TMZ bus tour attracts tourists and celebs

The appetite for celebrity gossip and video clips seems to show no bounds.

And apparently celebrities are happy to oblige those who collect and distribute this stuff.

Consider the TMZ Hollywood Tour, a special celebrity tour that was launched last year by Starline Tours, Los Angeles’ largest tour bus company, with the help of the celebrity-stalking website and television show TMZ.

Starline launched the special tour with one bus and four daily tours. The response has been so strong that Starline added a second bus last September and plans to add two more by July. By then, the bus company plans to offer 16 of the tours per day.

Visitors on the tour watch TMZ video clips on the bus as they ride to the locations where those clips were shot. For example, people on the bus can watch clips of comedian Michael Richards launching into a racial rant at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood while the bus pulls up to the comedy club.

And although many celebrities publicly denounce TMZ for prying into the details of their lives, several celebrities have been willing to chat with the TMZ bus operators and the tourists they carry.

Riders of the TMZ Hollywood Tour have recently taken photos with basketball great Shaquille O’Neal, comedian Pauly Shore, singer Cee Lo Green and talk show host Ellen DeGeneres. The photo above shows tourists meeting Jiggy, the dog of Lisa Vanderpump from the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” outside her Beverly Hills restaurant Villa Blanca.

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