It was this story - which Atkins repeatedly refers to as 'Amy's Hair' - and others, such as Girls Aloud's Sarah Harding developing an interest in quantum physics, and Guy Ritchie injuring himself while juggling cutlery, that have garnered his film the most publicity to date.
Atkins and his team called up British tabloids with made-up frivolous celebrity stories, and they 'just printed anything', he says. He was flabbergasted by the speed with which completely fabricated stories flew around the world: "I was not expecting to have an article in the Times of India about Amy's hair catching fire.
"Everyone is churning everyone else. It's like a Barium meal: you eat the thing and then you can see how it's going round the digestive system."
Two Guardian front-pages helped make the fake gossip news too: reporting how Starsuckers had duped tabloids and captured red-top reporters describing some very underhand techniques.
It has captured the foreign media's interest too (particularly the ones who were hoodwinked - apparently a Spanish newspaper will no longer touch the Sun's copy) and Access Hollywood has been in touch, to Atkins' astonishment: "Everyone loves a good hoax, a stunt."
But the film is about a lot more than celebrity, Atkins insists. "It's an exposé of why we're so hooked on fame, and a blast at the corporations that are dealing it to us," he tells Journalism.co.uk.
"It's not about celebrities. None. There are no celebrities in the film. It's about the media, and the media's toxic effect on society, in particular, watching too much television screws with kids' heads."
He thinks that bad celebrity reporting doesn't bode well for the rest of a paper's standard:
"Some people sit there and say 'we know it's all bollocks', but you still have the most powerful newspaper in Britain, possibly in the world, an incredibly powerful newspaper that can swing a general election, actually writing things that aren't true.
"Some journalists act like they're John 'fricking' Pilger. It's the attitude of these people. These same people get to write about WMD."
Atkins is particularly proud of the section of the film that deals with the charity event Live8: revealing, he says, what happens when celebrities get involved with charity and politics: 'they screw it up a lot of the time because they try and simplify what's a very complex issue'. His aim? To expose it 'for being the counterproductive, toxic thing that it is'. "African debt is a very complex issue. It can't be summarised in a sentence by Chris Martin," he adds.
The film, screened at the London Film Festival, has received a mix of mainly positive reviews to date for tackling human psychology, and what Atkins says is 'genetic programming' for celebrity obsession.
Atkins, who made the widely-acclaimed film Taking Liberties, is on a campaign to expose British celebrity culture.
"We're pumping this out (...) It's like Britain is the pollutant of bad media," he says.
PCC is a 'chocolate teapot', says Atkins
While he doesn't have 'a tickbox of ways to make the world a better place', Atkins does have a number of targets: the industry self-regulation body, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), for example. In his view, it's a 'chocolate teapot' and the fact that Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is chairman of its code committee undermines the body's role, he says: "It's like Mugabe charging himself with war crimes."
Atkins smirks when asked if the PCC received complaints the ludicrous celebrity stories planted in British tabloids. The celebrities wouldn't bother, he says, firstly because the stories were so silly and secondly, because they're used to the British press making up stuff.
"The PCC's an international embarrassment. I've done non-stop foreign press [interviews] - they love flaming Amy's hair - and they quite can't get their heads round when I explain the PCC. They think they've misheard, or English isn't very good. No: you heard right: it's run by the people they're judging," says Atkins.
The only way the tabloids would feel the pressure of a PCC adjudication is if they were made to pay, he says.
Public relations and communications are Atkin's other big gripes: "PR is paid lies. Not to sound too moralistic or an old fart, but when I grew up I was taught that lies are bad. Now it's a career. I think if someone's going to print something from PR it should say sourced from PR."
But what would be left? Nothing, he says and that's the point: we should start again, with a news system which clearly marks the source as PR, similar to the 'advertorial' rule.
"I think the public are very smart. One thing I can't stand about the attitude of the media establishment is that they assume the public is stupid. The public will [continue to] look at something that's PR-led - but if it says it's PR they will have a certain mistrust," he explains.
PR-driven news
One criticism levelled against Atkins is that he himself has used promotional tactics for his film - in fact, he has employed PR firm Porter-Frith (they're nice, 'like aunties', he assures Journalism.co.uk) to do his promotion.
What's more he got publicity most liberal art-house films would kill for: masses of Guardian news coverage, penned by Paul Lewis, known for his investigative work into Ian Tomlinson's death at the G20 protests and in the shortlist for this year's Paul Foot Award for campaigning journalism.
"I went to the Guardian and said it [the film's content] is quite newsworthy," Atkins says.
"They said ok, if you give us a scoop we'll give it prominence. I didn't realise I was going to get two front pages out of it. I couldn't believe it."
Of course, they also ran it with a photo of Amy Winehouse: "Absolutely, that is spin. Having said that, I would defend it to some extent. It is also news. It is a genuine piece of news. We genuinely did punk these tabloids. That is news and they ran it as news. But of course I did it to promote my film. I had to be very open about that."
The film's tactics raise their own ethical questions, something Atkins says he regularly thought about: "You need to question yourself and you need to try and rise above their [the tabloids'] tactics.
"I haven't gone into their [the subjects'] private lives - I'm not interested in that." He believes what his film investigated sits firmly in the public interest:
"We set up a sting where we wanted to test and see if Sunday tabloids will consider breaking the law. The Sunday Mirror and the People both offered me money for medical records which is against the law.
"There was a public interest in secretly filming that, but we didn’t intrude on anyone’s private life, we just filmed them in their place of work."
Legal matter
Lawyers were involved from concept stage, says Atkins: "I basically sat and chatted to the lawyers about where the boundaries are."
And while Atkins won't be drawn on specific legal issues (his lawyers would shoot him), he says that he made the film in such a way as 'to test media law'.
"We talk about media release forms - they are essentially a piece of legal trickery - that's in the film, about how you trick people into being in films by conning them, which we all know in the media," he says.
Still, Atkins is lying low for a while and hasn't started work on his next project.
No one's going to let him make a documentary again for years, he says: "I'm the hated man of the British media at the moment; it's not a good idea to be touting stuff around."
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