The host of AMC's Cinemania talks about the show, his celebrity status, the future of Tivo and his secret life as an adult film star.

Q: You were on AMC's last movie show, The Movie Club. Did the Cinemania opportunity come out of that experience?

A: It actually had absolutely nothing to do with that. In fact, to be honest with you, I'm not sure if AMC even remembers I was on that show. I had hosted shows in the past, and I told my peeps, my representatives, that if I'm going to host anything in the future it has to be something that I'm enthusiastic about -- not just Celebrity Fit Cook-Off. But they said there was a movie show in development at AMC, and I am a movie buff, so I said definitely.

Q: Cinemania is all about knowing the minutiae of movies. Are you a big trivia buff?

A: Heck yeah. I kick ass. And I try to work that in a little bit. But the thing I have to remember is, I'm talking with the people who made the movie. They already know the answers to these, so they're not really impressed. So when I go, "It must have been really interesting working with the second AD Jack Salinger who also was the special effects coordinator on a little movie that came out in 1982," they're like, "Yeah, Jack's cool, he's a real nice guy." And I'm like, "Aren't you impressed that I knew that?" "No not really." They just figure some producer told me, I just want to raise my hand and go, "NO! NO! I really do love your movie! I really am a dork!"

Had enough of Obama vs. Clinton? Watch films do battle instead. At Movie Smackdown, two films go toe-to-toe to decide whether the defending champion, a classic, still has what it takes, or if a new release is the one to watch.

"The idea has always been simple," says site creator Bryce Zabel. "Two films, one review, no holds barred." As the Smackdown referee-in-chief, he makes sure every match offers readers more fun, more value, and more suspense than the traditional thumbs up or thumbs down critique. "Most reviews let you know whether the reviewer likes a film in the first paragraph," he says. "In our reviews, there is actual suspense and doubt about which film will win, often going all the way through to the end."

Man racing to outsmart the machine -- with nothing less than the fate of the world at stake -- is a classic movie storyline. In WarGames, Matthew Broderick convinces the W.O.P.R. computer that thermonuclear war is futile; matinee idol Keir Dullea outsmarts the wily HAL 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey by sneaking into the Logic Memory Center; and Linda Hamilton is always one step ahead of Skynet in The Terminator trilogy. Movie computers, for all their power, speed and single-mindedness, still can't hold a candle to real live people when it comes to creative problem-solving. And it's not just on screen.

Writer-director Oliver Stone came to Wall Street directly after winning an Oscar for Platoon. "I ran into a lot of Vietnam veterans on The Street, and they all told me that it's an extension of combat," said Stone. "There is a certain high to closing a deal, to taking the enemy to a raid, to a merger and acquisition. The language is brutal, violent. Everything is there but the machine gun... So Wall Street is a chance for me to wean myself away from the blood cycle and go do a more domestic, possibly more sophisticated, form of combat film."

"Taking over a company is a lot like a military action," Stone insisted. "In those raids, they stay up for weeks on end on an adrenaline high, and a lot of their terminology is war terminology -- 'We're in the kill zone here,' 'I'm going to rip his throat out.' I'm not talking about refined Morgan Stanley bankers, I'm talking about buccaneers."

Wall Street star Charlie Sheen also saw the correlation between high finance and military combat when he spent six weeks on the trading floors of Wall Street researching his role. "A lot of these guys on Wall Street consider themselves to be warriors. They say, 'I'm going off to war today,' and they're not kidding," Sheen said.

Writer-director Oliver Stone is the son of Louis Stone, a well-known stockbroker who worked on Wall Street for 50 years. "The main motivation to make Wall Street was my father," Stone revealed. "He took me to the movies, and he would bemoan the lack of a good business movie... He always said there were no good business movies, because the businessman was always the villain."

"My dad was a very strong believer in Republican principles," said Stone. "He hated Roosevelt all his life. He really raised me with the hatred of Communists, so I very much saw the Vietnam War in that context, that it was us against the Commies."

"My father believed that America's business brought peace to the world and built industry through science and research, and that capital is needed for that. But this idea seems to have been perverted to a large degree. The Wall Street that my father worked in, the one I grew up around, is wholly different from that of today. There were no computers, they didn't trade in such volume, and there were no fixed commissions."

"I would never have cut the mustard on Wall Street," admitted the director. "I did poorly in economics - I got a C, and my mathematics were suspect. I lost on every stock I ever invested in... I began to resent money as the criterion by which to judge all things, and there grew to be a raging battle between my father and me about it. I found ways to throw away everything I had, which pissed my father off. 'Going into movies is crazy,' he would say. 'You aren't going to make a dime.'"

The surest sign that Mother deserves a holiday all to herself is that you never remember it until the very last minute (if at all!), but she still loves you all the same. This year John Wayne wants you to get your rear in gear and put that card in the mail, hence The Sons of Katie Elder, in which a woman's funeral reunites her scattered brood and sets all manner of Old West mayhem into motion.

Wayne's own uneasy relationship with his mother must have been an inspiration to him in the role of John Elder; the biography John Wayne: American chronicles his desperate attempts to win her approval -- which she withheld even after he became the star of the century.

"Unlike his father," the book states, "Wayne fulfilled his mother's dreams of success, and she never forgave him for it... In Molly's eyes, even his spectacular success was only a prelude to ultimate failure. Until it came-- as she was certain it would, she would continue to remind [Wayne] that he was nothing special."