The unapologetic ‘king’ of paparazzi
E.L. WOODY
He didn’t meet Sylvester Stallone on the best of nights, and it didn’t go much better the time he bumped into Kiefer Sutherland. But Mark Wahlberg liked E.L. Woody, at least enough to cast him in HBO’s hit series “Entourage.”
Wahlberg’s marching orders for Woody were clear enough — just play yourself.
So Woody strapped a camera around his neck and furiously stalked Vince Chase, the show’s movie-star character — doing on television what he did in real life: hunting a celebrity.
Woody, who died May 23 in Los Angeles at age 70 after a long fight with cancer, was the self-anointed “King of the Paparazzi” and an unofficial spokesman for those who tried to make a living taking photos — usually unwanted and generally unappreciated — of movie stars and other celebrities.
For decades, Woody was a fixture in Hollywood, starting his workday in the early evening outside a movie premiere or star-mingling event and wrapping up during the predawn hours after the nightclubs closed up and their celebrity customers were swept
into the open and at their most vulnerable.
Though often vilified, Woody saw the job of the paparazzi as an honest profession that took skill, precision and patience that ultimately benefited tabloid readers and the stars themselves.
“They have to have the photogs. It feeds the ego. Every flash, every click feeds their careers,” Woody told CNN in a 2011 interview. “It feeds the supernova of fame.”
Edward Lee Woody was born in the small East Texas town of Orange., He fought in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969 with the U.S. Army Special Forces and then worked on a highway crew and as a bail bondsman.
In the early 1980s, he tried his hand as a fashion photographer, but found more reliable work shooting photos for biker magazines. He got his first taste of the celebrity game while shooting pictures of customers at a Malibu roadhouse where he worked as a doorman.
An imposing figure at 6foot-3 but gentle enough to win over many of those he chased, Woody found it a smooth transition into the paparazzi universe.
He shot Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth and final wedding from a helicopter buzzing over Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, caught Kiefer Sutherland socializing with an exotic dancer, became pals with Jan-Michael Vincent and photographed Lindsay Lohan during some of her lesser moments.
In 1991, Woody told police that he was sitting in a rented Honda Civic (he frequently rented cars to throw off celebrities, he said) when Stallone pulled up in a Mercedes-Benz and rammed the rental several times before chasing him through Beverly Hills.
“It was insane,” Woody later told police.
Stallone, however, said it was Woody who rammed his car as the actor was leaving a Sunset Boulevard nightspot about 2 a.m.
“It was like an excerpt out of the ‘French Connection,’ ” Stallone said later.
Woody told The Times that he later tried to sell the story to a London tabloid, billing it as “Rocky vs. Woody.”
In the 1990s, Woody set aside his camera and started shooting video, concluding that selling clips to shows such as “Inside Edition,” “Hard Copy” and “Extra!” made more business sense that wrangling with the tabloids.
But whatever competitive edge he held seemed to slip away as the networks and mainstream media began devoting more resources to chasing celebrity news.
“They are supposed to be doing real news,” Woody said in the 2011 interview. “There’s plenty of stuff out there that’s important to the public, but they are filling up programs with Lindsay Lohan.”
J.D. Ligier, a film director who spent years working with Woody, said the tipping point for celebrity photography likely came after the death of Princess Diana, who died in 1997 in a Paris car crash while her driver fled paparazzi.
In response, tougher celebrity photography laws were enacted, especially in California, making it a crime, for instance, for photographers to pursue someone in a car to snap a photo.
Yet Princess Diana’s violent death also seemed to whet the media’s appetite for celebrity sensationalism, Ligier said.
Woody said his business once brought in $500,000 a year. But that revenue stream slowed to a trickle with competition and the bargain-basement prices offered by Internet sites.
“I haven’t had a $10,000 sale for a still [photograph] since Shia LaBeouf ’s wreck three years ago,” Woody lamented, referring to the night the actor rammed a neighbor’s car in a fit of anger.
As he became a veteran in the “pap” business, as he called it, Woody also became an advocate and spokesman.
When a tabloid photographer was shot in the thigh outside Britney Spears’ Malibu baby shower and some neighbors reacted by suggesting the photographer got what he deserved, Woody was outraged, calling the incident an “assault on the press.”
“‘Paparazzi’ is a word that’s been vilified,” he told The Times. “There is a lynch-mob mentality, and this is evidence of that lynchmob mentality taking place.”
Woody is survived by his mother, Dorothy; a sister, Linda; a brother, Richard; a daughter, Sabrina Levert; and a grandson, Noah.