Smash His Camera

So what happens when people forget about all those people he stalked and snapped? Will his collection still be seen as an invaluable store of late 20th-century art, or the work of a celeb-obsessed hoarder?

Fittingly, there is something both thrilling and deeply unpleasant about looking at Galella's body of work -- there is casual genius in some of the captured moments, a combination of access, timing, and luck, with the subject almost always carrying most of the image's weight.

Filmmaker Leon Gast ("When We Were Kings") paints an entertaining portrait of the still-working 79-year-old photographer.

This entertaining docu by "When We Were Kings'?" Leon Gast is more eccentric personality portrait than the in-depth scrutiny of celebrity-culture madness afforded by fellow Sundance preem "Teenage Paparazzo."

There's no denying that paparazzo Ron Galella is a New York character. What's at issue in Leon Gast's entertaining documentary is whether he's an artist or a creep.

Leon Gast's profile of the photographer is not devoid of entertainment value or unhelpful in understanding the history of photojournalism, however, the movie is as ephemeral as one of Galella's snapshots of a coked out, B-list celeb exiting Studio 54 circa 1975.

Galella's real crime goes conspicuously unmentioned: feeding the cult of celebrity while stoking a public appetite for empty gossip as news.