Just as the dark hallway outside the newsroom of TMZ gives way to the bustling chaos inside, the last thing you see is a self-portrait of Paris Hilton framed on the wall. The pencil drawing is cute and girly, like something scrawled in an eighth-grade yearbook, complete with hearts dotting the “i”s. It depicts the actress locked up at the L.A. County Jail with TMZ’s Harvey Levin on the jailhouse TV. The artwork is on a greeting card sent to the entertainment news show in 2007, thanking Levin for his fair coverage of her case.
The lanky blond heiress is the star who inadvertently jump-started the celebrity news empire two decades ago. On Nov. 8, 2005, the beta version of tmz.com launched, and a day later, the site posted a video showing Hilton’s Bentley, driven by her boyfriend, Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos III, crashing into a parked vehicle to escape paparazzi, then later being stopped by police, who let the couple go. TMZ’s caption notes the car “slams into a truck with a hit and run,” and then, “Paris makes things right by blowing a kiss to the cops.”
The TMZ formula of snark, sexy babes, exclusive footage and a wink back at the audience was born. Today, the TMZ brand reaches 70 million visitors each month and operates an integrated ecosystem with TV shows and websites dedicated to entertainment news, sports and hip-hop. A sister site, TooFab, focuses on fashion and red carpets. The brand also operates an array of podcasts (including one featuring Los Angeles magazine co-owner Mark Geragos), has a kiosk at LAX and boasts a documentary film division. Famous faces (think: JoJo Siwa, Ray J and Bill Maher) can sometimes be seen on TMZ’s battalion of branded Hollywood bus tours. An “After Dark” tour shuttles fans to bars to pound shots, ride a mechanical bull and hear candid tales of debauchery.
“It was just a different voice,” says Charles Latibeaudiere, an executive producer who has been with founder Harvey Levin since the beginning of the show. “It was a voice that made [reporting about celebrities] palatable, I would say, to a male audience. Yes, we’re covering entertainment news, but we’re gonna say it kind of in a mocking, snarky and, at times, funny way. It was done more for ‘let’s have a laugh.’ It’s how guys sit around stereotypically in a group and just take shots at each other. We stumbled into presenting the show that way.”
Latibeaudiere, Harvey Levin
and Liza Ovsianniko
Executive producer Ryan Regan thinks the show’s speed, agility and point of view put it in a unique position. “Harvey prioritizes movement,” he says. “We need to be making 100 calls. We’re good storytellers. We’re very cost-efficient and we can do things faster than anybody.”
“We are to celebrity journalism,” says Michael Babcock, head of TMZ Sports, “what the New York Times is to hard news.” Staffers report occasionally pulling all-nighters, leaving the newsroom just as the morning shift checks in. The New Yorker once quipped that “TMZ resembles an intelligence agency as much as a news organization.”
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During the first two years of the site — before the launch of the TV show that would bring celebrity chaos into American living rooms — tmz.com broke news about Mel Gibson’s DUI arrest, ensuing antisemitic rant and possible police cover-up; a bald-headed Britney Spears attacking a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella; and Seinfeld’s Michael Richards screaming the N-word at Laugh Factory hecklers. Levin was fascinated by the way law enforcement sometimes treated celebrities differently, and grew his network of informants in courthouses, law offices and police stations. He connected with the legions of omnipresent paparazzi roaming the streets of L.A. and built a newsroom of reporters doggedly chasing down leads. In short, TMZ reinvented the entire concept of Hollywood news.
In the decades that followed the probing celebrity columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, entertainment coverage was filled with fawning fans like Johnny Grant, who emceed Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremonies, and softball-slinging oddballs like Skip E. Lowe, the inspiration for Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick. Levin’s plan was to subvert the sway of celebrity publicists by avoiding scheduled interviews in controlled environments and go looking for stories at the places they were unfolding.
The first version of TMZ’s TV show was similar to the competition, with glamorous anchors reading scripted news. Latibeaudiere thinks their early shows were terrible. “Our producer said these [episodes] should be in the library,” he remembers. “I said, ‘Please don’t ever play them.’”
Producers hit on the idea of inviting the entire newsroom to pitch their stories on the air. “They wanted everyone who is in the office to kind of be involved in the TV show,” says Brian Particelli, a supervising editor, who adds that anyone with a story that day is in the mix. Pitches go into a central email and get filtered through producers. “Harvey’s always been very ‘best idea wins’ no matter who it comes from,” says Particelli. “That’s kind of his motto.”
Actor David Arquette, who’s been a staple of TMZ stories from the beginning, sees the show’s interest as double-edged. “It’s typically pretty awful if they’re covering you. It’s usually for something embarrassing,” he says “The flip side is that when you have a big movie coming out, they’ll cover it. It’s the old Hollywood thing where it’s good they’re talking about you even if it’s negative. It means that you’re part of the culture and interesting enough that they’re paying attention.”
Courtney Doucette
Cast your mind back to the beginning of 2005 and a world before iPhones, YouTube and streaming Netflix. Dial-up internet was most often accessed on home computers connected to the same clunky cathode ray tubes that had powered televisions since they were invented. Most offices still had fax machines, and online video was rare. If you wanted to know who Orlando Bloom was dating back then, you might tune in to Extra or Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood around dinnertime and hope for red-carpet footage. You might have to wait until the next issue of People or the National Enquirer hit the stands.
TMZ gave the world scandal at the speed of light, pushing out story after story about celebrity shenanigans and beating the competition with the help of a huge newsroom that today sprawls over two-thirds of an acre inside a converted postal facility in Playa Vista, backed up by a New York office that filters the news overnight. At the helm is the indefatigable Levin, who his staff reports is approving stories at 3 a.m. before hitting the gym and commanding the office. The 75-year-old attorney and high-energy TV veteran has been a staple of L.A. news for almost five decades.
Levin started in media offering legal advice on the radio as “Dr. Law,” which led to regular columns in the Los Angeles Times and Herald Examiner in the 1970s before branching into long stints in TV news. Levin spent 26 years doling out legal analysis and interviewing bystanders on The People’s Court. “Harvey was always a legend for changing the game on breaking news,” says Christina McClarty Arquette, David Arquette’s wife and a former reporter for Entertainment Tonight. “Before TMZ existed, there was no source like it for breaking news. He also changed the game by making things a lot more salacious. People wanted to get the craziest stuff to compete with TMZ.”
Levin had been producing the slick syndicated TV entertainment news show Celebrity Justice when Jim Paratore, head of Warner Bros.’ Telepictures, canceled the show and offered to move Levin to a website. The company had merged with AOL and was in the market for new online content. Paratore imagined a celebrity news site with familiar coverage of TV, movies and red carpet fashion. But Levin wasn’t interested and left town. “I went to Mexico and was in this kind of margarita haze and it just hit me,” Levin says. “By the time they aired Celebrity Justice, it was old news. If you can break stories where you have producers and research and lawyers to vet everything and you don’t have a time period like a TV show, then you get it up and you beat everybody.”
Harvey Levin grew up in the San Fernando Valley. Meadowlark Park in Reseda was an instant neighborhood that popped up in the early 1950s, filled with quintessentially suburban midcentury tract houses that originally sold for about $10,000. A few feet from the family’s butterfly-roof home was his dad’s liquor store. Harvey remembers being fascinated by the blue and red lights outside his bedroom window as a kid— they weren’t from the store’s neon sign across the alley but from the LAPD squad cars that would show up when the store was being robbed.
“[He] would open the store at 7 in the morning and run it until 2 the next morning,” Levin remembers. “[The family was] in that store all the time. I ended up working there. My dad taught me how to be a salesman. I would learn all these terms like calling it a heady bottle of wine so I could sell a more expensive bottle. That whole experience taught me a lot.”
Levin became interested in politics at Grover Cleveland High School, where he served on multiple debate teams and became president of the Boys’ League. That’s the group that planned special events for the class of 1968, which included a performance by psychedelic band Strawberry Alarm Clock, an Arab-Israeli debate and a special assembly conducted by a skeptic of the official story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That one had Levin’s fingerprints all over it.
The teenager had long been fascinated by the case, and even camped out at the Reseda library to read the 888-page Warren Commission report. He repeatedly called New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (played by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone’s JFK) from an anonymous pay phone after reviewing stills from the Zapruder film, to offer a new angle on the case.
As a high school senior, Levin won a mock debate where he acted as Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in a battle against Richard Nixon. He dressed up the auditorium with fans, polls and friends costumed as a donkey and an elephant. “I started calling all the stations in town and they all came,” Levin remembers. “I was thinking, well, this is interesting how the media gets attracted to something because it was just different.”
Levin volunteered for RFK’s presidential campaign and was at the Ambassador Hotel the night he was shot. He soon left L.A. to study political science at UC-Santa Barbara and received his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School.
Levin’s interest in the Kennedys is at the root of one of TMZ’s greatest flubs. In 2009, the website published a crumpled snapshot of a man who resembled JFK partying on a yacht with naked women. It turned out to have been a Playboy magazine photo, taken years after the president’s death. “We screwed that up,” Levin says. “That one was on me. I spent the last two weeks of the year bringing in Kennedy experts, machines to analyze this thing, going to the Marina del Rey boatyards. We spent so much time on it, and we got it wrong.”
“We do what everybody is supposed to do,” Levin says. “You get a tip, you chase it down, you accept the fact that you’re going to hit 100 dead ends and, you know, you find ways around the dead ends.” Levin says that plenty of stories consume resources yet never make it on air. “If we find out that something’s unfair or untrue,” he says, “it’s dead.”
The show has been accused of paying informants, but producers deny the claim. “People do sometimes look for money,” Particelli says. “But we only pay for photos.” Sometimes an unrelated news story has such shocking video that it rises to the top. “It doesn’t have to be celebrity-driven,” says director of audience development Cameron Lazerine. “It can be a crazy viral moment of a huge tidal wave crushing a ship.”
With some 200 contributors, the show boasts veterans of CNN, Extra and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Many of the crew come from less conventional backgrounds but all share a dogged determination to tell the show’s stories. Producer Charlie Neff started out as a fashion model; TMZ Sports producer Michael Babcock was a restaurant manager in New Jersey before he sent in a winning audition tape. “One of our most successful guys Harvey met while pumping gas,” says Latibeaudiere. “This guy was at another pump and selling speakers out of his trunk, just hustling. He worked with us for at least 10 years.”
TMZ staffers enjoy the niceties that once enticed tech workers into the office. There’s a volleyball court filled with sand, and replicas of vintage military bombs stenciled with the TMZ logo hang near a ping-pong table across from the complimentary Starbucks station. Clear tubes of Frosted Flakes and Cinnamon Toast Crunch beckon hungry employees, as does a free convenience store stocked with Kraft Mac & Cheese and Pop-Tarts. Pizza Hut delivers on Mondays. Fox purchased TMZ for roughly $50 million in 2021.
morning meeting.
One of the newest staffers met his future at a scoop shop in Brentwood. Twenty-one-year-old London native Jakson Buhaj started filming skits and live streams for YouTube as a tween. He learned Python and JavaScript as he was finishing high school and faced a “what am I going to do with my life” moment before a TMZ field producer wearing a camera over his shoulder walked into his Salt & Straw location. “I made this pitch to him,” Buhaj says. “‘Please take my information,’ and to sweeten the deal I gave [him] free ice cream and sent [him] out the door.”
After graduating Santa Monica College, Buhaj had offers from several schools but instead took a spot at the TMZ intern desk. “I made this software— this bot,” he says, “that surfaces a thousand different media outlets and celebrities the moment they posted something, so we would be the first to get to it. That put me on Harvey’s radar.” Buhaj’s efforts have made TMZ on YouTube a major destination that may one day eclipse the brand’s TV efforts. “Jakson is being very humble,” Latibeaudiere says of the channel’s explosive growth since the eager Gen Zer showed up. “Once he was here … Thank the ice cream gods.”
Levin isn’t afraid to predict the future. “The reality is, YouTube is totally dominating,” he says. “I don’t think there’s going to be television in five or six years. You’ve got to pivot to where the audience is going.” In today’s age of infinite customization of personal livestreams, everyone can be a celebrity to somebody.
“People want authenticity,” Neff explains. “The new generation wants to see relatable people. Alix Earle, who is a very famous TikTok’er, is just a regular college girl who would post makeup videos. But she wasn’t fixing up the background of her bedroom. She had her tampons out, she had, you know, bloody panties in the corner, she had a Plan B package in the background. People are watching and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh! She’s so relatable!’”
But is being an internet streamer as significant in the culture today as singers, actors and comedians used to be? Kai Cenat posted skits on YouTube before turning the camera on himself all day and all night. By the time he reached 19 million followers on Twitch, more-established stars like Kim Kardashian and Mariah Carey were showing up on his livestream. “Streaming your life can be performance art. That’s what an actor is doing, right?” says Buhaj. “Nothing like that has been done in the history of entertainment.”
History buff Levin, whose life has long been colored by the promise and tragedy of the Kennedys, can relate. He has a favorite quote of RFK’s — words engraved on the late politician’s tomb: “Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’”
Chris Nichols
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