Just as not every bottle of wine gets better with age, not every celebrity mellows with time.

HARRISON FORD

Two prime examples are Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford, a pair of the most cantankerous critters in Hollywood.

I first interviewed Jones, 57, in 1989 for the Gene Hackman thriller The Package. Now Hackman, 73, isn't the most gregarious celebrity on the planet, but he is polite and congenial. He smiles, laughs and occasionally even jokes.

Compared with Jones, Hackman is a pussycat. During his press conference for The Package, Jones berated a roomful of journalists for daring to ask about his private life, leaving us mystified.

He was a relative unknown at the time and we knew our readers would be interested in how he had gone from being a Texas rancher's son to a Harvard graduate and much-sought-after actor.

When he left the room, he either threw the podium at us or knocked it over, depending on how kind or how critical you want to be.

Tommy Lee has continued to be as tough on furniture as he has on journalists.

When he was doing interviews for JFK two years later, he stomped out of the interview room, but not before knocking over the table at which he was seated with 10 journalists.

The official word was that he considered some of the questions too trivial for such a weighty subject and his leg had a cramp, which explained why the table unended during his exit.

Then came the infamous Volcano junket in 1997.

My group of journalists had concluded that Jones is a bully and the only way to deal with a bully is to bark back.

When we spoke with director Mick Jackson we questioned him about Jones' reputation of being a handful on a set.

Jackson smiled and said: "Let's just say there were days when I thought we should alter the poster to read Tommy Lee Jones is the Volcano." He laughed. We laughed. Foolishly, we thought Jones would see the humour in the remark.

We couldn't have been more wrong.

He was livid, insisting that he didn't have a negative reputation and we could ask any of his co-stars.

It was at that point one of our team pulled out an interview in which director Joel Schumacher recalled that Jones was "unconscionably cruel to Jim Carrey on the set of Batman Forever."

Then I put my two cents in.

Jones was in the midst of his divorce from second wife Kimberlea Jones.

I pointed out that the press kit said he'd drawn on his own life experiences to play a man going through an uncomfortable divorce.

That was it.

He grabbed my press kit away from me, found the passage and warned us not to pursue this line of questioning.

When he left our room, he slammed the door enough that it squeaked open, allowing us to hear him assure the publicists this was the last time he'd ever do print roundtables.

He stuck to his guns for five years until it was written into his contract that he had to do print interviews for Men in Black II.

LESS THAN AMUSED

As long as I can remember, Ford, 61, has held the press in contempt and made his feelings clear.

He answers in a monotone and whispers to ensure that he has complete control of the session.

Without fail, at least one of his co-stars for each new film would recall how amusing Ford is.

I asked him why we never got to see that side.

His answer through gritted teeth was that "they're not paying me enough to be funny for you people."

We tried to get Ford to talk about his years as a struggling actor and his marriage to screenwriter Melissa Mathison to no avail.

His response was always that, since he kept his personal life private, it was off-bounds to us.

We couldn't have been happier when his affair with Calista Flockhart became fodder for the supermarket tabloids.

It was wonderful watching Ford squirm for a change as we pointed out his personal life was hardly private any longer.

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BOWLING WITH CAMERON

Being a film writer and going on press junkets is not all work.

We do occasionally get to play.

We went white-water rafting with Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon during the junket for their 1994 thriller The River Wild and we went bowling with Randy Quaid and Woody Harrelson to get in the swing of things for their 1996 comedy Kingpin.

We also went bowling with Cameron Diaz and Matt Dillon at the luxurios Greenbriar Resort in West Virginia when they were promoting the comedy There's Something About Mary.

Diaz and Dillon were dating at the time and the lovebirds spent a couple of hours bowling against teams of journalists in an impromptu league.

Diaz was a bundle of tireless energy providing cheers for her own efforts.

Poor Dillon, on the other hand, could barely function. He'd pulled a tendon in his foot running in Paris a couple of months earlier and then threw out his back and neck trying to compensate for the foot injury.

Diaz finally retired Dillon to a bench and took on the rest of us on her own.

Dillon looked exhausted just watching her as we bowled well into the wee hours of the morning. He was bushed at the interviews the next day, but she still had more energy and enthusiasm than many celebrities have normally.

Long before she reserved her dance card exclusively for her current boytoy Ashton Kutcher, I got to cut the rug with Demi Moore. It was during the junket for her 1985 relationship comedy About Last Night in San Antonio.

Moore and her co-stars Rob Lowe, Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins joined us at a western saloon to dance and drink the night away. Moore was so much fun and so friendly. I foolishly thought this was the way it was always going to be. These days we're lucky if Demi can pry herself away from Kutcher's arm long enough to do a press conference.

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