Coming (back) soon to a theater near you: Titanic

Today's announcement that James Cameron's Titanic will be converted into 3-D format and reissued in theaters on April 6, 2012 -- just in time for the 100th anniversary of the luxury liner's first and last voyage -- strikes me as, at best, a mixed blessing.

To be brutally honest, I've never been a big fan of Cameron's romantic melodrama -- which, up until the 2009 release of another Cameron extravaganza, Avatar, ranked as the No. 1 box-office champ of all time -- and my original review most certainly was not a rave. On the other hand, I'll be more than mildly curious to see if and how the re-release will increase the amount of on-line traffic for my interviews with Cameron and Leonardo Di Caprio, which were videotaped shortly before Titanic opened at theaters and drive-ins everywhere back in 1997, and have been available on YouTube since 2008.

And yes, I'll admit: I want to see how that damn iceberg looks in 3-D.

So tell me, Mr. Twain: Just were do you get your ideas?

Over the past 40 or so years, I've had the pleasure of interviewing many notables who had already been interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of times before they sat down to chat with me. (Writer-director Whit Stillman once told me, years after the fact, that I actually was the first entertainment journalist ever to interview him, back when he premiered Metropolitan at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival. I suspect that he was joking, but if not, he apparently survived the experience with minimal trauma.) And on more than one of these occasions -- not many times, to be entirely honest, but more than once -- I have been told by the interviewee that I asked interesting questions, or at least questions that he or she hadn't fielded a zillion times before. I won't lie: I am shamelessly proud whenever I receive such a compliment. (Bless you, James Cameron and Philippe Noiret.) Early on, though, I learned not to get too big-headed about the praise because, in all likelihood, the interviewee thought I was a great interviewer simply because he or she had dealt with so very many lousy ones.

I'd like to think that, if I'd ever had the opportunity to converse with Mark Twain, I wouldn't be among the interviewers who inspired this essay. But as I read it, I confess, I found myself thinking: "Oh, gee, have I ever done this? Or that?" Which is a good thing, I suppose: You should never be too sure of yourself, or too complacent.  And if you're going to learn lessons from other writers, you can't do much better than heeding the words from this master. (Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan for steering me toward the source.)

A greater gross for Avatar

According to Variety, James Cameron's sci-fi spectacle didn't just make more money than you can shake a stick at -- it made the stick as well.

Here an Avatar, there an Avatar, everywhere you look, there's Avatar

Resistance is futile: You will see the trailer for Avatar, one way or the other. So you might as well just watch it here -- or down there -- and get it over with.

Reeling down memory lane with Leo and Jimmy

Thanks to the restorative work of filmmaker Robert Clark, I can offer you these two mini-interviews I taped with Leonardo DiCaprio and James Cameron during the 1997 New York press junket for Titanic. I feel a little guilty while watching these, since they expose my... my... well, my faking enthusiasm for a movie that underwhelmed me. But, hey, that's the game you have to play sometimes during the junket ritual. Just in case you're wondering what Cameron and I were chatting about before the cameras were turned on: Our first meeting, 14 years earlier, on the "Tech Noir" bar set while I was doing a location story about a low-budget sci-fi movie called The Terminator.