E.L. Woody — ‘king of the paparazzi’ shot after-hours exploits
Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton were among the scores of celebrities captured by E.L. Woody’s roving lens — whether they liked it or not.
Mr. Woody, a photographer and videographer, was a Hollywood fixture — or an annoyance, depending on one’s point of view — who chronicled the afterhours exploits of the glitterati for decades, a period when unauthorized celebrity coverage by the paparazzi expanded from tabloid newspapers to the nightly news and became a major driver of Internet traffic.
In a scrambling profession requiring stamina, moxie, sharp elbows and a thick skin, Mr. Woody was tireless in pursuit of an exclusive and put little stock in modesty: He crowned himself the “king of the paparazzi.”
He died at 70 on May 23 at a hospice facility in Los Angeles. J.D. Ligier, who helped Mr. Woody form a company called Papparazzi TV in the 1990s, said that the cause was complications of colon cancer.
To Mr. Woody, a scruffy, gray-goateed former Green Beret who saw duty in Vietnam, photographing starlets teetering out of a club in the wee hours was not a frivolous pursuit but a historical imperative.
“We’ve been recording the history of Hollywood, frame by frame,” he told CNN in 2011.
Mr. Woody was one of the earliest such photographers to carry a video camera. He created Papparazzi TV to sell footage to celebrity news television shows like “Hard Copy,” “Entertainment Tonight” and “Extra.” (The extra “p” in “Papparazzi TV” was a spelling error that Mr. Woody decided to keep.)
During the 1990s, Ligier said, the company’s three employees took in as much as $500,000 a year (more than $800,000 today) while scoring scoop after scoop.
One, Ligier said, was the first published photo of Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam. Another was a 1997 video of police officers questioning Eddie Murphy about a transgender prostitute they saw enter his car early one morning. (Murphy said the prostitute had asked him for a ride.) And then there were photographs of Kiefer Sutherland socializing with an exotic dancer. (After they appeared, his wedding to Julia Roberts was canceled.)
Mr. Woody was also competitive. He was in one of the handful of helicopters used to photograph Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding (her eighth and last) to construction worker Larry Fortensky at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in 1991.
Mr. Woody maintained that paparazzi were essential to the celebrities they covered. “Every flash, every click feeds their careers,” he said. “It feeds the supernova of fame.”
Many stars came to appreciate Mr. Woody’s work. Mark Wahlberg gave him cameo appearances as a photographer on his HBO comedy “Entourage.” But others were irritated by the intrusion, and a few were furious.
In 1990, Mr. Woody was involved in a highspeed chase with Sylvester Stallone after photographing him leaving a Sunset Boulevard nightclub in Beverly Hills. Mr. Woody filed a lawsuit saying that Stallone had rammed his car, a rented Honda Civic, with his Mercedes. Stallone said Mr. Woody had repeatedly smashed into his car. The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
In the early 2000s, Papparazzi TV produced its own short-lived celebrity news TV shows, “Celebrities Uncensored” on E! and “Hollywood Uncensored” on international stations. By then the paparazzi marketplace was crowded with an expanded corps of photographers, websites like TMZ and what Mr. Woody called “the encroachment of the networks on celebrity news.”
“They are supposed to be doing real news,” he said. “There’s plenty of stuff out there that’s important to the public, but they are filling up programs with news about Lindsay Lohan.”
Edward Lee Woody was born Sept. 1, 1946, in the East Texas city of Orange. His mother, Dorothy Hildebrandt, divorced his father when he was very young, and Mr. Woody grew up in the Houston area.
He graduated from Vidor High School in 1964 and enlisted in the Army in 1966, where he joined the Army Special Forces, known as the Green Berets. He served as a medic in Vietnam and helped train a large group of indigenous Montagnards to fight with the American and South Vietnamese forces. He also started experimenting with photography while in the military. He received a Bronze Star before he was honorably discharged in 1969.
After working for a time as a bail bondsman in Texas, Mr. Woody moved to New Orleans in the mid-1970s. He began traveling around the country to photograph models and eventually settled in Malibu in the 1980s.
Working in security and production at the Trancas Roadhouse, a Malibu music club, he began taking pictures of actors and musicians like Nick Nolte, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Bob Seger and Eddie Van Halen.
In 1989, Mr. Woody moved to Hollywood to focus on celebrity photography. He lived there at his death.
A brief marriage after he left the military ended in divorce. He is survived by his mother; a sister, Linda; a brother, Richard; a daughter, Sabrina Levert; and a grandson.
Mr. Woody said that celebrities were embracing paparazzi-style coverage as their own, which sometimes dried up the market for traditional paparazzi.
“The Kardashians, they got over $18 million for the exclusive rights to their wedding package,” Mr. Woody lamented about the coverage of Kim Kardashian’s wedding to Kris Humphries in 2011. “That’s where all the big money is.”
“We’ve been recording the history of Hollywood, frame by frame.” E.L. Woody, in 2011 CNN interview