Don Johnson was hot, Burt Reynolds was not.
A fit Madonna topless is sizzling, a Mickey Rourke in any condition, fizzling, but still more valuable than a Gloria Estefan. Go figure.
That is the state of the South Florida celebrity photo market. Paparazzi photography-those fuzzy, out-of-focus photographsin gossip magazines.
Duchess Fergie engaged in bare-breasted frolics with Texas millionaire Johnny Bryan. Woody Allen anywhere close to his child/lover Soon-Yi Previn. Steffi Graff sunning topless in Boca Raton, Fla.
Paparazzi photography has always been big business in New York and L.A. This year, photographers predict that celebrity shooting will be better than ever in Miami as future subjects join Madonna, Rourke, Paloma Picasso, Robert De Niro and others celebrated for one fabulous thing or another who are seduced by the fresh glitz and glitter of the world’s new hip hot spot.
King Bill
Bill Cooke set a new high standard for Miami celebrity photographylast year when he clicked off eight frames of Madonna, sans shirt, atop a bicycle in Coconut Grove as she secretly shot “Sex.” The Miami freelancer has earned thousands of dollars from that exclusive expose. Precisely how many he’s not saying, but Madonna, Miami’s new hometown girl, is a hot paparazzi commodity.
Envious paparazzi compare the topless Madonna (almost) to the horrific Alan Zanger shot of Liz Taylor, gaunt from pneumonia, on a stretcher, or of Teddy Kennedy on a speedboat with a naked, nubile woman.
“People all over the country still believe that Bill Cooke finding Madonna was one of the luckiest finds of all times,” says Ray Fairall, a Boca Raton-based freelance photographer who chartered helicopters to fly over both Elizabeth Taylor’s and Michael J. Fox’s weddings, and once got a shot of Don Johnson squeezing Sheena Easton’s breast.
“They both looked very happy,” he says of the Johnson/Easton photo.
Breasts seem to be a popular theme. But did Madonna’s make Cooke rich? He’ll say only this: This year, for the first time, he’ll earn more from paparazzi photography than he will from news and fashion assignments.
“I got lucky,” he says. “People pay a lot of money for photos like that.”
Heather beats Burt
That Madonna photo could prove to be like catching a record-size fish, and then the entire world finds out about the fishing hole. The next day, you might not have the spot to yourself. Everyone with a pole wants some of the action.
“I expect there to be a lot of competition this year,” Cooke says.
Who’s hot and who’s not determines the paparazzi paycheck. Rourke isn’t hot, local paparazzi and photo agencies say. He’d barely fetch $500 on the worldwide market.
“You could chase him all day,” says Fairall, “and it wouldn’t be worth your while.”
Reynolds never was hot, photo-wise, except during that brief time a few years back when he was skinny from an inner-ear infection and the tabloids whispered AIDS. Estefan is hot career-wise, but she’s got such a clean image that gossip magazines simply aren’t interested in ambush photos.
Prince, spotted wearing a red lace get-up in Miami Beach months ago, is worth a lot of money because, like many celebs, he goes to great lengths not to get caught. He hires several limos when he goes out and sends them in opposite directions, hoping photographers will follow the wrong one. Nobody caught him in Miami Beach.
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“I got the tip too late,” says Cooke. Ditto with Christopher Walken, though he’s not a big-buck earner either.
It’s not ALWAYS the naughty girls and bad boys who bring in the bucks. Squeaky-clean Kevin Costner earned Cooke a few more thousand last year when the photographer caught him wife-kissing on the Miami Beach boardwalk. And it was his own wife!
“The best photos are semi-private moments when they don’t know you’re there, when they’re vulnerable,” Cooke says. “You don’t want someone coming out of a restaurant.”
And we are absolutely mesmerized by it all, aren’t we? We like our celebrities best without makeup, their hair a mess, engaged in some sort of hanky-panky or another. Jose Canseco caught wide-eyed in a flash, like a deer in headlights, leaving Madonna’s Manhattan apartment building. Oprah looking fat-or better, eating. Lady Di pregnant in a bikini, any royalty doing anything unroyal. In other words, pictures showing them to be vulnerable, like we are.
“We like to see them as humans, with their flaws,” says Alan Entin, a psychologist in Richmond, Va., who specializes in how the media affect people. “People have such a poor self-image of themselves, and they think these celebrities are so much better than they are, that their lives are so much more exciting. And then they read stuff and see the pictures and think, `Gawd, they have the same problems we do.’ “
Even the church isn’t sacred
It’s the most invasive celebrity photos we pay to see. Fairall took the orchestrated photos of a pretrial Willie Smith playing with his new golden retriever puppies. Those were set up, but Fairall thought people would pay for photos of the latest Kennedy in trouble, anyway. They were worth nothing compared to a fuzzy shot another photographer secretly snapped of Willie praying in church.
“We have a joke,” Fairall says. “If you want to make a lot of money, shoot it out of focus with a slow shutter speed because they think you went through a lot more trouble to shoot it.”
A topless queen
Paparazzi photography is about being in the right place at the right moment and having a camera to record it. Sometimes Cooke gets tips from friends in Miami Beach. Sometimes he reads in the newspapers that someone is in town and simply looks for that someone, as he did with Costner and Madonna. Sometimes he’s just lucky.
Raul de Molina has earned a living in Miami shooting Latin celebrities who live and play here, and traveling around the country on assignment for National Enquirer, or for European magazines. Often, National Enquirer calls him up and tells him where to find someone; sometimes he knows who is in town to appear on the Telemundo network. The tabloids do the same with Fairall.
Sometimes de Molina invents his own assignments based on what is happening, star-wise. The photographer followed Don Johnson almost every day for three years during the “Miami Vice” days. He knew where Johnson lived, and he bribed a production assistant into giving him daily reports on where shooting would take place. One of his biggest coups, he says, was discovering Melanie Griffith back in the picture again.
“I was following him and I saw her on his apartment balcony,” says de Molina. “She had just moved to Miami.”
He also shot (on assignment) the Enquirer’s cover photograph of the Ted Turner-Jane Fonda wedding, and Oprah Winfrey at a Caribbean fat farm, and Queen Sonja of Norway topless on a Jamaican beach.
“It’s the first time she’s been photographed in a bikini,” de Molina says, as excitedly as if he had just spotted the last living dodo bird.