THE lead actor in the TV series Entourage, Adrian Grenier, says the best way to avoid the paparazzi is to be “boring”.
Grenier is relaxing in a hotel somewhere in Auckland, a far cry from his Hollywood haunt where stars are hounded daily by “paps” intent on filming them in vulnerable positions.
Ironically, the actor’s rise to fame came by playing a celebrity, Vincent Chase in the television series Entourage.
This role made Grenier a celeb in real life. He found himself on the paps’ wish list – hunted, and unable to avoid the “spray” of flashes that followed him everywhere. He didn’t like it.
“I was definitely intrigued and curious about this culture of people who thought it was ok to be so disrespectful,” he says.
But Grenier never expected to come across one of these people fondly referred to as “vultures”, in the form of a 13-year-old boy called Austin Visschedyk.
The kid snapped Grenier out one night with a blinding spray of quick fire shots, and it got the actor’s attention.
Austin wasn’t “just a fan with a camera”, he was a fully-fledged paparazzo, who ran with the veterans and waited outside clubs at 2am.
Grenier saw in Austin a living product of the celebratory-obsessed culture in Los Angles. He was curious to find out more.
He decided to turn the camera  onto the people snapping him. Grenier became the word that means mosquito in Italian – a paparazzo.
He followed and filmed Austin in an attempt to discover why the boy chose this world and why his parents allowed him to.
The resulting documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, delves into Hollywoods celeb-obsessed underbelly, and exposes the real people behind the camera.
Grenier also interviewed academics, psychologists, and historians on the phenomenon that is popular culture.
The general consensus was that celebrities give people a talking point, and gossiping about them is a way for people to voice their values, and feel included in the celebrity world.
“One thing I tried to do was to diffuse the illusion, and bring celebrities and paparazzi down to earth and show their human side. I hope people can relate to that more,” Grenier says.
In doing this, the actor pissed a lot of paparazzi off, which provided some unintentional humour.
He attempts to take a picture of a lady paparazzo who pleads with him not to – she’s dressed in track pants and hasn’t done her makeup, she says.
“How ironic, right?” laughs Grenier, possibly thinking of some less than flattering beach shots of himself snapped by the paps.
But despite their initial hostility, Grenier is able to gain some real insight into why people choose this profession, through his relationship with Austin.
Many have families to support and being a pap pays well. Austin can make up to $1,000 a shot, which Grenier rightly says, “beats selling lemonade”.
It’s not just the paparazzi the actor targets – he also speaks to many of the celebrities, including Matt Damon, Eva Longoria, and Paris Hilton, who are often so trapped by photographers they can’t get into their cars.
After a meeting with Hilton at a modest beachside house, Grenier draws the curtains to reveal the view – dozens of trigger-happy paps.
Predictably, articles speculating the nature of the stars’ relationship appear alongside the pictures in magazines the following day.
Longoria, of Desperate Housewives fame, voices her frustration at the the media machine: “No-one wants to hear a celebrity complain”, she says.
Is it fair for paparazzi to say that this “stalking” is something celebrities should put up with because it’s the nature of their job?
“One thing I noticed about paps is they always have an excuse and rationale that will allow them to sleep at night,” says Grenier. “Celebrities have to take responsibility for what they bring on themselves, but paparazzi do too. There is a collaborative nature to it – paparazzi need stories, so if you’re gallivanting around and up to no good, you’re creating those stories. If you’re boring… well, as Matt Damon says, ‘still happy, still married, still boring’.”
However, young Austin, who had by now become a micro-celebrity because of the media attention, didn’t want to be boring, and was  showing signs of becoming a celebrity brat.
Grenier was concerned that he’d inadvertently unleashed a foul-mouthed monster, who bragged that he was “best friends” with Paris Hilton, and was about to star in his own television series.
He decided to show Austin and his mother the documentary, and then stop the film. He’s still in contact with Austin who is now 17.
“I think all is well that ends well, and sometimes you need to go to the heart of the beast and risk it all to come back to somewhere more sane,” says Grenier. “It is a hall of mirrors that you have to come through before you have revelations – which I had, as well as Austin.”
Adrian Grenier will be at the 2pm Paramount Theatre session of Teenage Paparazzo, and will conduct a question and answer section after the film, July 25.
Teenage Paparazzo is also screening at the Film Archive, 3.30pm, July 24, and Paramount, 12pm, July 27.