Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz Chihab El Khachab Vanessa Díaz, Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 328 pp. Manufacturing Celebrity is an ethnography of the celebrity media industry based in Los Angeles, with an emphasis on the precarious work of paparazzi and celebrity reporters working with magazines such as People and Us weekly. The book contributes to the existing literature on precarious labour in the American media industries as well as the broader field of media anthropology. It is divided into three main parts covering the labour of Latino paparazzi, the labour of white female celebrity reporters, and the content of celebrity magazines. Chapter 1 is an engaging ethnography of the everyday work of Latino paparazzi in Los Angeles, while Chapter 2 delves into the overall political economy of paparazzi images. With a focus on the death of Chris Guerra, a Latino paparazzo, after a police altercation on the job, Chapter 3 reflects on the disposability of racialized bodies in contemporary America. Chapters 4 and 5 provide, respectively, an ethnographic study of red-carpet routines and a strong analysis of the precarity of white celebrity reporters. Finally, Chapter 6 delves into the work of “body teams” in celebrity magazines, which are tasked with covering and manufacturing celebrity bodies on a daily basis, while Chapter 7 explores the power of blended couple names à la “Brangelina.” The book’s core strength lies in its detailed ethnographic attention to the racialized and gendered work of the celebrity media industry, a well-established theme in existing scholarship on American film and television production more broadly. Chapter 1, for instance, details how paparazzi [End Page 197] shifted from being a mostly white male profession before the 2000s to a workforce of mostly Spanish-speaking Latino men, both documented and undocumented, working in precarious circumstances whether through agencies or as freelancers. The author highlights the unspoken skills and professional ethics upheld by paparazzi in the face of widespread condemnation—and in some cases criminalization—of their daily livelihoods. In a similar vein, Chapter 5 narrates the sexualization of female celebrity reporters’ work, which attracted media attention after the #MeToo movement, yet was integral to the industry’s working practices for decades. The chapter shows how reporters are expected to work in numerous informal spaces—classrooms, hospitals, restaurants, houses, nightclubs—in which their physical safety becomes secondary to their ability to elicit information by all means necessary. Another strength of the book is the analysis of the commercial conditions under which celebrity images are made and sold. Chapter 2, in particular, explains the political economy of the boom in paparazzi images after Us weekly, Life and Style, and Star became major competitors to People in the weekly celebrity magazine sector in the early 2000s. This boom not only affected the livelihoods of paparazzi, but also the value attached to certain kinds of images. For instance, whereas “exclusive” shots of celebrities were very valuable in the 2000s, the growing number of “candid” paparazzi images meant that magazines paid less and less to buy their rights, while incentivizing the paparazzi to sell their images multiple times to multiple outlets. The author astutely notes the collusion between celebrities, agents, publicists, and paparazzi in producing the candid images fed to weekly magazines; a collusion hinging all at once on the productive labour of paparazzi and their professional marginalization to avoid legal liabilities on the magazines themselves. While rich in ethnographic detail, the book makes some ambitious claims that are not always supported by ethnography or theoretical elaboration. For instance, the reader is told that Donald Trump’s election to the presidency demonstrates how “the power of celebrity and Hollywood stardom has never held more social, cultural, political, and economic power than it does now” (16). This statement is not supported by a strong historicization of American celebrity culture in the book, whose sources are mostly restricted to the 2000s. This short-term historical focus gives little confidence in the author’s claim that the power of celebrity is unprecedented, since growth in the celebrity media industry’s size cannot [End Page...