Here’s another gripping instalment in the making-news-is-like-making-sausages school of trash-mag rumour mongering.

For the past seven weeks, Melbourne, and the Herald Sun in particular, has gone feral over a notorious family of Scientologists, one of whom, Katie Holmes, is apparently shooting a film at a Docklands studio.

For the most part, relations have remained cordial — paparazzo tell of a symbiotic relationship with the trio’s security staff, with the hunters and the hunted eager to play the fame game.

Each morning the main photo pool receives a Lachlan Harris-style briefing from TomKat’s entourage and are corralled into the best position to snare their pound of flesh.

Things were going swimmingly — Katie’s film, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, was receiving reams of column inches all around the world as fabricated yarns about non-existent cruises off the Kimberley coast competed with breathless reports detailing trips to the Melbourne Aquarium.

Paparazzo sales are said to have already run in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Tom and Katie couldn’t have been more accommodating,” one leading snapper told Crikey.

So far, so good.

But one story that appeared last week has set the gravy train skirting close to derailment.

On August 12, the following picture was taken by photo agency Big Australia, the local arm of Geelong-boy-made-good Darryn Lyons’ international operation:

But it was the caption, penned by an underling of “Mr Paparazzi“, that rally set tongues wagging:

Tom Cruise and daughter Suri come to visit Katie Holmes on set. Tom stopped and spoke to fans. A grumpy Suri stood by with Katie waiting for Tom. Once together again Tom is seen storming up the street looking very pissed off. Forcing Katie to put on a big smile [sic].

At exactly the same time, another pic was taken, of the lip-locked duo in a very public display of affection:

Despite the disjuncture, two days later, this story, based on the caption, appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, under the headline “Tom and Katie’s Melbourne meltdown”.

The next day the “Fight to End All Fights” exploded on the cover of US weekly In Touch.

So, in the space of a week, a staff photographer’s creative account of what he “saw” in Melbourne, has gone front page in the US, with the break-up angle metastasising all over the web.

Photographers who witnessed the split second “incident” described it as a storm in a tea-cup:

We are as a result being asked by the world’s press about it … there was no fight, no disagreement and no spat.

But such was their apparent seriousness, on Friday, Cruise was forced to deny the rumours to US Weekly.

That didn’t stop NW resuscitating the story this morning, citing the couple’s “public spat” under the headline “Tom Leaves Katie”. The accompanying yarn, penned by Zoe Nauman, cites the usual “confidents” and “sources”.

Relationships between the Cruises and the snappers is now on the verge of collapse.

Meanwhile, the Herald Sun TomKat blizzard continued as the mood turned sour.

Last week, lifestyle columnist Susie O’Brien (of the infamous Lynne Kosky EQ Bar scandal) wrote a pious piece calling on the slavering international paparazzo to lay off TomKat’s three-year old daughter Suri:

SURI Cruise is news. But she is not sport. And she shouldn’t be hunted down like fresh celebrity meat while she and her mother are in Melbourne.

Sure, her father Tom Cruise is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but it doesn’t give us the right to make his daughter’s life a misery.

Erm, that’d be the same Herald Sun that has run at least 20 stories on the duo since they arrived in Melbourne on July 1, complete with pics sourced from the photo pool that O’Brien takes to task. She continues:

Stalking celebrities — and outsourcing the stalking of celebrities to piranha paparazzi — is about as Australian as apple pie and baseball…

Ousourcing, one presumes, commissioned by people such as O’Brien’s editor, Simon Pristel. The paper encourages readers report on their own personal stalking odysseys:

Have you seen the Cruises and little Suri out and about in Melbourne? Let us know.

This story on July 1 reveals Tom, Katie and Suri’s room number at Crown Towers.

And on July 2, the paper included a helpful Google Map to assist vigilantes with their personal stalking mission.

While the official relationship with the paps deteriorates, it’s reassuring to know that the Herald Sun newsdesk lies in wake, ready to exploit the same three-year-old its loud-mouthed columnist is trying to mollycoddle.