X17 cashes in on its photos as demand raises the stakes
The photograph showed apparently soused starlet Lindsay Lohan passed out in a car, mouth agape, oblivious to popping flashbulbs.
That image, with everything it says about Hollywood excess and youthful indiscretion, ran on the front pages of yesterday's New York Post and its rival Daily News, accompanied by headlines that yelled "Smashed" and "Party Pooped."
For X17, the paparazzi photo agency that owns the picture, it was a good day in L.A.
"We are overwhelmed," X17's founder and president, Frank Rohmer, said yesterday from his Beverly Hills, Calif., office as he fielded phone calls from media outlets clamoring to buy photos of the party girl's unconscious visage, snapped by X17 photographer Roberto Maciel early Monday. Lohan was caught slumbering in the passenger seat of a car at a gas station. Lohan's publicist, Leslie Sloane Zelnick, later released a statement that said Lohan had checked into "an intensive medical rehabilitation facility on Memorial Day."
By midafternoon yesterday, Rohmer said, he had sold the image about 100 times, to CNN, MSNBC and magazines, newspapers, TV outlets and Web sites, not only in the United States but in England, Australia, Sweden and Germany. In New York, the Post and the News each paid about $10,000 for the picture, he said, although smaller news organizations were not required to pay that much.
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