Latest news with #JeffWeiss
Washington Post
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A flashback to the tabloid culture that made and broke Britney Spears
Jeff Weiss was 16 years old in the summer of 1998, when a then-unknown Britney Spears came to his California high school to film the music video for her upcoming debut single, '…Baby One More Time.' Also 16 years old, weeks away from the onset of the fame that would eventually consume her, Spears was a goofy theater kid dressed in a schoolgirl uniform from Kmart, joking with her backup dancers. Even to Weiss, who was more of a rap fan, it was obvious: Britney was magic. 'Britney was the opposite of everything I'd known,' a smitten Weiss writes in 'Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly,' his incredibly entertaining and frequently insane debut book. 'A sequined mirage and airbrushed myth. It felt like I'd just watched a comet be born.' Weiss wound up as an uncredited extra in the video and in the story of Spears's life. An acclaimed music journalist who runs the online magazine Passion of the Weiss (and has written for The Washington Post), Weiss began his career as a reluctant tabloid reporter assigned to the Britney beat. 'Waiting for Britney Spears' traces his and the pop star's intertwining paths in early-2000s Los Angeles. Its title draws from Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' except unlike Godot, Britney shows up. Everywhere, all the time, slaloming through L.A. nightlife, hell on stripper heels, trailed by an ever-present wolf pack of paparazzi, reporters and pitiless observers documenting her every move. At least, this is how Weiss tells it. 'Waiting for Britney Spears' isn't strictly a nonfiction account. It's a throwback to the days of Hunter S. Thompson-like gonzo journalism, a kinetic, extravagantly written fever dream that lands somewhere between a memoir and a roman à clef. True in vibe, if not necessarily in detail. For anyone who consumed pop culture in the '00s, 'Waiting for Britney Spears' feels as vividly real as any documentary account. All the Mount Rushmore moments are here: both of her weddings; the night she first hooked up with Kevin Federline; the time she shaved her head; the day she drove off with her baby in her lap, paparazzi in pursuit. The more prosaic moments are here, too: the court dates, the barefoot gas station Red Bull runs, the breakneck Westside paparazzi car chases. Most of these vignettes are reported by Weiss as either first- or secondhand accounts. And while it's unlikely that even the most diligent Britney chronicler would have been present for all of them, they do coincide with contemporaneous published reports. Most of the events Weiss describes almost certainly happened, in other words, even if they didn't always happen to him. At first, everyone was mostly having fun. Spears was the biggest pop star in the world. Her exploits at an endless series of bottle service nightclubs and awards shows were a welcome distraction from the country's post-9/11, Iraq War doldrums. When a walk to the beach with K-Fed turned into a national news story, complete with helicopters circling overhead, she seemed amused. Weiss and his paparazzi sidekick weren't immune to Mission: Impossible-style maneuverings, either. One day, when the couple chartered a luxury boat, 'Oliver rented a helicopter and pilot and snapped $20,000 worth of photos while dangling from the chopper,' Weiss recounts. 'Britney waved.' 'Waiting for Britney Spears' peaks one night in 2006, at Hollywood club-of-the-moment Hyde. Everyone was there: Leo DiCaprio, Colin Farrell, Paris Hilton (imperious and blank, the only person there as famous as Britney) and her lowly assistant Kim Kardashian, 'raspy chaos phantom' Lindsay Lohan. It was the pinnacle of '00s Ed Hardy culture; the Yalta conference, except everyone was in trucker hats. Later that night, Spears, Hilton and Lohan would drive off together in Hilton's car, photos forever memorializing what became known as the Bimbo Summit. It was all downhill from there. As Spears tumbled deeper into whatever cocktail of mental illness and substance abuse eventually pulled her under, and the once exhilarating Britney beat turned into a 'trail of tears,' Weiss, who longed for literary seriousness and lamented his guest role in Spears's misery, grappled with his own self-loathing and guilt. But when he wasn't assigned to Britney detail, things were somehow worse. He engaged in a death-defying car chase with Ben Affleck, only to realize it was Affleck's brother, Casey, behind the wheel. He was publicly admonished by Bob Saget over tabloid treatment of the actor's former 'Full House' co-stars the Olsen twins. 'What amount of money is worth losing all self-respect?' Saget asked Weiss, who wasn't sure. He even became briefly famous himself after being detained for trespassing near Brad Pitt's beach house while on assignment for People magazine. He was scooped up by the actor's security crew and dragged before a disapproving Pitt. 'His skin is perfect,' Weiss recalls. 'His expression is wrenched with disgust. He shakes his head slowly, confidently, letting me know that I've lost.' As 'Waiting for Britney Spears' draws to a close, Britney and the tabloid culture that birthed her seem to be disintegrating at the same pace. The advent of TMZ dynamited the established tabloid order. Traditional paparazzi, who at least had a vague sort of ethical code, were replaced by less professional, more menacing 'stalkers with video cameras, jumping in celebrity's faces,' lamented the old-school Oliver. The advent of citizens with camera phones would soon render both models obsolete. Meanwhile, Spears was in her 'crack-up summer' era. She reportedly rubbed mashed potatoes on her face at the Chateau Marmont. She spoke in an inexplicable British accent. She appeared to hold her infant child hostage, leading to an extended police siege. She was utterly alone. With great sympathy, Weiss recounts her devolution from an animated and sweet southern teen to a finger-snapping, assistant-terrorizing hellion clutching her tiny dog for comfort to, eventually, an empty-eyed zombie, submitting to an involuntary psychiatric evaluation. During one of the book's most poignant passages, Weiss recounts Spears becoming trapped by photographers inside a Malibu Starbucks, pregnant, disoriented and terrified, clutching her newborn. 'In the glass cage, she begins sobbing. An excited gasp erupts from the photographers who know that tears pay double.' Are you not entertained? Weiss saves his greatest distaste for the men who betrayed her: ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake ('a horny doofus,' writes Weiss, which about covers it); her Rasputin-like minder Sam Lutfi, who Britney's mother suspected was drugging her food to keep her compliant; and Spears's scowling father, one of the overseers of her 13-year conservatorship. She would later claim he belongs in jail. Weiss doesn't exempt himself from criticism. To write a book that grapples with Spears's exploitation while simultaneously providing an imagined interior monologue of her innermost thoughts and fears, the only private thing not taken from her, is itself a form of exploitation. But still. The Britney of Weiss's recounting, which ends as her conservatorship begins, is a more 3D Britney than the one in her own, somewhat mechanical 2023 memoir, 'The Woman in Me.' And sometimes a more optimistic one. 'Her struggles were communal,' he writes. 'She's become a heroine for a malfunctioning society. If Britney can come back, hope can never fully be lost.' Allison Stewart writes about pop culture, music and politics for The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune. She is working on a book about the history of the space program. A True Story, Allegedly By Jeff Weiss MCD. 402 pp. $19
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He Was in the Pack Swarming Britney Spears. Now He's Ready to Tell All.
WAITING FOR BRITNEY SPEARS: A True Story, Allegedly, by Jeff Weiss In 2023, the pop princess Britney Spears published her autobiography, 'The Woman in Me.' In its pages, Spears had choice words for the paparazzi who pursued her at the heights and depths of her fame. She described them as enemy combatants, the ghosts in a Pac-Man game, sharks who sensed blood in the water. They were, she wrote, 'an army of zombies' who treated her with 'disregard' and 'disgust.' She hated them. She feared them. Jeff Weiss, by his own account, was one of them. In the 2000s, Weiss worked as an occasional reporter for a couple of tabloids. (He was also cited for trespassing on Brad Pitt's property, ostensibly at the bidding of People magazine.) He details these exploits — with grandiosity and rue — in 'Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly.' It is not a novel, not yet a memoir. A roman à clef? Probably. Autofiction? Sure. It is also, in its most engaging moments, a bedazzled biography of Spears herself, as glimpsed across the dance floor, or through a long lens. Weiss, if you believe him, first met Spears when he sneaked into the ' … Baby One More Time' video shoot, which was held at his Venice, Calif., high school. The first glimpse of a pigtailed Spears ensorcelled him. A few years later, sprung from college and lightly adrift, Weiss found himself flung into her orbit again. Zhuzhing his résumé and shushing his qualms, Weiss persuaded a tabloid to hire him as a Hollywood party and celebrity reporter. (Context clues suggest that the tabloid was Star; in the book, Weiss calls it Nova.) This is a book that wears its antecedents on its sleeve, or perhaps low on the brow, like a Von Dutch hat. There's new journalism here and gonzo journalism, as well as more literary stabs at the mournfulness of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the contempt of Nathanael West. Parts of the book read like a retread of 'Miss Lonelyhearts,' doused in apple martinis. Other sections suggest link-rotted LiveJournal entries. In broad strokes, it is a story of a young man's disillusionment, a West Coast 'Sweet Smell of Success,' if success smelled like Victoria's Secret body mist. These strokes are indifferently compelling. Weiss falters in building stakes or sympathy for the self he describes. A 22-year-old college grad distracted from working on his novel? Oh no! And there is a cloying quality to his repeated insistence that he is too pure, too talented to do the work of a tabloid reporter. Many of us who make a life in journalism have done as bad or worse, without ever expensing our drinks. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Waiting for Britney Spears': 5 shocking (allegedly true) stories from a former tabloid writer
In his new book, "Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly" — a mix of fact and fiction — music writer and L.A. native Jeff Weiss brings us back to the last gasp of the celebrity gossip-mongering machine of the early aughts. It was the prelapsarian age of the dumb phone, when we weren't all taking photos of everything all the time and paparazzi were commanding six figures for shots of Angelina Jolie's baby bump. Fresh out of college and dreaming of Pulitzer glory, Weiss instead takes a job with Star magazine — called Nova in the book — to pay his rent and winds up being present during ugly episodes of the celebrity stalking era: Britney Spears' meteoric rise and career lows in the early 2000s, a few years before her personal and business affairs were placed under a court-ordered conservatorship controlled by her father, Jamie. Weiss bears witness to this particularly gruesome episode with clenched teeth, filing dispatches for rent money alongside photographer Mel Bouzad (referred to as Oliver Bournemouth in the book), who acts as his Virgil, smoothing the writer's way through Hollywood's red velvet ropes. Weiss in short order is engulfed by Spears' world until it becomes his organizing principle. The writer becomes an unrepentant co-conspirator in the plot to knock down Spears, one breaking news item at a time. "We wanted more and more, until she had no energy left to resist and no place left to hide," writes Weiss. Here are some of the most shocking stories from the book. Read more: Britney Spears' highs and lows — a timeline from 'The Mickey Mouse Club' to her tell-all memoir As a cub reporter in 2004, Weiss gets a hot tip about Spears' wedding to Kevin Federline at the Studio City home of a Spears confidant. Accompanied by Bouzad, Weiss scouts a neighboring house and pays off its owner in order to witness the nuptials next door. 'An hour before the ceremony, the bridegroom swaggers in in his white undershirt,' Weiss writes. 'The groomsmen look like lost members of 98 Degrees, wearing squiggly goatees and gummy-worm braids.' After the reception, where Federline 'removes [Britney's] garter belt with his teeth,' the wedding party packs into black SUVs wearing monogrammed Juicy Couture sweatsuits: 'Britney's announces Mrs. Federline. His just reads, Hers.' Weiss' Britney beat is temporarily placed on hold so he can dig up information on Ben Affleck's budding relationship with actor Jennifer Garner. In search of the duo, Weiss drives to Affleck's Brentwood house. He's in luck: Affleck materializes and hops into his car, prompting Weiss to tail him. 'My wobbling, elephantine car is no match for his agile V12 Mercedes, but I somehow keep up,' he writes. But Affleck is onto Weiss and swerves across lanes of traffic along the 101 en route to the San Fernando Valley. Weiss is nearly side-swiped by a Range Rover, 'and suddenly, it's over. [Affleck's] car heads into the parking lot of Bob's Big Boy.' When the visibly shaken driver emerges from the Mercedes, it turns out to be Affleck's brother, Casey. On assignment for People magazine in 2005, Weiss attempts to sneak onto Brad Pitt's beachfront compound in Santa Barbara, hoping to grab some tasty morsels about the megastar's new relationship with Jolie. He has been tasked, alongside a two-paparazzi team, with monitoring Jolie's son's fourth birthday party. 'I'm on the verge of breaking open one of the decade's biggest stories,' he writes. 'For the last six months, you haven't been able to buy a Snickers at the supermarket without missing the all-caps headlines' about the love triangle between Pitt, Jolie and Jennifer Aniston. No sooner does Weiss climb a bluff and whip out his binoculars than he is surrounded by 'four goons' with Glocks tucked into their shorts. He is harassed and finally released, but not before Pitt appears. 'He shakes his head slowly, confidently, letting me know that I've lost.' The next day, Weiss himself becomes a tabloid story: In the U.K., the Daily Mail headline reads, "People Paparazzo Popped Trying to Snake Pitt." Weiss has his first 15 seconds of infamy. Read more: Britney Spears' 13-year conservatorship is done. Here's how we got here In 2007, Weiss and Bouzad chase Spears — recently divorced from Federline — to a nondescript hair salon in Tarzana. 'Shielded by her security, Britney scurries in like a frightened deer,' Weiss writes. From an open window, Weiss hears Spears tell the hairdresser, 'I want you to buzz my hair off.' When she refuses, Spears grabs the trimmer and clicks it on: 'The extensions are hacked into lifeless scraps … the stray hairs curl on the floor like writhing snakes.' Hours later, Spears' hair is auctioned on eBay. 'The bidding reaches $1 million before the online auction house removes the listing. The authenticity of the hair cannot be verified.' In her own memoir, 'The Woman in Me,' Spears explained the reason for the bold act. 'Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,' Spears wrote. That same year, Spears attempts a musical comeback with a new album and series of one-off performances. Weiss nabs an exclusive interview with the pop star at a rented mansion in the Hollywood Hills. It doesn't go as planned. A disoriented and agitated Spears shows up late, rejects the pre-selected wardrobe choices for the photo shoot and locks herself in the bathroom. Finally, Weiss' moment arrives. Over lunch, 'Britney shrugs and summons me like she has something to confess.' Weiss is about to get his first face-to-face with Spears, but it's a false alarm: She thinks Weiss is a production assistant. 'She hands me her empty plate filled with bones and fat to throw away.' Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
