Just as addicts need their drugs, a celebrity-obsessed culture needs its candid photos. The aggressive freelancers who cater to that market got their name - paparazzo, plural paparazzi - from Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, the 1960 classic in which one photographer was named Paparazzo. In the United States, the most famous paparazzo is surely Ron Galella, who for decades hid in bushes, locked himself in warehouses and jumped out of taxis to take pictures of, in Andy Warhol's words, the famous doing unfamous things.
Galella is semi-active now, living off his extensive archive of photographs. "The gold is in the files," he says proudly in Leon Gast's documentary Smash His Camera (2010). While commentators both praise him and damn him as a mosquito on the skin of respectable journalism, Galella has no self-doubts. These are people in the public eye, he says. Who cares whether some of them want to be left alone and not photographed walking out of a bar? They asked for it. It's a philosophy lately taken to ridiculous extremes by the website and TV show TMZ, which never met a hapless semi-celeb it couldn't intrude upon and mock.
Galella is a perfect subject. He's an engaging conversationalist with a great store of anecdotes, such as the time Marlon Brando smashed his teeth in. (He settled for $40,000.) He lets the camera follow him while he stalks his prey, both now and in 1981 clips from a profile by David Frost. "We asked Galella if harassing a 71-year-old woman in this fashion was a decent way to make a living," Frost says in reference to Galella's stalking of Katharine Hepburn. Galella replies that he felt no guilt because "the people out there want a glimpse of her."
Narrative tension comes from Galella's long-running obsession with Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the former U.S. first lady who improbably married a Greek shipping tycoon. "She was my girlfriend in a way," Galella says creepily. It was she who told the Secret Service agents assigned to protect her children - she had lost her own protection when she remarried - to "smash his camera." They didn't, but they had Galella arrested, and for years he was in and out of courtrooms fighting harassment suits and Jackie O's applications for restraining orders.
Even Galella says it's "crazy" how many paparazzi turn up now for events. And they start young. Actor Adrian Grenier ( Entourage) was so curious about one 14-year-old who kept shooting him that he made the documentary Teenage Paparazzo, released earlier this year and scheduled to air on Nov. 13 on HBO Canada.
If that teen needs advice, Galella has plenty to offer. Always dress to blend in. It's easier to crash a party if you don't wear a coat. "Without a coat, it looks like you belong there. You took a break outside or something." If that doesn't work, forge your credentials. "You have to be one up on these people."
He does come by his fascination with celebrities honestly. His mother loved glamour magazines. She named him after movie star Ronald Colman.