Singer Britney Spears Sensitive News: paparazzi sport a particular intensity. Paparazzi. Blasting through the lips, skipping across the headlines, screaming from television sets and computer screens, 15,000,000 Google hits and counting, running amok almost everywhere every day – especially here in Los Angeles. Who would have guessed that a term derived from a character created by an Italian filmmaker 48 years ago would be used more now than it was back then? For “Paparazzo” was the name Federico Fellini gave the photographer (played by the now-nearly forgotten Walter Santesso) who accompanied the film’s “scandal” journalist antihero Marcello (Mastroianni) in La Dolce Vita – the international blockbuster sensation of 1960. Capturing “The Sweet Life” of both the famous and the infamous in Rome during the late ’50s period known as Il Boom, Fellini’s film zeroed in with a laser-like precision on not only the power of press but the power of the “paps” in ways that make it far from just a film of its time. Unlike everything else in this increasingly disposable culture, the paparazzi have won a lease on life well beyond Andy Warhol’s famous 15-minute limit.

According to linguistic scholar Robert Hendrickson, Fellini took the name “paparazzo” from the Italian dialect for a particularly noisy mosquito. A schoolmate from his youth was so-called because of his fast-talking and fast-moving ways. The notion of a half-man/half-insect is remindful of Papageno, the half-man/half-bird of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. But Papageno was a character of antic charm. Paparazzo’s insect antics in La Dolce Vita are far less charming. The name was quickly pluralized in the press (from “zo” to “zi”) for the scenes in which the photographer and others of his kind literally swarm around a buxom movie star, played by buxom movie star Anita Ekberg. There were also less-glamorous ones, where the paparazzi aimed their cameras at the chaos caused by a pair of lying schoolchildren who claimed to have seen a Virgin Mary. And there they are at the police investigation of the death of Marcello’s intellectual friend Steiner, who kills his children before taking his own life. But they also figure in a spectral way in the film’s climax – a desultory orgy at a beach house where a more-dissolute-than-ever Marcello and the dregs of the Via Veneto in his circle gather to get drunk and destroy furniture.

As dawn breaks, the orgy-goers stumble toward the seashore where local fisherman have discovered something – an enormous dead fish. To Italian audiences at the time, this finale was an especially sharp sick joke. What they expected to see was the body of a young woman. In April 1953, on the beach at Ostia (the Roman suburb where Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered many years later), the corpse of Wilma Montesi, an otherwise ordinary everygirl, was discovered, fully clothed, floating near the shore. The police ruled her death an accidental drowning. But no sooner did this ruling appear than the Italian tabs began investigations of their own into the possibility that she was murdered. Looking forward to the conspiracy industry that would develop a decade later with the Kennedy assassination and be taken up by the radical right to cast aspersions on the suicide of Clinton associate Vincent Foster, “The Montesi Scandal,” as it came to be known, moved into high gear. Instead of the demure, young bride-to-be her parents had confected, the image of a wild party girl began to emerge. And aiding that image were the paparazzi, whose portfolios were filled with pictures of all manner of decadent doings in which Wilma may have been enmeshed. Writer Karen Pinkus’s excellent book The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome goes into it all in exhaustive detail. Suffice to say Wilma Montesi was a dry run for Natalee Holloway – another everygirl who vanished while on vacation in Aruba in 2005, who has come to play a comparable cultural role in America today. If they could just find the body, the picture would be complete. Cut to the “paps” salivating at the thought of a now-decaying corpse.

Since Fellini, the paparazzi have become endemic to the sort of sensational news that’s always going on somewhere in the world. Here in Los Angeles, however, the paparazzi sport a particular intensity, thanks to the louche antics of sometime actress Lindsay Lohan, sometime model Paris Hilton, and sometime pop princess Britney Spears. Going to and from court appearances, nightclub hopping, and, most recently, psychiatric ward incarceration, Spears has been followed by swarms of “paps” and (at considerable taxpayer expense) small armies of police – there to presumably protect ordinary citizens from the messes the “paps” make. Clearly, Britney Spears is no Anita Ekberg. But then her most devoted chronicler, Harvey Levin, is no Marcello Mastroianni either.

A lawyer turned TV “legal analyst,” and now producer-purveyor, Levin can be found weekday afternoons as a supporting player on the much-imitated The People’s Court (where he does the wrap-up interviews for each day’s small claims rulings), and in the early evening as the star of his ineffably bizarre TMZ. The letters TMZ stand for “Thirty Mile Zone,” a term coined by the movie studios in the 1960s to label off-limits locations in the heart of Hollywood. Levin knows few limits, and treats the TMZ as if it were the DMZ – the fabled no-man’s-land of the Vietnam war. And L.A. in 2008 – when instead of Il Boom America faces Il Bust – is very much a battlefield in an ongoing media war. Still, TMZ comes off on TV more like a TBZ – a “Two-Block Zone.” Levin’s camera crew always appears to be parked in front of Hyde on Sunset Boulevard, a trendy club within lurching distance of the Chateau Marmont. Lindsay, Paris, Britney, and their many wannabes always seem to be tumbling in and out of limos and doorways to the derisive amusement of Levin’s cynical staff. Making smirky faces and snarky remarks while introducing each exceedingly short bit of candid nonsense, their repartee is often followed by Levin dryly opining, “That’s funny.”

It would be the easiest thing in the world to dismiss TMZ as rancid fluff – a new low for a culture that one had thought bottomed out with the wall-to-wall coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial. But, at heart, is what Levin doing really all that different from Chris Matthews on Hardball, Tim Russert on Meet the Press, George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week, or Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition? All of them ignore serious issues to concentrate on personalities, thus reducing even the most sobering of circumstances to the how-they-looked level of Entertainment Tonight. And each revel in gotcha journalism, in which manufactured scoops are created by “catching them off guard” with a question about a statement they may have made in the past, or interrogating them about an alleged critical issue of an entirely personal nature; the better to produce an “embarrassing” result. Unlike Levin’s crew, these “professionals” have names and histories. Yet like the Levinistas, no one expects them to actually explain what’s at stake in an unstable economy, global warming, or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in which this country is embroiled with no end in sight. What’s really important is opining how the big names in politics feel, and making smart (i.e., glib) wisecracks. True, unlike Britney, the personalities within the purview of these ringmasters of the Beltway manage to keep their underwear on – despite aggressive attempts to pants some of them, on the part of Chris, Tim, George, Wolf, and other Harvey-alikes. But the result is the same – reality television at its most debased.

Good thing they don’t have cameras. If they did, the first thing they would rush to capture is the body of Britney Spears as it washes up on the shores of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights.

Singer Britney Spears Sensitive News: paparazzi sport a particular intensity. Paparazzi. Blasting through the lips, skipping across the headlines, screaming from television sets and computer screens, 15,000,000 Google hits and counting, running amok almost everywhere every day – especially here in Los Angeles. Who would have guessed that a term derived from a character created by an Italian filmmaker 48 years ago would be used more now than it was back then? For “Paparazzo” was the name Federico Fellini gave the photographer (played by the now-nearly forgotten Walter Santesso) who accompanied the film’s “scandal” journalist antihero Marcello (Mastroianni) in La Dolce Vita – the international blockbuster sensation of 1960. Capturing “The Sweet Life” of both the famous and the infamous in Rome during the late ’50s period known as Il Boom, Fellini’s film zeroed in with a laser-like precision on not only the power of press but the power of the “paps” in ways that make it far from just a film of its time. Unlike everything else in this increasingly disposable culture, the paparazzi have won a lease on life well beyond Andy Warhol’s famous 15-minute limit.

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