Paparazzi have their lenses on Miley Cyrus
May 28, 2008
How much is Miley Cyrus’ first kiss worth?
Anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000, depending on which paparazzo you ask. A photo's price could be higher if her designated love object happened to be camera-worthy like a Jonas brother, or Shia LaBeouf, not just some cute Kevin Federline-esque wannabe.
Yes, the paps have discovered the "Hannah Montana" star, forming a scrum of ferocious men-dogs who camp outside her North Hollywood home. They follow her shopping at the Malibu shops, lurk around her lunch spots, accompany her to church, riding her bike, and then pop up again down in Nashville, where's she's recently gone to shoot the "Hannah Montana" movie. No one in the Cyrus camp (not Miley, pa Billy Ray Cyrus, her publicist, or her agent) would comment, though one person close to the star notes that the phenomenon started around February, when Cyrus returned to Los Angeles after finishing her world tour.
Let's repeat one salient fact about Miley: She's all of 15.
She can't drink, drive or serve her country, but she can provide a profitable stream of income to those devoted to chronicling her every move?
Every milestone in her young life is going to have some fairly concrete monetized value -- if the photographer can get the shot. But will all the attention ultimately corrode the very wholesomeness that makes Miley so popular? It doesn't appear that the 24/7 spotlight has helped the mental health of such fore-gals as Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears.
Indeed, it's their unseemly public antics that have stoked the appetite for Miley, the paragon of Disney-branded civility and niceness.
"She's much more attractive than Britney Spears," says Frank Griffin of the Bauer-Griffin paparazzi agency. "It's much more of a success story. [Consumers] want to see success. They don't want to see failure. If someone famous falls on their face, you have to report it . . . but Miley is going to steal all of Britney's thunder. Kids want to see her. They don't want to see ripped fishnets and fear and mascara-streaked cheeks."
"I think one of the reasons she's so popular is after all the train wreck girls, the Britneys, there's a move toward all-American clean living," says Gary Morgan, CEO of Splash News, another paparazzi behemoth. "Everyone is looking for a moral teenager, someone they can look up to."
To François Navarre, the proprietor of the X17 photo agency, the leader in candid celebrity shots, the market for Miley really began to pick up after the notorious Vanity Fair incident in which Annie Leibovitz photographed the teenager seemingly nude covered by a sheet. "She's started to sell more," says Navarre. "Now the pictures are going for a higher price. It used to be $300" for a shot, "and now it's $2,000 for a picture. It has to be a nice picture. I have a couple of guys working on her. It's not like Britney [Spears], where we have 24/7 coverage, but we are watching her. If she goes out of town, we try to follow her."
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