Jenny from the block, and her notorious bottom, have landed in British Columbia. But if you happen to bump into the bootylicious pair, please don't tell anyone you saw them. In this part of the country, it's not polite to stare at the celebrities.
On Tuesday morning, Jennifer Lopez flew into Kamloops, via private jet from Paris. For the next three months, the 32-year-old movie goddess and Latina singing sensation will be setting up camp in the small interior town while shooting the Lasse Hallstrom film An Unfinished Life with co-star Robert Redford.
Only 350 kilometres away, in downtown Vancouver, the current love of her life, Ben Affleck, can be found on the set of the John Woo film Paycheck. And according to our sources, it took only four days for the lovely J.Lo to hightail it out of cattle country for a weekend rendezvous in the city.
On Saturday afternoon, Lopez was spotted at the spa in Vancouver's Sutton Place Hotel, where Affleck is presumably staying. Later that evening, the couple reportedly dined at Cin Cin on Robson Street.
J.Lo's stampede to the city is fair game for media to report, one would guess. But it appears that the local Kamloops press is having a much tougher time working through a moral conundrum regarding celebrity coverage.
You might recall that back in February, soon after the Kamloops location was announced, the Thompson-Nicola Regional District issued a confidentiality memo to all local employees, urging them to keep information regarding the shooting locations, filming schedule and all other production details strictly under wraps.
"They'll stalk Jennifer Lopez," warned film commissioner Vicci Weller, who worried that the international paparazzi would storm the tranquil region and set off her royal highness, who has just topped the list of "celebrity monsters" in the premiere issue of Radar magazine. That honour recognized Lopez's talent for distinguishing herself "in the areas of physical and verbal abuse, overweening arrogance, and the imposition of a particularly nasty influence over the culture at large."
The shroud of secrecy lasted all of two minutes. On Wednesday, The Kamloops Daily News reported that Lopez, avec entourage, had been whisked off the tarmac in a fleet of SUVs with dark-tinted windows, and was rumoured to be staying in either the Sun Rivers resort or a home in Rose Hill (for a better monthly rate, we would hope, than the $60,000 local homeowners were trying to gouge from the film's producers a few months ago).
The next day, an intrepid local photographer unearthed the film's top-secret ranch set simply by spending the day driving dirt roads and pleading with people for clues. When Keith Anderson stumbled onto the set, he cruised right by Redford. Lopez stayed put in her trailer.
Anderson's photographs, however, will not be splashed all over the local paper. Daily News editor Susan Duncan says she has nixed the Spot J.Lo Contest that the city editor wanted to run daily on the front page. Nor was she willing to pay a local mole the $100 he asked in exchange for information on film-crew activities.
"It's not that I don't want photographs of the pair," Duncan wrote in her weekly column on Friday. "This is still a relatively small city and when celebrities come to town, it's news."
Indeed, the Miramax film, about a struggling single mother who must move in with her father-in-law to support her young daughter, is the biggest celebrity draw in the area since Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn dropped in to shoot The Pledge two years ago.
The economic spinoff for the region, which is standing in for Montana, is projected at up to $10-million. "But paying people and giving them Daily News shirts in exchange for sightings seemed too close to stalking," Duncan continued.
"We may be in the news business, but there still is such a thing as good manners."
Duncan then went on to report, in the very same column, that Lopez and Redford had been seen together after a late lunch at Ric's Mediterranean Grill on Victoria Street. "It's a difficult call for the media when actors are in town," she wrote, trying to wrestle the star-gawking demons right out of her pen. "They want their privacy and we don't want to be boors, but we also need to give the public something.
"Despite my own little fixation with Redford, I don't really understand the awe the average person has for celebrities. So they are famous and they can act, they're just people. It seems a little demeaning to get all goofy and excited because a famous person walks by, unless, obviously, it's Robert Redford."
In the meantime, the Kamloops young-country radio station, B100, has begun a petition to rename a local mountain after the visiting star with the famous posterior. Now that's what some would call high class.
Alexandra Gill