BY DANIEL BAIG | If you regularly read the roundtable interview pieces I write for CountingDown, you'll know that easily more than half the press days/junkets I attend are held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. The Beverly Hills Four Seasons is, for all intents and purposes, Junketville, or Junket Central, or whatever other nickname one could think up along those lines to apply to it.

As to why this is, I'm sure that, beyond what I could tell you, there are reasons of which I'm not aware and which have never occurred to me. That being said, I think the most obvious explanation is simply  and this is not meant as an exercise in tautology  : the majority of press junkets are held at the Four Seasons, hence, the majority of press junkets are held at the Four Seasons.

In other words, because the studios have become so used to doing their thing at the Four Seasons, and because the Four Seasons has become even more obviously used to having the studios do their thing there, it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

Those entertainment journalists who are "junketeers," regularly flying into Los Angeles, for weekends of (usually) multiple screenings and interviews, from all parts of the country including Canada (yes, yes, I know Canada is technically another country), I believe by and large enjoy the Four Seasons being their regular home-away-from-home in L.A. I think mainly this is because they're used to it, so they know how to get their from the airport, and because the room service (which is in most cases picked up by the studio) is good.

I as a locally-based person don't get to stay at the hotel and try out the room service. But for me too there is the benefit of familiarity. I have the routine down pat; I know where to park, I know which floor to go to when I get there to sign in with the publicists and find out what room I'm assigned to, etc.

And I was not looking forward to participating in the Spider-Man print press (roundtables) day there. Not because I wasn't looking forward to seeing Tobey Maguire in person or anything like that  on the contrary, I was, because I'm always curious to ascertain the height differential between me and actors I've heard are on the short side. I'm not as tall as the average American male, something annoying people for some reason enjoy pointing out, and I like to be able to reply with, for example, "Yeah, well, I'm taller than Jet Li, and he could kick your ass!" (I assure you that both those statements are true.) I'd heard Tobey was a fellow member of the height-impaired club; that alone would have brought me to the press day.

(Oh, and what are the facts regarding the relative heights of Mr. Maguire and myself? They will be revealed, closer to the end of this piece.)

Also, I was really hoping for a visual/special effects presentation. These are often the highlight of these junkets (at least for me) for these big budget extravaganzas. (See my articles on the effects presentations done for The Mummy Returns and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. The presentation on the "pre-vis" process used in the making of Panic Room was fascinating.

Alas, it turned out there was no presentation of any kind. Just roundtables.

Which brings me back to why I wasn't looking forward to going to the Four Seasons to participate in them. Roundtable interview sessions at the Four Seasons take place in special hotel rooms on a floor reserved for these smaller and squarer than usual chambers. Imagine a typical hotel room, except without the bed  and without the space the bed that isn't there would occupy if there were a bed there.

These are small rooms. Inside fits one round, standard catered-function table (the kind that seats eight comfortably), and one armchair, which is almost always reserved for the publicity person or star's assistant, who sits in on the roundtable interview, presumably to make sure no reporter gets out of line and starts asking questions about, say, secret treatments at clinics in Switzerland, instead of sticking to the general topic of the movie at hand.

A roundtable interview session in one of these rooms can actually be a quite pleasant affair, if the room isn't full. If for some reason there are only, say, five journalists at the table along with "the talent" being interviewed, which sometimes happens for less than wildly anticipated movies where a number of reporters end up being no-shows, the situation can be quite comfortable and even friendly.

However, those occasions are the exception. It is more commonly the case that there are at least ten people squeezed seated around the table. And for high-profile, big ticket movies, there are often people standing behind the table as well, between it and the wall. And these rooms, when packed with people, heat up real fast. Uncomfortableness is a state reached pretty quickly.

I remembered how crammed-full the rooms had been last year around this time for The Mummy Returns. Spider-Man is an even more hotly anticipated movie than that sandy Saharan sequel was, and consequently I was expecting the worst.

As it happens, though, my fears  well, those particular fears  were somewhat unfounded.

Yes, there were more reporters there for Spider-Man than I had probably seen at any other movie. But, we weren't crammed inside those little rooms.

Instead, the Four Seasons' large ballroom had been divided up by partitions, creating separate spaces, within which were not round tables, but long (very long) rectangular ones.

At first I thought, "Yay! No stuffy small rooms! Yay!"

It soon became apparent, however, that this was no improvement. Indeed, comfortable temperature aside, it was a lot worse.

And the reason why it was a lot worse was so obvious it's hard for me to believe the folks running the event couldn't have been aware of it. But then, if they were/are aware of it, why do it this way?

The reason the situation was unsatisfactory was NOISE. The partitions that were dividing up the ballroom were not sliding walls or anything, but rather just big cloth screens, not reaching to the ceiling. At every table a different interview was going on, and at each table perhaps 25 people were talking. And because the tables were very long, writers not seated near the star/s being interviewed were compelled to half-shout their questions out. This is leaving aside the gales of laughter which would periodically erupt from tables, especially those where Kirsten Dunst was currently being interviewed.

The word "din" comes to mind . . .

This extremely loud and crowded sound environment made my job much, much harder when it came time to write this piece, because, despite the fact that I placed my tape recorder right in front of whichever interviewee we were talking to, there's an enormous amount of extraneous noise on the recording. To transcribe quotes accurately, particularly when the subject was soft spoken  which could describe at least three of the people we talked to that day (executive producer Avi Arad, co-star James Franco, and a funny-looking guy named Tobey)  or when one of our interviewees' voice's somehow perversely managed to be the exact tone/pitch/whatever to be at times almost perfectly obscured by all the background noise (Laua Ziskin)  required me to listen over and over and over (and over and over and over ((and over and over))) to the same section of tape. I hope you appreciate the effort.

The first people to come to the table I was at were

THE PRODUCERS!

Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin sat down together to talk with us. (At first they couldn't figure out where, indeed, they were supposed to sit. They appeared to consider sitting at the opposite ends of the elongated table, like Father and Mother at Dinner, but this would have entailed out-and-out shouting. So they sat in the middle, like the honored guests at a banquet. However, since reporters were thus sitting on either side of them and across from them, all the way down this long table, they were barraged from all directions with questions. Unfortunately, while they didn't appear to be bothered by this in the least, they had the interesting habit of immediately responding to any new question they heard  whether or not they had finished answering the one they were answering! And since a number of reporters at these things (including one especially egregious individual at my table) seem to feel that the only interesting questions are theirs, this happened a lot.

Avi was dressed all in black, which seemed not inappropriate for the founder and owner of New York and Las Vegas' Harley Davidson Cafes. The only hint of color was a cool lapel pin he wore  of the masked face of the Webswinger himself.

His day job is President and CEO of Marvel Studios, which means he's a hell of a busy guy these days, what with X-Men, Blade, Daredevil, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Prime, Namor, Silver Surfer, Captain America, . . . and Spider-Man.

Avi became a part of Marvel back in 1993 when the comic book house bought a part of Toy Biz, Avi's toy company. In the intervening years, Marvel became the object of a hostile takeover bid by infamous "Wall Street raider" Carl Icahn. At the end of a protracted fight which took a three-year detour through bankruptcy court, Avi and his Toy Biz partners ended up the victors of the ugly struggle, and bought Marvel in 1998, combining it with Toy Biz under its new name, Marvel Enterprises.

Laura, a grad of USC Film School, has a producing career which goes all the way back to 1978's classic fashion-world- serial-killer- ESP-lacking-a- titular-definite- article-Faye-Dunaway -starring-thriller, Eyes of Laura Mars  co-written by John ("I actually used to make good movies") Carpenter and directed by Irvin (The Empire Strikes Back) Kershner!

Since then she's been the force behind countless projects, both as an independent producer and as a studio exec. A couple of her films which you just might have heard of: she produced a little thing called Pretty Woman, and was the executive producer of As Good As It Gets.

A question was immediately addressed to Avi:

So why did it take so long for Spider-Man to swing onto the big screen? (Do you like my little visual image there?)

"It took a long time because it started first, it started before its time. These kind of movies [sic] couldn't be made really fifteen years ago . . . the kind of technology necessary to make these movies really didn't exist I think until Terminator 2 when we started seeing some of [sic] unique opportunities in CGI. And then, there was bad deals. The movie started with Cannon films  do I need to say any more? Golan Globus. My favorite countryman [Avi is Israeli; it's unclear which of the two partners in notorious 80's shlock-house Cannon he was referring to, Menahem Golan or Yoram Globus, or if he is under the impression that they were actually just one man]. That was in the eighties. '85, '86. I mean, he [Golan? Globus?] had the right instinct. He [Globus? Golan?] bought a bunch of stuff from Marvel; Marvel then had kind of a low opinion of themselves. It was TV shows, and TV in Japan . . . Really there was no focus in the company. I don't think there was anyone there at the time who understood the value of this library."

How did Jim Cameron come in?

"Jim Cameron came in when Carolco took over. And Carolco would have been a great home for it at the time, it was a very hot company, and basically two crazy guys who trusted Jim and could give him any amount of money to do it. That was the beginning of the '90's, '91, '92. And then Carolco had too much of a good time, and they went under . . . And the rights  basically the litigation rights, because the issue was, the movie, in order to generate money for Golan and 21^st Century, which was like another 'shell,' if you will. So he [Golan] sold Columbia domestic home video rights. Which then doesn't [sic] mean anything, today without it you couldn't make a movie. Uh, Paramount got TV broadcast rights. It was one of these, 'How do I get some money out of this deal?'

"When it ended up with Carolco it was the right place at the right time. And Jim [Cameron] got really immersed in it. And probably wasn't, I cannot think of another guy who could have come up with the focus CG on scenes [sic] and how to make a movie like that at the time. He was really one of the masters of that. And Carolco went under, and MGM came in, and they tried to do it. MGM at the time . . . "

Here a reporter [not me!] interrupted, 'helpfully' completing Avi's sentence, though not, it turned out, correctly  "they didn't have the money!"

Avi corrected him. "MGM had the money, but they didn't have many things. To the point . . . "

Here, Laura, sitting next to him, interrupted  "They didn't have the will."

Avi repeated what she said. "They didn't have the will . . . . Jim felt that this is, can be one of the greatest movies of all time, and he was looking to do it with a studio that understood the value, and had the marketing power to do the right thing . . . And then Marvel went into bankruptcy, and . . . it's a long story. But, anyhow, at the end of the day, what we set out to do with Sony [which became the corporate parent of Columbia Pictures in 1989] was the kind of company, the kind of enterprise that should have been a great home for it. And having some rights in it, but more important, that really wanted this property. And we used the pressure of bankruptcy  bankruptcy court has a way of changing the rules, thankfully, it's a disaster and a blessing."

Here Laura interjected again  "There's a fascinating book actually Avid let me read, that's coming out  , when is the book coming out?"

"Uh, April 30^th," he supplied.

"  called Comic Wars," she continued. "Which tells the whole history of this bankruptcy and how . . . . It's a great read."

"When you go in front of a judge in bankruptcy court, " Avi continued, "she reevaluates contracts . . . and for MGM to claim that they're going to able to do the movie . . . there's too many diverse rights. So, anyway, we went to Sony. And Sony had the things that it takes: the willingness, the enthusiasm to say, 'We will fight to get to get it together, and to negotiate with all the parties, and let's go make a movie!' And here we are."

But what about James Cameron?

"I think what happened with Jim," theorized Avi, "it was past Titanic, I think for Jim, Spider-Man was this girl that he always eyed all his life, like Peter Parker [had all his life "eyed" Mary Jane, or at least that's what I assume Avi meant; I rather doubt he was comparing Peter Parker to a girl], and he couldn't get to her, and it took so long, he just moved on. I think he was, he was pretty angry about the process in some ways, and I don't blame him."

"So Laura," I called out, "how did you come on board in that whole process?" [Spider-Man is "A Marvel Enterprises/Laura Ziskin Production."]

"I was very late to the party, I was the last  I had come  I had taken a sort of detour in my career in starting Fox 2000 at Fox. And, sort of stayed doing that longer than I wanted to, and when I finally extricated myself  Amy [Pascal, the chairwoman of Columbia Pictures] and I were buddies for a long time  she went to Turner when I went to Fox. She asked me to come over and make a producing deal at Columbia  my third tour of duty at that studio, I've been there a lot. And I was very hungry to get back into production in a big way. So I said, 'Just  what have you got? Just give me the biggest mother you got. And I got what I asked for. Yeah, I came in, Sam [Raimi, Spider-Man's director] had been hired, the script was in a kind of evolving, you know, sort of halfway there, on its way . . . . It wasn't something certainly that I originated, as I often do."

Laura was then asked about the Twin Towers teaser trailer footage.

"The marketing people had created the teaser trailer, and the poster [which had the World Trade Center in it]. The teaser, which was really tremendously well received, just as a taste of what was coming, the marketing people created that."

I interjected, surprised  "You mean, Sam didn't direct that?"

"No," she told me. "We supervised it. It was under our auspices. We supervised the CG and all that. Then, after 9-11, I felt extremely uncomfortable  I think we all did. Obviously, we pulled the teaser. That seemed inappropriate. We had liked it a lot over the summer, that we put it into a montage, where Peter gets his powers and he first becomes Spider-Man . . . . And we just  that aircraft, in juxtaposition with those towers, was for me just impossible to look at, so we took it out. We did make the decision . . . we did leave the towers in the skyline."

A reporter then piped up to say she had heard the finale of the movie had been forced to be changed because it had originally taken place at the WTC.

Laura immediately responded, "That was Men In Black [II]. Actually, we heard this. I don't know "

Avi chimed in, "Allegedly!"

The topic of The Fantastic Four was then raised. Some years ago, a very low budget Fantastic Four film had been made, which Avi now referred to:

"Well, I don't know if you know, but I actually bought The Fantastic Four [movie] for a couple of million dollars in cash and burned it. I know some geeks in some [pirated] copies  "

At this point it was Laura Ziskin's turn to be surprised and interject, "Did somebody make that??"

"Oh yeah," replied Avi, " Bernd Eichinger and Roger Corman. And it was a legal issue, it was before my time. And the first thing I did, I was in the airport, and a guy saw my T-shirt  I had an FF T-shirt [on]  and he said, 'Man, in January the movie's coming out!' And I said, 'No, it ain't!' And we bought the negative and destroyed it."

"Why??" somebody asked in shock.

"It's so bad," Avid answered. "This can be one of the greatest movies of all time, and it was made for probably $1.5 million. They sold it to me at $2 million. And it was just sort of one of these angry films, they lost their time for principal photography, they just went in and shot the movie quickly."

But they say, the same veritable-font-of-information reporter who had "heard" that Spider-Man's finale had been at the Twin Towers interjected, you can't make that movie for less than like $160 million.

"You will see this movie within two years," Avi replied. "It's at Fox, and Peyton Reed [Bring It On] is directing it."

Another "reporter" who apparently disdains actually doing research or paying any attention whatsoever to movie news then said to Avid, So you got The Incredible Hulk next, then what?

Avi reminded him that actually, before The Hulk there will be Daredevil.

At which point another "journalist," apparently going for extra credit, loudly called out, "Oh yes, Daredevil, with Ben Affleck."

Oooh, Ben Affleck, why him? yet another reporter asked.

Avi replied that, well, Ben is a huge fan of Daredevil  he actually writes (prefaces) for the comic book! "This is something that all his life he " (He didn't get to finish the thought, because he was interrupted by a reporter shocked to hear Affleck writes for Daredevil.)

To that he responded, "Ben is a very good writer. He wants to write the books too [and not just the prefaces]. All his life he wanted to be this guy [Daredevil], and he really prepared for it."

But then the previous reporter, undeterred, was back to asking his timeline question. Okay, fine, so Daredevil, then The Hulk, then what?

Avi patiently replied, "Then we have X-Men 2."

Tired of listening to Avi dole out "information" readily available in about three seconds on IMDB, I jumped in with a question for both him and Laura: "Just this past week it was announced in the press that all the principals involved in Spider-Man have signed to do the sequel. But wouldn't that have been done way back when they first signed their contracts for the first one?"

Laura nodded at me. "Yes, in fact it was."

And Avi added, "It was."

"So then why the announcement only now?" I asked.

"We had just hired writers," Laura told me. "And of course, these [the clauses in the original contracts] were options. So the commitment to in fact go forward was news."

"So," I asked, "David Koepp [the writer of this Spider-Man, and also of the recent Panic Room] is not going to be the writer of the sequel?"

"He's not," Laura confirmed.

I was about to ask why, but as is typical at these things, another reporter with his own agenda jumped in with a different question.

Much later on I managed to finally put the question to Laura, though.

"He didn't want to do it. I think he felt he'd done  he really worked on this for many years. When I came on the movie he had done nine drafts, with, you know, with different kinds of stories, different villains, different versions . . . And I think he wants to be directing himself and focus on his directing career.

A little bit later I asked something else I had been wondering about, which was whether Stan Lee had had any objections to the change from Peter Parker using mechanical web-shooters to it being an organic power.

Avi said, "Initially, eight years ago, he cared, and ate lunches with Jim [Cameron, whose idea the change had been, along with making the spider that bites PP be a genetically modified spider instead of the comic book's radioactive one] . . . But I tell you, Jim was so passionate, and so convincing about it . . . .

And [if Peter actually was able, in today's story, on his own to invent 'webs',] he would have owned 3M by now!"

A wry comment which earned everybody's laughter.

Finally, I asked Avi if the villain in the sequel will be Dr. Octopus. He looked at me and said, in a quiet, deadpan way,

"Maybe . . ."

[More interviews to come! -- Ed.]