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In two days, two documentaries about paparazzi have screened at Sundance. One, Smash His Camera, was directed by Leon Gast, who won an Oscar for When We Were Kings. The other, Teenage Paparazzo, was directed by Adrian Grenier, who has been nominated for two Teen Choice awards for his work as the star of Entourage.

The gap in quality and seriousness between the two films is not as vast as you might imagine. Both use the same exact footage from La Dolce Vita to explain to origin of the profession, both include montages of talking heads discussing the significance of the fact that the word paparazzo is Italian for mosquito. Both blame the death of the Hollywood star system for destroying the old, comparatively orderly celebrity publicity machine, and bringing on, to quote Liz Smith in camera, "whatever we have now." Both films are flawed, a bit too in love with their subjects, intermittently insightful, consistently entertaining. Neither fully accomplishes it alone, but together the two films document the changing face of celebrity, an evolution in what the public wants from their stars, and why.



Grenier's film tracks his personal quest to better understand the paparazzi industry, using a 14 year-old home-schooled professional pap as a catalyst. Blonde, brace-faced Austin appears to already have a career going by the time Grenier enters his life, but his association with the Entourage star ups his profile, for better or for worse. When, in their "Stars Just like US" section, US Weekly runs a pap shot of the actor shopping for a camera in preparation to go undercover as a pap alongside his little friend, Grenier realizes how easily a photograph turns into a story. He decides to play with this theory, and help Austin out at the same time, by spending an increased amount of time with Paris Hilton. Sure enough, the tabloids document the pair as a new couple, thanks in part to Austin's shots.

As Austin's notoriety as a pint-sized pap increases, his ego swells to match, and Grenier realizes that he's been all too complicit in creating a monster. "I fucked up," he concludes, and in his guilt, he starts talking to experts, from the staff of OK! Magazine to Henry Jenkins, to better understand the psychology of the game that he and Austin are feeding by plying their respective livings.

Though Grenier gets a huge assist from editor Jim Curtis Mol, Paparazzo is still kind of a mess; it's also far more intellectually engaging than a film about celebrity made by a celebrity has any right to be. In general, the actor's own insights are fairly limited ("What is it with this hall of mirrors?" is an actual quote), and his narration has its groaner moments (opening line:"I'm a celebrity, or at least, I play one on TV - literally!") And yet, there are bits and pieces that are absolutely sublime, such as a late scene in which Grenier, softly rocking in a hanging bubble chair, explains the Narcissus myth to Paris Hilton, who plays with her hair and gazes at him dopily and asks, "Is that story true?" If they staged a romance for the paparazzi, there's no reason to believe that this scene "really happened," but Grenier's shaped material, up to and including several visual references to E.T. (a precocious kid on a bike finds himself through an encounter with another world - get it?), is his best.

Camera tells the story of Ron Galella, the first notorious American paparazzo, who had his teeth knocked out by Marlon Brando, and was famously sued by Jackie Onassis. As Gast's intimate, story-filled portrait proves, yesterday's pap targets were objects of curiosity, people who were trying to do a job and live a life away from the camera. Today's targets understand that submitting to the gossip industry's ambush, even courting it, is, as Jenkins tells Grenier, "one of your jobs as a celebrity." Galella started sneaking into venues and events because as a freelancer, he couldn't get on the list; he started poking holes in Katherine Hepburn's hedges because he couldn't get a shot of her at all otherwise. In Grenier's film, Paris Hilton readily admits that she needs the attention to make her living as much as the photographers need her neediness in order to make theirs.

The point of gossip narratives evolved, from celebrating the innate glamour and unattainability of the celebrity lifestyle, to proving its mundanity. Today's celebrity spreads are all about deconstructing myth and mystery of stardom; in Galella's day, they sought to offer evidence that stars are always stars, even when we're seeing them at their worst.

The most interesting overlap between the two films is their common allusions to the kinds of imaginary romances that animate celebrity photos. Grenier's experts turn him on to the notion of "parasocial relationships" - essentially, gossip consumers come to think they "know" the stars they admire. In Camera's most interesting revelation, Galella exposes his delusions that he has a relationship with his subjects - he writes a letter to Brangelina trying to arrange a date, and he admits that, when he was following her on a daily basis, "Jackie was my girlfriend, in a way."

Talking to me after the screening, Galella elaborated on the role attraction plays in the pap shot process. "Jackie was my ideal subject, ya see. First of all, she was very famous and beautiful. And she didn't pose for me. That's good, that's what I want. When somebody poses, you get a picture everybody else got. That's why Jackie was my favorite--she ignored me. She played hard to get. You want to know more, and more, and more. It's almost like sex."

Or, to quote the Lady Gaga song that (inevitably, it seems) plays over Teenage Paparazzo's credits, "I'm your biggest fan, I'll follow you until you love me, Paparazzi." Maybe things haven't changed so much after all.