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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz Perry B. Johnson (bio) Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood by Vanessa Díaz Duke University Press. 2020. 328 pages. $107.95 hardcover; $28.95 paper; also available in e-book. Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood focuses its critical lens on the evolution of celebrity news and the precarity endured by the media laborers who bring it to audiences around the world. At its core, this book is an interrogation of the unequal power dynamics that situate celebrity media laborers within journalistic and sociocultural hierarchies marked by exploitative conditions and pervasive sexism, racism, and xenophobia. It is an important historical account of the formation and formalization of celebrity media, one that brings much-needed attention to the consequential ways in which celebrities and celebrity media have infiltrated cultural discourses and institutions far beyond the bounds of entertainment. Coupling personal experience with extensive ethnographic research, author Vanessa Díaz provides readers with firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of celebrity media and demonstrates an acute grasp of the editorial and economic forces that craft American celebrity culture. Accounts from paparazzi, photographers, freelance/staff reporters, bloggers, interns, editors, publicists, and celebrities expand upon Díaz's experience as a woman of color within these spaces to provide an ambitious assessment of the disposability and disenfranchisement of minoritized celebrity media laborers. [End Page 185] Díaz considers the tensions that emerge from the formal and informal economies in which celebrity "information gatherers" work, interrogating the challenges faced by those differently positioned within the segregated and stratified hierarchies of entertainment media, especially in Hollywood.1 Hollywood, for Díaz, is a fabrication—an idea that has become a consumable product. It is a universal symbol for celebrity and a manufactured celebrity protagonist itself in narratives of global stardom. She thus re-theorizes Hollywood as the "Hollywood Industrial Complex": "the political economy made up of the totality of Hollywood's many subindustries and its laborers … [and] celebrity-focused media of all kinds."2 Celebrity is not only at the center of this complex; it is "its driving force."3 Each of Manufacturing Celebrity's three parts offers a rigorous examination of the co-constitutive forces that fuel and are fueled by the demand for 24/7 celebrity news. The major individuals, institutions, and outlets that supply global audiences with non-stop content about celebrities are considered in detail, among them People, Us Weekly, Life & Style, Touch, Entertainment Tonight, E! News, OK!, Star, and TMZ. Part 1 is dedicated to the paparazzi, its labor, and its laborers. Díaz explores the evolution and the economics of paparazzi work and its relationship to other forms of celebrity photography. She maps how demographic shifts have led to a paparazzi labor force that is 98 percent male, approximately 60 percent of whom are LA-based Latinx men, many (almost half) who may be undocumented. Questions of citizenship and legal status compound the precarious subjectivities of these individuals and their labor, trapped within the interlocking domains of power that constrain agency and opportunity. Many Latino paparazzi view this work as "a form of migrant labor."4 In chapter 1, Díaz details the intricacies of day-to-day paparazzi work and examines the opaque compensation practices that paparazzi navigate in an informal "honor system" with little-to-no oversight, unpacking the hypocrisy of celebrity media that rely on paparazzi images yet want no affiliation with those who capture them. Díaz's interviews shed light on how Latino paparazzi grapple with their role in elevating and (re)producing the dominant visibility of white celebrities and white celebrity culture in a system that sustains their precarity. In chapter 2, Díaz situates celebrity news within broader American media ecosystems, detailing the "paparazzi boom" from 2002 to 2008 and the accompanying backlash against it, including the passage of anti-paparazzi laws AB 524 and SB 606 in California.5 Prior to the backlash, entertainment news was subsumed within "hard news" at key cultural junctures—notably the 9/11 attacks—when audiences were primed for an escape. The financial crisis of...