My first in-person celebrity, don't-muck-it-up interview in this gig was Roger Corman, at the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival in '93. I don't need to explain how geeked or revved or whatever the kids say these days that meeting made me.

Corman is 83 and a respected Hollywood icon now, at least more than he was in 1962, coming off a string of drive-in hits with titles like Beast from Haunted Cave and Attack of the Giant Leeches.

That's when he'd buy the rights to a Soviet sci-fi flick -- at the height of the Cold War -- then slash its running time in half to 77 minutes (and later 62, for the lower half of the double feature), adding badly dubbed dialogue written by young Francis Ford Coppola and monsters resembling genitalia.

Do I have your attention now?

Check it out.

(Photo: Getty Images)