These days, with most print media struggling to stay afloat, it’s unfathomable that a publication would have millions of dollars to spend solely on images of famous people walking to and from their cars. ![]() “Extrapolate that over the year, you know, $7 to $8 million, but spending millions of dollars a year on pictures that just quintupled the amount of money that was out there, which meant there were a lot more photographers coming in and doing it.” “When I had a really healthy budget, it’d be about $140,000 a week on imagery,” Stone says in the film. To get a sense of just how massive the market for tabloid shots of young, vulnerable celebrities was back then, Framing Britney Spears brings on Brittain Stone, the photo director of Us Weekly from 2001 to 2011, to reveal just how much money he was able to devote to paparazzi photos. There are plenty of cringe-worthy moments that highlight this throughout the film, including clips of reporters asking Spears (who, it’s worth noting, was an underage teen girl during the early part of her career) about her breasts or whether she’s still a virgin, and magazine covers patting Justin Timberlake on the back for “getting into pants.” But perhaps most striking is the way the doc reminds us how pervasive and accepted it was for paparazzi to harass famous people like Spears. I wish I could tell my 13-year-old self the world has become a kinder to place to people struggling with mental health issues big and small, but that would be a lie.This week, the New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears premiered on Hulu and sparked new conversations about the harassment that female celebrities in the late ’90s and early aughts suffered at the hands of the media - and society in general, really. This month, singer Chloe Bailey was shamed for being too sexy on TikTok after she posted a video to a viral dancing trend on the app. British reality TV star Caroline Flack died by suicide in February 2020 after her personal life became months-long tabloid and social media gossip. It's also a reality for social-media-present celebrities today.ġ5-year-old TikTok star Charli D'Amelio said she gets hundreds of thousands of hate comments every week about her appearance. We go home versus being at work where something bad is happening." "It used to be where we could separate ourselves from any kind of bad situation. They literally cannot separate themselves," Saltz told Insider. "The victims of bullying are unable to separate themselves from anywhere where they have access to the internet, so they get bullied over and over and over again. There's even a weekly podcast analyzing her posts, seen by 27.7 million followers. And yet every photo, video, and caption is the subject of scrutiny. Take Spears herself: she barely goes out, isn't working, and famously does not post anything of note on her Instagram. But that doesn't mean we're better at shutting down harassment and treating celebrities as real people.Ĭelebrities today have as fraught a relationship with their social media followers as the stars of 2007 had with paparazzi and magazines. ![]() If Spears rose to fame today, we'd have language to identify the bullying that put her mental health at risk. It's been over a decade and a lot has changed. It put so perfectly what we all had trouble expressing at the time: Britney Spears, at 26 years old, was in shambles and needed compassion and help. The film is a look at her rise to fame, the media bombardment she endured, and how she ended up in a 12-year conservatorship meaning that, to this day, her father controls her money and life. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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