E2 MONDAY, APRIL 6, 2020 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
duction. “But that will take a
little while.”
While donations are en-
couraged, they will not be re-
quired to view the opera.
Viewers can also choose todonate to Opera Poverato
help cover production costs.
The performance —
which will be held on the
night of the full moon known
as the “pink moon”— will
kick off with a pre-event con-
versation co-hosted by Grif-
fin, performance artist Ron
Athey, curator Bonaventure
Soh Bejeng Ndikung and
composer George Lewis.
Griffin, who collaborated
with Oliveros while she was
aliveand directed the per-
formance “Gifts of the
Spirit”with Athey at the Ca-
thedral of St. Vibiana in 2018,
says it’s a production that
has come together in record
time.
“An opera, for me, takes
me three years — but we
started this one two weeks
ago,” he says. “This is an
earthquake.”‘Full Pink Moon’ opera offers relief for musicians
COMPOSERPauline Oliveros, left, and librettist Ione
at the Hammer Museum in West Los Angeles in 2013.Lawrence K. HoLos Angeles Timesglobal pandemic. “I don’t
think anybody saw this com-
ing,” Harrison, 51, said last
week. Amid the misery and
economic devastation
wrought by the coronavirus
outbreak, the fate of those
who make their living snap-
ping candid photos of Holly-
wood’s rich and famous —
routinely invading their per-
sonal privacy and at times
even putting lives at risk —
may not rank high among the
public’s concerns. But for
Harrison and the hundreds of
other paparazzi working in
Los Angeles and other celeb-
rity-dense cities like New
York, Miami and London, the
pandemic has brought their
work to a virtual grinding
halt.
With the majority of the
nation under lockdown, ce-
lebrities, like the rest of us, are
stuck in their homes. The
beaches where they might
otherwise be spotted sun-
bathing are empty. The cafes,
restaurants and nightclubs
they normally frequent are
closed. The film and TV sets
where they work are shut
down. The gyms and yoga
studios where they exercise
are shuttered. The red car-
pets they strut during film
premieres have been rolled
up and stowed indefinitely.
With their usual hunting
grounds all but barrenand
with stars Instagramming
their own quarantines, papa-
razzi have been left struggling
to capture what few glimpses
they can. For Harrison, that
means spending all day driv-
ing around Los Angeles’
Westside communities —
through Pacific Palisades,
Brentwood and Santa Moni-
ca and on to the San Fer-
nando Valley, West Holly-
wood and Beverly Hills —
looking for any bold-faced
name who might be out get-
ting some fresh air or heading
to the store to stock up on toi-
let paper and food.
“The only thing that we’ve
seen people doing lately is ex-
ercising, walking around
their neighborhoods, going
grocery shopping,” said Har-
rison. “I saw Liev Schreiber
and his girlfriend [Taylor
Neisen] walking their dog on
Saturday in Venice. Jordana
Brewster from the ‘Fast and
Furious’ movies, she was out
taking a walk yesterday. I saw
Don Cheadle on a power walk
with hand weights. I saw
Christian Bale riding a Razr
scooter with his wife and kids
in Brentwood.” In the com-
plex and fiercely competitive
paparazzi ecosystem, pho-
tographers can spend years
working to cultivate different
patches of turf: red carpets,
nightclubs, the LAX arrivals
area. In a matter of days, the
pandemic threw all of that
out the window. Now many
find themselves cruising the
same neighborhoods and
grocery stores across Los An-
geles, hoping for a single ex-
clusive shot, or fruitlessly sit-
ting for days outside of celeb-
rities’ homes — “doorstep-
ping,” in the parlance of the
trade.
“Me personally, I was a set
paparazzi, where I would
work on productions,” said
one 44-year-old photogra-
pher who goes by the alias
Mark Karloff. “On any given
day there’s normally upwards
of 30-plus productions shoot-
ing around town, and 90% of
the time I’d just be on one of
those. When those started
shutting down, that put me
back out on the streets like
when I first started this job,
camping out in front of celeb-
rities’ homes and just basi-
cally driving around celebri-
ty-rich areas ... It seems like
the only cars out on these
roads right now are either
construction, delivery trucks
or us.” In recent days, Karloff
says, he’s been lucky enough
to capture photos of Jennifer
Garner and Kate Hudson out
on walks. But given the
dearth of material, celebrity
blogs and news sites will now
pay modest sums for shots of
figures with even a small
measure of fame. “There are
celebrities that are selling
right now that never would
have sold three weeks ago,”
Karloff says. “Basically any-
body out and about — espe-
cially if they have a mask on
and gloves — is a guaranteed
sale.” But making a sale and
making a living are not the
same thing. Since the heyday
(some would say the nadir) of
the paparazzi business in the
late 1990s and early 2000s,
when exclusive photos of ce-
lebrities being “just like us”
routinely fetched $5,000 to
$15,000 or more, the industry
has been steadily eroding,
undermined by the slow de-
mise of glossy print publica-
tions, legal pushback against
particularly aggressive papa-
razzi behavior and the ability
of stars to share their own
personal pictures and videos
on social media.
While it’s impossible topeg the exact number of pa-
parazzi, most of whom work
on a gig basis, Karloff esti-
mates that in the glory days
there were 500 full-time ce-
lebrity photographers in L.A.
Now, at most, there are half
that number. Meanwhile, the
market for their photos has
shrunk to a handful of sites
including TMZ, Just Jared
and the U.K.’s Daily Mail,
which rarely pay the sort of
fees that, say, People maga-
zine would in years past.
The pandemic has shifted
the power even further away
from individual photogra-
phers. “A lot of the guys who
work regularly for specific
photo agencies will work on
retainers or guarantees: Say,
‘I’ll give you $2,000 a month
and hopefully you’re going to
generate $5,000 a month in
material,’ ” said Harrison.
“Now, since the material isn’t
coming in, a lot of those agen-
cies are pulling those guaran-
tees and making people go
freelance because it’s not sus-
tainable.” (The Times
reached out to four photo
agencies that specialize in ce-
lebrity photography but
none responded.)For paparazzi like Karloff
—who cohosts “The Papa-
razzi Podcast” with another
photographer who calls him-
self Jedi — the pandemic has
made an already challenging
financial situation increas-
ingly untenable. Many worry
that, as the virus continues to
spread and the death toll
mounts, fans will quickly tire
of endless shots of celebrities
in masks walking their dogs
or loading groceries into the
car at their local Erewhon
market. (The oddly slow
daily walks of Shawn Mendes
and Camila Cabello near
their home in Miami have be-
come the subject of viral fas-
cination in recent days, but
it’s unclear how long such
mundane moves will remain
of interest.) “The money was
not good to begin with, and
now it’s really hard to make
any kind of money doing
this,” says Karloff, who has
two children, ages 12 and 8,
and has been freelancing for
roughly the past year and a
half since the photo agency
he’d been with for his entire
career went under. “My wife
has lost her job, so it’s really a
mad chase to get out hereand get people.”
On a recent episode of
“The Paparazzi Podcast,”
Jedi spoke about the anxiety
and monotony of the gig now.
“It’s just tough leaving the
house every day knowing the
odds are against you,” he
said. “Whereas before if you
sat at a celeb’s house for four
or five days, you’re going to
get them a couple of times,
now you could sit there for
two weeks and some of these
people aren’t leaving. ... It’s
tough. It’s really ... tough.”
To weather the dry spell,
some paparazzi are looking
to leverage other sources of
income. As news about the
pandemic grew increasingly
grim, longtime photographer
Rick Mendoza decided to
leave Los Angeles last month
and temporarily relocate to
Palm Springs, where he has
tried to piece together paid
work.
“I’m a stringer and a
nightcrawler; I have scanners
in my car so when there’s an
accident or a fire, I go after
that,” Mendoza said. “Any-
thing where I can use my
camera or my video camera,
I’m going to do it, becausethat’s how you sustain your-
self until it gets back to what-
ever we consider normal. “We
have to shoot everything be-
cause it all adds up,” he ex-
plained. “Unless you get a de-
cent hit, an exclusive that
Daily Mail or TMZ picks up at
$300 or $400 ... you’ve just got
to accumulate 50 bucks here,
100 bucks here, 10 bucks here.
... A lot of these guys, all they
knew was paparazzi, papa-
razzi, paparazzi. They wer-
en’t thinking ahead of the
game. But this market is
changing, and if that’s all you
have, you’re done.”
At the same time, Men-
doza is trying to work the
Palm Springs star quaran-
tine scene. “There’s celebri-
ties here also — don’t let
those boys know that,” he
said, referencing his L.A.
peers. “There’s old-school
Hollywood here. I get myself a
picture of Suzanne Somers
out here, I’m going to make
big money on TMZ, you
know? That’s how I think.”
With the pandemic
threatening to upend life for
months to come, Harrison is
not sure how much longer
many of his fellow paparazzi
will be able to hold on. “I truly
don’t think it’s long,” he said.
“People who have been in this
business long enough to
make a career of it, luckily like
I have, might have other
sources of income and sav-
ings and investments. But a
lot of photographers don’t.
I’ve just seen one guy I know
who’s a photographer, a Viet-
nam vet who gets paid under
the table by a photo agency to
shoot celebrities, and he’s lit-
erally standing outside Whole
Foods as we speak, panhan-
dling.”
Still, as difficult as the cur-
rent situation may be, Harri-
son finds one small, ironic
consolation in it. “Weirdly,
there’s no job that lends itself
to social distancing better,”
he said. “If you do it well,
you’re isolated. You’re in a
car. You’ve got long lenses so
you can keep your distance
from people. I can be 500 feet
away. Especially in this situa-
tion, you don’t want celebri-
ties to feel like you’re putting
them at risk to make a buck.”
Paparazzi know that no fed-
eral bailout package is com-
ing to rescue their industry.
They’re used to being seen as
parasites on the hide of celeb-
rity. But amid this wrenching
crisis, some are hoping that
people — even the ones
whose personal lives they ex-
ploit for profit — can at least
see them as fellow human be-
ings who are suffering along
with everyone else.
“The celebrities are never
empathetic to us at all — they
think of us as all basically the
same guy — but yesterday I
took a different approach,”
Karloff said. “I drove by Chris
Pratt’s house and he was in
his driveway sweeping and I
just decided to stop and say
hello. I said, ‘Hey, I know
you’ve seen me around here
once in a while. I apologize be-
cause there’s a lot of photog-
raphers out running around
right now, but a lot of us are in
kind of a dire situation and all
we can do is get pictures of
you guys to get our families
fed. When you see me, I don’t
want you to feel threatened.
I’m a nice guy. I just wanted to
introduce myself.’ ”
Pratt, who has been
hounded by paparazzi ever
since breaking out to mega-
stardom in the 2014 smash
“Guardians of the Galaxy,”
seemed receptive to the over-
ture, Karloff says.
“He said, ‘Thank you, I ap-
preciate that. Take care,
buddy.’ I don’t know if that’s
ever going to help. But maybe
if I see him later in the week or
on another day, maybe he re-
members and gives me a
wave or a smile.”BEN AFFLECKand Ana De Armas find plenty of company while venturing out for a neighborhood stroll.Paparazzi PodcastPaparazzi focused on fresh tactics
DON CHEADLEgets a little exercise in while taking
a purposeful walk around Santa Monica.Giles HarrisonLondon Entertainment / Splash[Paparazzi, from E1]
CHRISTIAN BALEand wife Sibi Blazac are spotted
riding their scooters while in the Brentwood area.Giles HarrisonLondon Entertainment / Splash‘Full Pink
Moon: Opera
Povera in
Quarantine’
When:6 p.m. to midnight
Tuesday; the pre-event
conversation begins at 5
p.m.
Where:Facebook Live,
YouTube, Twitch and the
opera’s website
Info:seangriffin.org/full
-pink-moon-livestreamrona Relief Fund, created by
the musical nonprofit to dis-
pense small grants of $500 to
U.S. musicians whose gigs
were canceled by the pan-
demic.costume and props.
- A performance area is des-
ignated. - Each performer decides on
what sound to listen for and
when the sound is perceived
it is the cue to perform. The
same sound or another
sound can be used to stop
performing and freeze until
the cue comes again. - Each performer is respon-
sible for their own character,
costume, props and what or
how to perform in response
to the chosen cue.
“It’s people inhabiting a
city full of characters who
move in and out of making
actions and noises and lis-
tening in some kind of rever-
ie,” says Griffin. “The city is
revealed by the light of the
moon.”
In this case, that city will
exist virtually, online.
It’s all in keeping with Ol-
iveros’ experimental nature.
A composer and musician —
who could play accordion, vi-
olin and tuba — she was
known for producing sound
with magnetic tape and
prototype synthesizers back
in the 1960s.
Griffin says that even her
chosen language works well
with the language of the in-
ternet. Oliveros, he notes,
liked to refer to her word
scores as “an algorithm.”
“Full Pink Moon: Opera
Povera in Quarantine,” as
the production is titled, is
co-sponsored by CalArts
and the University of Chi-
cago’s Gray Center for Arts
and Inquiry.
It’s also serving as a fund-
raiser for Equal Sound’s Co-“We are working really
hard to fund every person
who applies,” says Madeline
Falcone, who does A&R for
Equal Sound, and is also
helping with the opera’s pro-[Opera, from E1]