Paparazzi Apprentice

Help wanted: celebrity photographer. Must have good eyes and flexible moral code. No experience necessary

You'd be surprised how much water a six-inch plastic bottle seems to hold when it's poured all over you.

This lesson in liquid displacement comes courtesy of Bruce Willis, who has just sauntered out of a Malibu eatery, made a beeline for our car and distributed the contents of said bottle through the vehicle's open windows. Pop-eyed in the backseat I catch a faceful of designer H2O, but the brunt is absorbed by Marc Rylewski, a paparazzo busily snapping pictures of Willis from the front seat. He's soaked.

Willis swaggers away, then glances back with the famous smirk that has preceded so many leaden action-flick one-liners. "How's that?" he asks.

Swell, Bruce. So you want double prints, then?

The term paparazzi comes from the 1960 Federico Fellini film La Dolce Vita, which features a pesky news photographer named Paparazzo. The word literally translates as "buzzing insects," and Mr. Die Hard has just treated us as such. Paparazzi have existed for decades, but we're entering the profession's golden age. Led by a slew of new or reconfigured celebrity magazines--Us Weekly, In Touch, Star--all trying to dethrone the venerable People, competition and compensation have never been greater for the exclusive, often embarrassing famous-person photo.

The ad in LA Weekly made it sound so simple: "Paparazzi wanted. No experience necessary. Car and cell phone required." It doesn't seem like a job you'd find jammed between "office manager" and "patent clerk" in the classifieds, yet there it was. The idea intrigued me. Could a career of harassing celebrities and disgracing my good name really be just a phone call away?

Yes and no. When I contact Rylewski he explains that it can be that simple--but if I really want to learn what it takes to be a good paparazzo, more effort is required. He agrees to take me under his wing for a week so I can see just how much more.

Days later I'm jetting west from the relative tranquility of Atlanta, about to be dropped into the middle of the paparazzi's natural habitat: Los Angeles.

Lesson Number One: Spot the Car, Catch the Star

"Mary-Kate and Ashley were here earlier," Rylewski informs me in his halting French accent. For my first tutorial we're standing in the parking lot behind upscale L.A. boutique Fred Segal. To most it's a nondescript slab of asphalt near a cluster of trendy clothing stores. To a paparazzo it's a regular shooting galleria.

Rylewski is a lanky 35-year-old expatriate with dark, gray-flecked hair who moved to L.A. nine years ago. After spending four years working with X17, a paparazzi agency, he took 18 months off to write and direct a movie, then in 2001 started his own agency, Ins7ght.

"See that guy?" He gestures toward a middle-aged man behind the wheel of a beat-up taxi who looks a hell of a lot like a cabdriver. "He's paparazzi. Works for my old boss. That one too," he says, nodding toward a stout guy loitering at the open hatch of a Land Rover.

I had naively suggested meeting at Rylewski's office. He instructed me to meet him on a street corner and then led me to a silver Mercedes SUV. This, I realize, is headquarters. Inside, all the backseats except one have been removed, and a laptop is mounted in a bracket over the passenger seat. The windows are heavily tinted and covered by a black curtain that rings the back of the car. A plastic case containing an array of electronic equipment is mounted behind the driver's seat. Rylewski's camera sits in a green backpack next to it.

I quickly learn it's hard to overstate a car's importance to this job. It's a studio, a dining room and, when necessary, a bedroom. Rylewski's Mercedes is ideally suited to the task. For starters it's an SUV, which gives him a high vantage point to scope his quarry. And it's an expensive SUV, which blends in around the tony neighborhoods where celebs live and gather. The flat rear window is perfect to shoot through. From here Rylewski juggles tips, pursues celebrities, snaps digital pictures and even edits and transmits them to magazine photo editors when his wireless Internet card is cooperating.

We motor down Melrose toward Beverly Hills. Rylewski is perched in the driver's seat with his head high, though somehow he's still slouching. His eyes constantly scan the horizon. Every few minutes he'll fix on a car traveling in the other direction and crane his neck as it passes. "I'm checking out license plates," he says. He tosses me a small black notebook; in it is a handwritten catalog of plate numbers, car descriptions and their corresponding celebrity owners. "Mornings I usually follow a particular star. Afternoons I just drive around and catch people."

I mention that it sounds rather implausible to pinpoint a few specific souls in a sprawling city of 4 million.

"Oh no, I catch people all the time," he says. "I look at everyone driving--well, the bling-bling cars. If they're in the distance, I look at the plate. If it rings a bell, I check the person driving and anyone beside them. The tricky part is doing a U-turn without being spotted or creating an accident."

Despite the reckless maneuvers this entails, Rylewski boasts that he hasn't been in an accident in nine years. Soon we pass Barneys on Wilshire and turn down a side street. He eyes a tall, well-dressed man getting into a silver Acura.

"That's Lisa Kudrow's guy," he says. We pull over. "He might be going to meet her. Not a top seller, but with her kid and the guy, it'll sell." It's one thing to be able to recognize Kudrow walking down the street; it's entirely different to be able to pick out her husband, Michel Stern, an advertising executive known for nothing other than marrying a Friend. I'm not sure I'd recognize David Arquette if he were sitting in my lap.

The Acura eases into traffic. We follow for a few miles, then pull up to a stoplight in the left lane, leaving a car between us and him. I haven't tailed anyone since I suspected a high school girlfriend of cheating on me. When the light changes, the Acura turns right.

"Damn, I passed him," Rylewski mutters. "You should never pass." We swerve across four lanes, turn right onto the next side street and swing an abrupt U-turn. Without warning I'm tossed shoulder-first into the back of the passenger seat as we slam into a Jeep.

"Fuuuuuck." So much for nine years without an accident.

We climb out to survey the damage. The Mercedes's front grille is smashed and the hood bent, steam billowing ominously. The Jeep is completely unscathed, its driver relieved to be on her way. Standing at the side of the road, hands on his hips, Rylewski manages a weak smile. "If the stars knew about this they'd be having a good laugh right now."

Lesson Number Two: Jim Carrey is not your friend

It's practically an article of faith that paparazzi are scum. When the sedan carrying Lady Diana Spencer and Dodi Al-Fayed careened into a Paris tunnel wall in 1997, the army of photographers pursuing her, and their ilk, were immediately stamped as immoral, bloodthirsty demons. Evidence that the driver was shit-faced and speeding did little to mollify the public wrath, especially given reports that several paparazzi had taken pictures of the dying royal in the wreckage. In the aftermath the epithet "princess killer" was hurled at hard-core paparazzi and even news photographers.

Few thought the profession would survive such a thrashing, but seven years after Di Day it's positively thriving. Give some of the credit to magazine überdiva Bonnie Fuller. In 2002 she transformed Us Weekly from a dismal People wannabe into a snarky celebrity bible, only to decamp the following year to Star, a supermarket tabloid with its own glossy aspirations. As a result of the intense competition, prices have skyrocketed: Coveted shots of a celebrity couple such as Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake have fetched six-figure prices.

"Last year was the biggest for just about everybody," says Gary Morgan, co-director of Splash, a large paparazzi agency. "People were getting $10,000 for stuff that the year before would've sold for $500."

The upshot? A flood of new photographers, often novices recruited by the agencies, are handed a camera and a cell phone and set loose on the stars. Which isn't to say the paparazzi are suddenly Hollywood's darlings. Quite the contrary--more than ever before, celebrities view them as stalkers with zoom lenses. It's a war out there.

The hatred often runs deep. As favorite paparazzi target Jim Carrey told Playboy, "They can't feel good about what they're doing. There will be a reckoning in their lives--some unexplainable disease, something that makes them go, 'Why me?' I'm here to tell you, it's because of the choices you made."

Lesson Number Three: Shoot 'em all, Let the Buyers sort it out

With the Mercedes out of commission, our paparazzi-mobile the next day is Rylewski's second car--a green Toyota Camry. We pretend it doesn't chap us to drive it through the gilded hills of Bel-Air, past ivy-covered stone walls hiding one mansion after another, then park in front of Meg Ryan's house. Ryan isn't a huge star these days, but her tryst with Russell Crowe, the subsequent dissolution of her marriage to Dennis Quaid and recent rumors of a less than convincing Botox overhaul have kept her hot with tabloid editors. Rylewski has shot her at least half a dozen times in the past year.

We creep along the fence toward a six-foot gate at the top of her driveway. "Stay to this side," he whispers, pointing out a security camera. He motions for me to peek over the gate with him. I hoist myself up, wondering whether the sight of America's sweetheart aiming a shotgun at my face would make me laugh or cry.

"That's her car, so she's here. Newspaper's still there too, so she hasn't been out yet today." We move the car 50 yards down an adjacent road. If we sit right outside her gate, he explains, she'll spot us as she leaves.

Then we wait. Like cops on a stakeout, paparazzi do a lot of waiting. While we fidget in the cramped Camry, Rylewski describes the winding path that led him to Meg Ryan's driveway this morning.

"I wanted to be a journalist," he says. He got the itch after getting bounced from the French army at the age of 20 and then spending two years traveling through Eastern Europe and Russia, selling pizzas from the back of a van he'd outfitted with a wood-burning stove. After years on the road, fistfights with Russian gangsters and a stint in an Uzbekistan jail for stealing artwork from a restaurant, he returned to Paris. An internship at a French news photo agency led to full-time work in the agency's New York office. Photography became a sideline. He moved to L.A., where he shot studio stuff--bright-eyed actor-waiters in need of head shots--and worked the red carpet at movie premieres and parties. The money, though, was in paparazzi work.

"I ultimately want to work with them," Rylewski says softly. "The stars. As a director." The movie he made a few years ago, Killer Cop, is a straight-to-video action flick self-financed with money he inherited from his grandmother. "I don't know if I ever could, though, after doing this. The thing is...."

Rylewski stops, glances in the rearview mirror and cranks the ignition. "That's her."

Ryan's black Mercedes disappears down the road behind us. For a few seconds we do nothing, and I stifle an odd urge to shout, "We're losing her!" Then Rylewski turns the car around and follows, winding through the hills a bit before spotting the Mercedes rounding the bend in front of us.

"That's what you want," Rylewski explains. "When you see just the tail end, you see them, but they don't see you."

Stealth is vital to good paparazzi photography. An undetected photographer can snag a star in unguarded (preferably incriminating) moments, while one who has been spotted often must settle for bland, camera-conscious photos--or deal with a star actively thwarting his efforts.

We merge onto busier city streets. Ryan parks near a bookstore, and Rylewski drives past, stopping at the end of a row of cars. He grabs his camera, a $5,000 Canon digital with a $2,000 lens, lowers his seat, aims through the side window and begins popping off shots as she enters the bookstore. Minutes later, on her way out, she seems to be covering her face with her hand.

"She may have spotted us," Rylewski says. "She has a very good eye."

His suspicion is confirmed by the series of swift turns Ryan makes down narrow side streets. We roll through red lights in pursuit but appear to have lost her. On instinct Rylewski cuts behind a building, slices through an alley at 60 miles an hour and emerges (continued on page 142)Paparazzi(continued from page 118) on the other side just in time to see her parking again, in front of a salon.

We position the Camry so we'll have an unobstructed angle of Ryan as she leaves. Rylewski spritzes his windows with Windex. Forty minutes later Ryan heads down the sidewalk straight toward us. Rylewski clicks off a blur of photos, ducking as she gets close and instructing me to do the same. Granted, I've hidden my face while watching a few Meg Ryan flicks, but a week ago I don't think I could have imagined a reason I'd be hiding from Ryan herself.

Though the photos aren't particularly newsworthy--hell, she's not actually doing anything--they are exclusives, a precious commodity in this town. Which isn't to say they'll necessarily sell: This week's demand could depend on whether Britney hogs the space by getting married again or some TV star is snapped coming out of rehab.

Once or twice a week Rylewski transmits recent catches to photo editors at the tabloids and glossies. If they're interested, negotiations begin. Persian bazaar--style haggling can ensue, though in most cases the worth of a particular set of photos is clear to both sides.

As the sole full-time employee of his own agency, Rylewski is something of a dinosaur. Most L.A. paparazzi are now concentrated in four large agencies: Splash, Bauer-Griffin, Fame and X17. They have the budgets to wine and dine editors, hire sales staff and even pay their shooters something akin to a salary. The trade-off is that big paydays are split with the agency. Disputes over commissions are common, which is why Rylewski went his own way.

Given the bigger-is-better trend, going solo was a shaky proposition. Rylewski lacked contacts and much credibility. That all changed when he snapped exclusive shots of Nicole Kidman and Tobey Maguire together. It was Kidman's first suspected fling after her marriage to Tom Cruise had gone splat. Rylewski sold the photos for $87,000.

"It changed my life," he says.

Lesson Number Four: Use the Local Talent

Later that afternoon, amid a steady drizzle, we pull to the curb in front of a burger joint on San Vicente in Brentwood. On the sidewalk is a husky black fellow with a yellow front tooth and a cardboard sign that reads Vietnam Vet. Need Food. Any Money Appreciated.

"Hey, Green," Rylewski greets the man amiably. "Seen anyone good today?"

"Nah, it's been quiet."

A homeless guy who keeps an eye peeled for celebrities--now that's L.A. Green has current copies of Us Weekly and In Touch stuffed in the pockets of his ragged jacket. A hands-free cell phone earpiece dangles from under his baseball hat, near his left ear. And when he dips his sign I see scrawled on the back a crib sheet of celebrities' cars and plate numbers.

Green has been hanging around this corner for 11 years. "About five years ago a guy comes up and asks if I ever see stars," he explains. "I tell him I see them all the time. He gives me his business card and some cash. Tells me to call him when I see someone. So I did."

Since then Green has become a valued paparazzi asset. Rylewski pays him for tips and occasionally buys him lunch to keep him happy. I ask Green about the bulging folder under his arm, and he opens it. It's filled with paparazzi photos clipped from tabloids featuring him panhandling celebrities.

"That's me and Jim Carrey," Green says. "That's me and Van Damme. They were setups. The photographer had me set them up." A picture of a star handing a homeless guy money is, after all, worth more than a star walking down the street.

Green is just one of the town's street-level reconnaissance corps--doormen, valets, security guards, waiters and, yes, homeless people on the lookout and on the take, who trade celebrity co-ordinates for cold hard cash and keep the paparazzi machine running hot.

"What you see is everything," Rylewski reminds me. "You just have to turn it into gold."

We ask Green if he wants to join us for a burger, but he declines. "It's raining," he says. "That's gonna be bad for business. I'm gonna go watch some movies, study some faces."

Lesson Number Five: Don't Upset the Herd

Paparazzi has become a tag for all celebrity snappers, but there's a distinction between hard-core gotcha paparazzi such as Rylewski and the photographers who line the red carpet at movie premieres and other star-studded events. A big distinction, if you ask them.

"I take offense when someone calls me paparazzi," says Lester Cohen, a celebrity photographer and one of the founders of WireImage, a top photo agency. "That's somebody who's not invited in, who'll go to any lengths to get the photo. I'm not comfortable invading somebody's privacy."

The disrespect is mutual. "They're just button pushers," Rylewski snorts. "It's so easy--you know the stars will be there on the carpet. Yet they're so serious, all those ants running around."

I check out this other, shiny side of the coin for myself by hitting the red carpet at the Starsky & Hutch premiere. At sundown I'm among a teeming mass of photographers herded into a makeshift pen outside the Westwood Village Theater entrance. Most carry step stools and at least two large cameras. I'm armed with a skimpy 35 millimeter I got for my birthday a few years ago.

The pen is separated from the imminent celebrity parade by a waist-high steel barrier. All the choice positions along the front are taken, so I camp behind a large woman, a spot everyone else seems to be avoiding. The tight space is illuminated by klieg lights and thick with body odor.

"Are you a photographer?" the woman asks, glancing dismissively at my camera.

"Yep."

She rolls her eyes.

Then comes the cavalcade of "stars." People named Michael Cera and Kelly Rowan are preceded down the carpet by publicists, who helpfully inform us who the hell they are. Then the yelling.

"Kelly! Kelly! Over here!"

"Kelly, you look beautiful!"

That's nothing compared with what happens when recognizable faces start to saunter in. Ben Stiller arrives to a mob scene; photographers literally climb over each other to get their shots. But when I press against the large woman in front of me she spins around with a swiftness of which I never imagined her capable.

"Don't ... lean ... on ... me."

I smile, assuming she's just hazing the new guy. She glowers back to let me know she's serious. A photographer dashes from one end of the pen to the other, shouting, "Get out of my way! Get out of my way!"

The absurdity of this venture is that the stars are posing just a few feet away! Each celebrity spins around for each knot of photographers, offering whatever angles they want. The screaming and jostling are little more than a ritual intended to manufacture excitement around an event that will be repeated a couple hundred times this year.

When Stiller and co-star Owen Wilson start mugging together on the carpet, the pandemonium escalates until I'm convinced the entire pen is going to spontaneously combust. The movie? Somebody told me later it was okay if you weren't expecting too much.

Lesson Number Six: Know When to Fold 'Em

Rylewski and I spend seven hours the next day cruising around Beverly Hills, staking out stars' houses and getting squat for our trouble.

Around four P.M. our luck turns. We catch Michael Douglas and Prince (not together, unfortunately) at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We snap Robert Downey Jr. reading Star at a clothing shop in Sunset Plaza. ("That's a sure seller. They love to see celebs reading their mag.") Then we catch Paris Hilton's sex video co-star, Rick Solomon, in the parking lot. ("Surprisingly, he sometimes sells.") We spy James Woods outside a hotel. All this in little more than an hour.

In Green Hills of Africa, a memoir about big-game hunting, Ernest Hemingway describes "the nervous exhilaration, like a laughing drunk, that a sudden idiotic abundance" of ordinarily rare game makes. We're similarly glowing from our windfall.

We head toward Ashton Kutcher's house. Photos of him with Demi Moore and her kids regularly fetch $10,000. On the way Rylewski notices a party rental truck emerging from a leafy side street.

"Paul McCartney lives up there. I'll bet he's having a party," he says. Sure enough, McCartney's front gate is buzzing with activity. We pull past, attracting the attention of some well-dressed security guards. "It's only six P.M. We'll check for Kutcher and then come back."

Kutcher's place yields nothing, so after scarfing down some takeout we head back to Sir Paul's estate. We trudge up the street toward the gates and are met by a phalanx of security guards in overcoats.

"Can we help you?"

"No," Rylewski answers without looking up.

"This street's closed. Private party."

"Do you have a permit for this?"

"Yeah."

"Okay," Rylewski says without missing a beat. "Let's see it."

Surprisingly important to paparazzi work is knowing the law. Although you aren't allowed to shoot on someone's private property, you cannot be ejected from a public place simply for taking pictures. And closing the street requires a permit. Nonetheless security is not amused.

"How about we call the cops and have you arrested?"

Rylewski doesn't flinch. "Go ahead. Bring the permit or bring the cops."

We hear a voice crackle over their radios: "We've got two guys here refusing to leave. Call the police. They're going to jail."

I shuffle my feet. Although I'm fairly certain we'd be among the tougher characters in the Beverly Hills lockup, I'm not eager to put this theory to the test. I take out my notebook and start scribbling, hoping to look like the sort of muckraking reporter who shouldn't be messed with. Nobody notices. A guy in a blue coat descends the hill.

"Who are you?" Rylewski asks.

"I'm the policeman who'll take you to jail if you don't leave." He shoves a piece of paper at Rylewski. It's the party permit.

We slink back down the hill, defeated.

Lesson Number Seven: Trust no One

The next morning we catch Tara Reid canoodling with an anonymous guy in a baseball cap over brunch at a Sunset Boulevard cafe, then we spend the afternoon in Malibu. With its sunny, vacation-community vibe, it's a nice change from the city bustle yet still blessed with a higher ratio of celebs per square foot than just about anywhere else on the planet. We cruise the parking lots in the Malibu Country Mart shopping center until Rylewski gets a call from a guy who used to work for him: Something is happening at Ralphs, the supermarket around the corner.

In some ways L.A. paparazzi are a tightly knit community. They are mostly foreign born and male and all seem to know one another. That doesn't mean they like one another. Competition leads to a never-ending tangle of squabbles, many of them personal. Still, there's a camaraderie based in part on their being privy to this shadowy parallel universe that hides in plain sight.

We scope Ralphs but find nothing. "It may have been a trick," Rylewski says. We return to the Country Mart to see Nicole Richie caught in a paparazzi cross fire outside a pet store. Moments later we run into the photographer who had provided the bogus tip.

"Sorry," he says, leaning out his window with a sly grin. "Did I say Ralphs? I meant the pet store. My bad."

Rylewski is only mildly annoyed--this cat-and-mouse game comes with the territory. Richie by herself isn't a big seller anyway. The real money is in shots of celebrity couplings, stars with their families and, best of all, freaky celebrity rendezvous.

Rylewski gets a call from another shooter, this one looking to sell some photos without the knowledge of his agency, which he's convinced is screwing him out of commissions by underreporting his sales. It's a common complaint that's difficult to verify, since photos are often sold multiple times, all over the world and in perpetuity.

The transaction has the surreptitious feel of a drug deal. In the back of his van the photographer hands Rylewski the flash card from his camera. Rylewski inserts it into his laptop and transfers the photos, then pays him $200, promising more if the pictures sell.

The moral: You have no friends, only those who haven't screwed you over yet.

Lesson Number Eight: Shooting is a Drug

Certain things become second nature the longer you do this. For one, I've started looking at people's faces much more closely. It pays off when I spot Alanis Morissette walking into a Malibu taqueria.

"Where?" Rylewski asks.

"To our right. Brown shirt. She looks different because her hair is short," I say with authority.

He seems impressed. "You want to take the photos?"

It's graduation day. My immediate impulse is to whip out the camera and start firing, but Rylewski cautions against it. "She'll probably eat at one of those outside tables. That's your best shot."

As we cruise the lot for a few minutes, I worry we'll lose her. But when we return to the taqueria she's just sitting down. I slouch in the backseat. Rylewski's camera is unexpectedly heavy. I hoist it to the window. The zoom makes Morissette appear so close that I pull my eye away to confirm she hasn't moved right outside my window. I focus. Pop-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pop. The camera shoots eight frames a second, which makes taking photos feel like firing an assault rifle. But as I capture her famous face chewing a burrito I feel neither shame nor self-loathing. In fact, I'm pretty pumped. Screw Jim Carrey and his paparazzi curse.

Later that day I spot Adam Sandler, a.k.a. Mr. Reclusive, behind the wheel. I snap him picking something up at his gym. The next day it's Mel Gibson, an ascendant target thanks to his blockbuster Jesus flick. With each success the base appeal becomes clearer: the thrill of the catch.

"This job is like a drug," Rylewski says. "You wait, but you're in suspense. You're like a pelican looking through the water. Then all of a sudden you go get the fish. I work seven days a week, 365 days a year. To me every hour the sun is shining is an hour I could be taking some star's reflection in my camera."

Refueling at a gas station I ask him if the whole idea--chasing movie actors around--ever seems silly.

"No," he says defensively. "Why? Do you feel silly?"

Rylewski's bravado notwithstanding, his chosen profession causes personal tension. His live-in girlfriend, a casting agent for a Hollywood studio, keeps the dirty secret from her co-workers. His parents hate it. Doesn't it bother him to be a leper?

"Yeah," he says after a long pause. "I can understand why people say we're scumbags. But I wouldn't do something to someone that I wouldn't like done to me." Besides, paparazzi exist only because people want them to.

"I don't understand what the problem is," says Peter Grossman, senior photo editor at Us Weekly. "The public wants to see celebs like this. These guys are just doing a job, a service. I'd bet the average American could relate more to the paparazzi than to a movie star."

Lesson Number Nine: Click Hard with a Vengeance

Which brings us back to where we started: Bruce Willis. Sure, we're still literally dripping with his disdain, but if I've learned anything this week it's that the only guarantee in paparazzi work is that giving up will get you nothing. As we jump out and follow, a passerby hisses, "Why don't you leave him alone?" Willis ducks into a clothing store where his daughters are shopping. A store employee closes the door, so Rylewski shoots through the window. Another photographer pulls up but stays in his car.

Willis's daughters exit the shop giggling and dash to their car, multimillionaire A-list dad in tow. Rylewski instinctively stations himself between them and the other paparazzo, obstructing his rival's shot. We tail Willis's car a few blocks until it's clear he's headed home.

"My fucking flash card ran out," Rylewski says. "I don't think I got him and his daughters together. That was the goddamn money shot."

The mishap is costly: Our Willis pictures don't sell. In fact, from our week's work only two sets of pictures sell domestically: In Touch buys the Meg Ryan photos for $750, and Star buys the Robert Downey Jr. photos for $1,500. That'll just about cover the SUV repair bill.

But as we climb through the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains back toward Hollywood, his shirt still damp from Willis's shower, Rylewski's spirits are high.

"Did I ever tell you about my time in the army?" he asks. "My unit was called the Alpine Hunters. I hated it, got kicked out after eight months. But most of the techniques I'm using now I learned in the army--how to follow people, avoid being seen.

"Our unit's motto was 'Hunter one day, hunter forever,' " he continues, chuckling. "That's what I do now. I hunt."

Paparazzi Kit

To bag the Big Game, you'd better get the Right Gear

High-end digital camera with telephoto lens To be competitive a paparazzo can't get just a shot of Jennifer Aniston eating lunch. The truly celeb-obsessed need to know what kind of lettuce is caught between those perfect teeth.

Two Cell Phones For juggling informants' tips on celebrity whereabouts, calling magazine editors with fresh "exclusives" and ordering yet another take-out meal. Plus, this is LA.--not constantly yakking on a cell is conspicuous.

Backup Camera For when Jennifer Aniston's bodyguard tosses your main camera under a bus.

Dark Sunglasses No, shoplifting starlet, I'm not looking at you; I'm looking at that squirrel over there. Go about your misdemeanor.

Tape Measure Restraining orders are subjective things, but judges seem to take the whole 50-foot zone seriously.

Attorney's Card The sooner you call a lawyer after a beating, the sooner you'll be living in Russell Crowe's condo.

$20 Bills The standard denomination for paying off valets and pool boys who put you on the scent.

Black Book Quick reference for stars' cars and license plate numbers.

Wireless Laptop For instant photo editing and transfer to prospective buyers. Also useful for playing solitaire while waiting for aging celebs to emerge from Botox treatment.

Gourmet Doggie Treat It takes the best to stop a spoiled Hollywood guard dog from gnawing on your femur.

Coffee Mug For staying awake until Shannen Doherty starts a three A.M. club brawl.

Window Cleaner Maybe your conscience isn't clear, but your windshield should be.

Celebrity Rags Essential for keeping track of who's hot with editors at the moment. Plus, did you see what Demi wore to that charity event? Girlfriend, please!

Change Holder Don't miss a hot shot because you're fumbling to feed the meter.

Paparazzi Gone Wild

Getting beaten up and Sued is all in a day's work

The Unmerry Widow

"Papa of Paparazzi" Ron Galella was particularly obsessed with Jackie O. During her 1968 honeymoon with Aristotle Onassis, Galella dressed as a seaman to catch her sunbathing topless on a Greek isle. After Jackie sued him for harassment in 1972, he argued that he was protected by the First Amendment. A judge disagreed and granted Jackie a restraining order that stipulated Galella stay at least 25 feet away from her and her children. He violated the order several times but finally agreed to leave her alone in 1982.

Penn Unhinged

Soon after Sean Penn and Madonna's 1985 engagement, two paparazzi asked the pair to pose for them. Penn grabbed a stone and threatened, "You take my picture and I'll break your back with this rock." When they asked what his problem was, Penn threw the rock at one and punched the other. A judge fined Penn $100 and gave him a 90-day suspended sentence. During the wedding, circling helicopters drowned out the couple's vows, prompting Penn to spell out fuck off on a beach the next day.

Footloose Fergie

In 1992 a photographer with a telephoto lens caught Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, getting her toes sucked by her "financial advisor" while sitting topless poolside. When a British tabloid published the photo, royal-watchers around the world let out a collective "Ewwww." Fergie's husband, Prince Andrew, immediately separated from her, prompting the Duchess of Pork to take her little piggies to the market and go on an eating binge.

A Close Shave

As Alec Baldwin and then wife Kim Basinger took their newborn home from the hospital in 1995, a paparazzo tried to capture the moment. Baldwin smeared shaving cream all over the man's windows. The shutterbug says Baldwin then punched him and broke his nose. The actor says he merely slapped the camera away and it accidentally struck the man's face. The photographer sued Baldwin and won $4,500, far less than the $85,000 he was seeking.

Wedding Album

Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas arranged to sell their wedding photos exclusively to the British tabloid OK! for $1.6 million in 2000, so they were appalled when rival Hello! crashed the shindig and published candids three days before OK! hit the stands. Zeta-Jones was furious because she thought a photo of her eating cake made her look fat. They sued Hello! for $815,000. A jury awarded the couple $26,000.

"I take offense when someone calls me paparazzi. I'm not comfortable invading somebody's privacy."