment. Our host shrugged, swigged from a bottle of light run, and didn’t give a shit about the reporter’s protests. The other pap begrudgingly acknowledged me while I radioed my partner to say I was in the plaza and had a good view, but we weren’t going to get exclusivity.

I should probably mention the men high on crack more thoroughly. It seemed that our host had a side business, which was selling crack, and his customers would buy a rock of crack, head up to the rancid apartment, smoke the rock, sit there buzzing for a while, and then either leave or buy more crack. In essence, I had paid a crack dealer to hole up in his crack house, surrounded by crackheads.

The day passed slowly, and the crack house’s reek increased as the heat of the day rose. One of the backrooms was used by the crackheads to piss and shit in, and the thick, funky aroma of the backroom was quite foul. This was mixed with the acrid, chemical fumes from the crack smoking.

There was tension as well. Firstly, there was tension between the other pap and the reporter. We had chatted and discussed jobs, and equipment, etc., and he seemed like a nice bloke, but she viewed me as the enemy that must be eliminated to preserve their exclusivity, and they would huddle in the corner while she reprimanded him for chatting with me, and muttered about how to get rid of me.

There was also tension between the crackheads and the us. The crack heads greedily eyed our expensive camera equipment, their lips blistered and split from the glass pipes they smoked, their eyes vacant and dangerous, demanding to know how much it was worth, and we could see them working out in their heads how much crack they could buy if they stole our equipment and sold it.

And thirdly, tension developed between us and our host, who had started drinking white rum earlier in the day and was now getting high on his own supply. He started menacingly demanding more money to allow us to stay and threatening to report us to the cops if we didn’t hand over more cash. The American reporter said she would give him more money if he threw me out, and reported me to the cops, and let them stay, and she smiled unpleasantly at me.

I reflected at that moment, standing in the filthy, stinking apartment filled with crackheads, that being a pap was a seedy and dirty job and that perhaps the seedy and dirty apartment said something deeply profound about the job that I had chosen to do, and my life choices, but fate interceded before that deeply profound thing could be fully realised, and our crack smoking host could make a decision about my future in his crack house.

Angelina Jolie appeared on the set, dressed in a 1960s wardrobe, a green satin dress, hat, and coat, surrounded by production staff fussing and preening. The other pap and I immediately raised our cameras to our eyes and went silent, the autofocus of our high-end Canon digital cameras locked on Angelina’s face about 60 meters away.

He had a 500mm Canon lens, and I had a 350mm Canon lens with a doubler, effectively making my lens 700mm. Both lenses were coloured white so that news photographers could be easily identified in warzones and hopefully not targeted. We stood, watching our target through the viewfinder while our host continued angrily demanding money, waiting for a break in the crowd of people attending Angelina on the set. We saw her speak to Robert Deniro and her co-star Matt Damon, and the final touches to her make-up were applied.

The world shrunk in size to whatever we could see through the lens, nothing else mattered in that moment. The angry shouting and demands of our host faded into nothingness. All we heard were voices shouting from across the plaza for Lights Up! And Quiet on the set! And the scene was ready to be shot. The crowd around our target broke apart, and we saw her. A sudden jet of adrenaline fired into my central nervous system, which made me quiver.

There was a burst from both of our cameras’ shutters, like a rapid fluttering, as the mirror rose, the shutter curtain opened, the focused image hit the billions of light receptors of the semiconductor inside of the camera, and the light was converted to zeros and ones, and the image was captured. Hundreds of photos were taken in a matter of seconds, and it was over. 

Let’s fucking do one, said the other pap, grabbing the reporter’s arm and making for the door. I did the same, barging past our angry, drunk, high host, and hurrying down the stairs, stuffing my camera into my backpack and trying not to fall, all while the shouts behind us sounded angrier and angrier.

We dashed across the square, splitting up,  toward the watching crowds behind the line of troops. Excuse me, mate, I said to a soldier, pushed past him, and was gone, disappearing into the throng of faces, hoping for a glimpse of Hollywood royalty.

Within moments, the images were uploaded to an FTP server and retrieved by the photo desk team in LA, and moments after that, messages were hitting the inboxes of editors and journalists around the world urgently announcing New Photos of Angelina Jolie, and moments later the sales began, and newspapers and magazines splashed the images across their websites to feed the public’s unquenchable thirst for new and more celebrity news.

I never did get that exclusive shot of Angelina, but I did get a shot (see below). My partner across the plaza got an excellent shot of her. He had holed up in a fancy villa much closer to the action, having given a teenage kid some money to use his bedroom window overlooking the plaza, and was unharassed by an unreasonable and unhinged crack dealer. He got the shot showing Angelina sweetly smiling, and the baby bump clearly visible, which made it to the front pages of all the mags and newspapers.

And then we packed up and flew back to Miami and trawled the beach and nightclubs for celebrities for another couple of nights before heading home.