Focusing on celebrities, real and not

Photographer Annie Leibovitz has contributed so many indelible images to American popular culture in the last four decades it's hard to know exactly where to begin cataloguing them: A naked, extremely pregnant celebrity Demi Moore; celebrity Whoopi Goldberg erupting from a shock-white bath of milk; celebrity Mick Jagger literally soaring into the spotlight onstage; then Keith Richards a celebrity collapsed into a heroin-laced heap somewhere backstage.

These are pictures a lot of us can see with our eyes closed. What we don't recognize, perhaps, is what the images reveal about our own fantasies about celebrities. Or how the media allows ordinary people to project their own dreams and fears onto the glamorous faces that tend to decorate magazine covers.

This idea looms just beneath the surface of celebrity "Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens," the fascinating documentary that airs on KOPB (10) at 9 p.m. Wednesday night. It also fuels much of the action in "Dirt," albeit in more awkward, less-satisfying ways. Ultimately, FX's new drama stumbles over its own mixed emotions: For all of its disdain for celebrity media, it can't help kneeling before the same shiny altar it purports to disdain.

Set in modern Hollywood, "Dirt" stars Courteney Cox ("Friends") as Lucy Spiller, the powerful editor of two celebrity-obsessed magazines. The respectable title is Now, a People-like chronicle of beauty and success. But the real action takes place between the covers of Dirt, which trolls the down-low for seamy tales of celebrity sex, drugs and death.

Both feared and loathed by Hollywood's reigning glamour class, Lucy is powerful, attractive and intensely lonely. Her one friend is ace photographer Don Konkey (Ian Hart), a freakishly effective paparazzo whose schizophrenia is only sort of under control. The magazine's other inhabitants, from rapacious owner Gibson Horne (Timothy Bottoms) to cheesy publisher Brent Barrow (Jeffrey Nordling) to the quivering writers and editors, serve mostly to goad Lucy's fears and tantrums.

Still, the real recipients of Lucy's wrath are the young celebrities who flit into the business end of the cameras and gossip mills. And though the celebs live in fear/hatred of the scandal sheets, they also depend on them to stoke the fascination that keeps their careers afloat.

"I'm an actor. That's all I wanted to do," one faltering thespian named McLaren Holt (Josh Stewart) tells Lucy.

"No, you're famous," she retorts. "There's a difference."

Actually, "Dirt" can't seem to make up its mind about Holt, who is described as a kind of Sean Penn type, all stubble, cigarette and creative intensity but who never once displays even a glimmer of artistic sensibility. And though there's something compelling (and, I bet, realistic) about how Holt's betrayal of a secret leads immediately to an upbeat story about him, which leads instantly to a juicy new role, the eventual reversals play like a prime-time soap opera.

Cox, who could have done anything after her performance in "Friends," obviously treasures the opportunity to play things darkly for a change: cussing and snarling and engaging in cable-ready sex scenes, not all of them with a partner. But she never looks less than fantastic -- in stark contrast to the real-life celebrity magazine editors I've worked with. For all the stars, real and imaginary, attached to "Dirt," it's never hard to figure out which one has the most juice: Courteney Cox's name is right above the show's title.

Annie Leibovitz photographed celebrity Cox, along with the rest of the "Friends" cast, of course. But as "Life Through a Lens" reminds us, the elaborately staged portraits of A-list celebrities she took for Vanity Fair and Vogue in the 1980s and '90s were actually a departure from the stark, intimate pictures that made her reputation at Rolling Stone in the late '60s and '70s. Inspired by the action photography of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leibovitz's pictures of celebrity John Lennon (including the portraits shot just hours before his death), Bruce Springsteen and virtually every other important musician of the era, set a new standard for portraiture.

Unfortunately, achieving intimacy with her subjects often meant sharing their more dangerous habits. And though Leibovitz eventually shook off an affinity for cocaine and other drugs, her growing fame and influence allowed her to take on some of celebrity's other less-appealing attributes, including a reputation for imperiousness and an ever-expanding grandiosity.

But as the film (directed by her younger sister, Barbara Leibovitz) establishes, the photographer's romance with writer Susan Sontag gave her a new intellectual grounding. Photographs shot by Leibovitz while accompanying Sontag to Sarajevo in the early '90s describe a crushingly raw vision of the toll of war. And even these pale in contrast to the portraits Leibovitz took of both Sontag and her father while both were in the process of dying.

There's nothing glamorous about those images. But what they share with Leibovitz's best celebrity portraits comes in the subjects' eyes, skin and sinew. It's the essence of a real life, frozen in an instant.