When the two young women showed up, the crowd was about 50 people strong and getting larger by the minute. Any later, and they might have come home empty, but instead they were able to get within 10 feet of the two movie stars and snap a photo as they exited the Galaxyland arcade. Security was not pleased.
“Cathie and I were throwing the camera back and forth so that the security guards couldn’t get it,” Psalios recalls. “They chased after us, but we managed to escape with what I guess was one of the first photos of them together when he was supposedly cheating on Jennifer Aniston.”
To this day, Psalios has no idea how the media tracked them down so fast, but by the time they got back to Koutouki, the entertainment news agency Splash News called them and offered to buy the image for $40,000. Within days, the photo was everywhere: People, Us Weekly, Entertainment Tonight. Psalios used her half of the windfall to pay for her wedding dress.
Tim Vee is a freelance professional paparazzo who was also in Alberta hoping to nab his own shot of Pitt and Jolie. His reaction to their payday is blunt. “She’s an amateur,” he says. “She got ripped off.”
Psalios, Melnick, Vee and even Pitt and Jolie themselves didn’t realize it at the time, but September 2005 was not just the peak moment of the public’s fascination with Brangelina, but the peak moment for tabloid culture as well. There was so much money sloshing around glossy magazines like People and Us Weekly that the first good photo of, say, the two of them sharing a kiss or Jolie looking pregnant could sell for as much as a million dollars. There’s a story of one especially resourceful reporter who deliberately concussed herself with a rock so that she could get inside the hospital where Jolie was giving birth.
“Those magazines would ship millions of copies every single week,” Vee explains. “But additionally, the magazine that could put an exclusive photo on their cover would see a massive spike in circulation, which meant they could then charge a premium to their advertisers. Of course, it’s always hard for a pap to actually get those images. If it were easy, they wouldn’t be worth anything at all.”
In those nascent days of the internet, Pitt and Jolie’s relationship played out week after week in the pages of glossy magazines, and the story had been gathering steam all throughout 2005. Pitt and Aniston announced their separation in January. Photos of Pitt and Jolie vacationing in Kenya surfaced in April. June saw the release of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, featuring the two stars each at arguably the height of their sex appeal playing married assassins. They promoted the film with an epic 60-page spread in W magazine in which they cosplayed as a pair of sexy suburbanites. In July, Pitt and Jolie were in Ethiopia, where Jolie adopted Zahara. Rumours that Jolie was pregnant with Pitt’s child ran rampant throughout the rest of the year.
Gossip columnists had never seen anything like it: it was as if Elizabeth Taylor’s romance with Richard Burton were somehow happening at the same time she was stealing Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds.
Celebrities still exist in 2026, of course, but while the likes of Taylor Swift and Timothée Chalamet can still command the attention of the world when they want to, they lack that larger-than-life air of mystery, glamour and adult scandal that made Pitt and Jolie (and Burton and Taylor before them) feel less like actors and more like primal myths. They barely seemed to occupy the same planet we do, which is perhaps why the sight of them visiting a place as banal as West Edmonton Mall broke the brains of the entire city.
Could anything like this ever happen again? Vee is dubious. Nowadays, he says, the tabloids are dominated not by movie idols but reality TV stars — people who desperately want to be photographed, which makes images of them much less valuable. And that’s not even taking smartphones and social media into account. “If you were to go to a restaurant where Johnny Depp was eating,” he says, “outside would be loads and loads of people taking pictures with their phones — and sharing them for free.”
Us Weekly is still America’s pre-eminent celebrity magazine, but in April they announced they were cutting half their workforce and shuttering their New York office. Even the alliance of superstars that was “Brangelina” seems more tragic than glamourous nowadays thanks to the bitter eight-year-long divorce proceedings that revealed details of Pitt’s alleged slide into alcoholism and domestic abuse.
And when The Assassination of Jesse James finally trickled into theatres in 2007, it failed to spark much interest among moviegoers, even in Edmonton. Nobody pegged the slow-paced, downbeat, three-hour Western as blockbuster material, but its failure to surpass even $4 million at the box office was a dismal outcome.
It would be exaggerating to paint mid-2000s celebrity culture as a vanished golden age, but revisiting the Edmonton Brangelina frenzy does suggest its lustre has greatly diminished.
Even Psalios’ memory of outfoxing the global paparazzi has turned bittersweet. “I’ll be honest,” she says. “Cathie and I felt terrible about it. We literally were there as two young girls, crazy in love with Brad Pitt. And it just happened that our photo might have destroyed his marriage.
“So that didn’t feel good. I still don’t feel good about it.”
This article appears in the September 2026 issue of Edify
