OK, they do pull down ridiculously fat pay and can make or break a pro­ject simply by deciding whether or not to do it (“You do realize that Natalie Portman is attached?”). But there are times when you almost feel they’re earning all that dosh and éclat.

Take the command performance the aforementioned Ms. Portman, along with Miloš Forman and Javier Bardem, turned in at the Four Seasons hotel last week. As it happened, the normally smooth-running luxury hostelry was the scene of abject chaos from the moment these folks walked in to a press con­ference for their new film, Goya’s Ghosts.

The sensation awaiting the leading lady, director and heavy from this lush period film was approximately that of walking into the center of a raging electrical storm. Now, these people are used to flashes going off in their face — that’s just part of the job description.

What they were hit with in the Karel IV suite, however, was about 50 megawatts of blinding nonstop white light popping from at least 50 cameras at once. And it didn’t stop after a minute or two — it just went on and on.

After a while, the woman ostensibly in charge of the press conference, Veronika Bednářová, began to plead with the photographers to stop, at first politely: “All right, photojournalists, that’s enough now. … Please refrain from any more shooting and let the press conference continue.”

No discernible effect. And the flashes, if anything, were intensifying — and so was the ugliness. One of the hotel security men decided to take matters into his own hands and began reaching for people’s lenses in order to block them.

“Are you crazy?” shouted one shooter in response.

This reaction might actually have been an attempt to help the security man — others in that profession have been known to, as my mother is fond of saying, “draw back a bloody stump” after reaching for a rabid photojournalist’s $10,000 (220,000 Kč) equipment.

It had little effect anyway. And tussles were starting as it became more and more clear that the law of the jungle was ruling the room.

Bednářová got more harsh. Still no effect. One shooter had a step ladder to get a height advantage over his competitors but now found himself lost in the churning sea of the working press. Those shooters edging him out caught hell.

In fact, an elaborate clever system had been devised by the press conference organizers in which some members of the media got little yellow badges and some got pink ones, while others got none at all. These entitled them to sit or stand in carefully designated areas.

But so many photographers had piled into the room that the entire hierarchy, along with any sense of civilization or decorum, broke down completely.

In the end, most of the shooters got reasonable (if remarkably similar) shots, no one got hurt too badly, the stars took it all in stride and made their obligatory gushing (but spontaneous) comments.

And the writers seated at the back were, for once, not bored for a minute.