WEST LOS ANGELES - Well, darlings, grab your pearls and clutch your smartphones — Hollywood’s latest milestone isn’t a grand dame at all, but a gossip column with Wi-Fi! It was twenty years ago, back on November 10, 2005, when a scrappy little outfit called TMZ dared to do what Hedda and Louella never could: spill the tea in real time. No martinis at Chasen’s, no whispered tips from the Brown Derby—just servers, screens, and scandal, sweet as sin.
By Allan R. Ellenberger - The Hollywoodland Revue
Nov. 10. (THLR) - Their very first headline? None other than video of the car crash and hit-and-run incident of Paris Hilton, the peroxide princess of the new millennium, flashing across cyberspace like a comet in couture. From that pixelated moment, the genie was out of the bottle and never went back in.
Under the stern gaze of Harvey Levin, a lawyer turned ringmaster, and the late television producer Jim Paratore, TMZ made tattling a 24-hour sport. When Mel Gibson went biblical on the highway, TMZ was there. When Britney Spears turned barber, they filmed the clippings fall. And when Michael Jackson left this mortal stage, it wasn’t the networks that broke the news — it was those caffeinated kids in hoodies behind their glowing monitors.
They called it “journalism,” though in old days, they’d have called it “having nerve.” Still, give the devils their due — they turned gossip into a global empire, a soundstage of snickers and scoops. Where Louella and Hedda traded whispers over champagne, TMZ trawls police scanners and social feeds, faster than a press agent can issue denial.
So here’s to twenty years of digital dirt and celebrity shock therapy. Love it, loathe it, or leak to it, TMZ proved one thing past generations always suspected: Hollywood’s secrets never die — they just refresh every fifteen minutes.
