SHOT TO HELL RELATIONS BETWEEN CELEBS AND PHOTOGS HAVE SLID FROM CORDIAL TO COMBATIVE.

Byline: Valerie Kuklenski Staff Writer

STARS NEED PUBLICITY, and photographers who feed the pages of People, US Weekly and other celebrity trackers need the stars.

But what once was a partnership in the Hollywood publicity mill seems to have devolved into skirmishes, with the photographers on the attack with incriminating stills and the famous ones biting back with powerful attorneys.

What happened? In the last couple of decades the public has developed an insatiable appetite for what their favorite celebrities are really like (Will Winona Ryder get jail time for shoplifting? Who is Gwyneth Paltrow sleeping with? Did Russell Crowe get plastered in a pub last weekend? Will Ben Affleck agree to the terms of Jennifer Lopez's prenuptial agreement?) The contrived moments and trumped-up romances created by studio publicity departments in the '40s and '50s became passe.

``Scandal sells better than cleanliness,'' says Maureen Rubin, a journalism ethics professor at California State University, Northridge. ``There's tremendous competition now and you have to go for the gutter if you want the big bucks.''

And the bucks for photographs can be very big. Stephen LeGrice, executive editor for the new In Touch Weekly magazine, said a bidding war between rivals People and US can drive a photo package's price into the $30,000 range. He estimated that one magazine's exclusive photos of the Lopez-Affleck wedding - as US is rumored to have brokered - could cost about $100,000 for North American rights alone.

Jim Ruymen, a freelance photographer shooting for Reuters, the Ramey Photo Agency and other outlets with worldwide distribution, has been training his lenses on celebrities since 1983. He says that portion of his work now accounts for about 90 percent of his income.

``I would not be able to support myself doing news exclusively,'' Ruymen said. ``I would not be in the (photography) business right now if it were not for the Hollywood connection.''

Murray Garrett, one of the top Hollywood shooters of the '40s through '60s, earned in a good year about the same sum that one really hot photo sells for now.

Garrett, 76, says more than the money has changed since he was in the business. He said the relationship between photographer and subject in those days was more ``fraternal.''

``There were no paparazzi in my day,'' he said of the disparaging term derived from a character in the film ``La Dolce Vita.'' ``We were not out to catch people naked in the back yard or in the bedroom. The studios had well-trained their stars to understand what their function was, which was to be out every night, and to understand our function.

``Our function was to keep that wonderful myth of Hollywood, that great bubble, keep it in the air.

``So we were out there at the nightclubs, covering the parties, covering the Academy Awards and all of those things that were important,'' Garrett said. ``They were not suspicious of us as they are of the paparazzi today. We didn't want to get their kids' pictures when they didn't want them taken.''

He prides himself on building a level of trust with the stars that resulted in Frank Sinatra's invitation to exclusively cover the surprise 21st birthday party he threw for Natalie Wood, and the privilege of following Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and their children around Disneyland for a day.

``It's a different world,'' Garrett said. ``The publicists now are building a fence to keep you out. And the publicists then were sitting down with us to say, 'How can we get this done?' ''

Garrett broke a few professional rules along the way, such as letting Taylor and Burton preview his photos and reject the undesirable ones, but he says it was a small price to pay for the exclusive access he received.

CSUN's Rubin says celebrity photographers still violate professional ethics, but their methods and motivations are very different from those of past shutterbugs.

``They were wrong, but they were not harmful and not that low,'' she says of past photographers who played along with orchestrated stunts or perpetuated Rock Hudson's macho image. ``Before it was with a wink, and now it's with a dagger.''

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo: (1 -- cover -- color) PHOTO FRENZY

Celebrity shots busting out all over

(2 -- 3) no caption (Magazine spread of celebrities)

(4) Winona Ryder outside Beverly Hills Superior Court in early November.

(5) Ben Affleck in New York City last week.

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