James Cameron Challenges 'F*cking A**hole' Glenn Beck to Debate

The King of the World took on Fox News's sniveling Boy Prince yesterday during a press junket promoting the enviro-conscious DVD/Blu-ray release of Avatar. "Glenn Beck is a f*cking a**hole," James Cameron cheerily told gathered journalists. "I've met him. He called me the anti-Christ and not about Avatar. He hadn't even seen Avatar yet. I don't know if he has seen it." Jim, Jim, Jim -- don't ever change. The filmmaker wasn't done there, either.

Cameron, apparently still aggrieved by Beck's slight of his heretical 2007 documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus, did backtrack a tad on the anatomical half of that epithet. But he made up for it by setting a stage for an ideological circus that would make a Tea Party look like a funeral:

"He's dangerous because his ideas are poisonous. [...] I couldn't believe when he was on CNN. I thought, what happened to CNN? Who is this guy? Who is this madman? And then of course he wound up on Fox News, which is where he belongs, I guess."

Asked by THR if he felt the right wing's attacks against him were continuing, Cameron replied: "They're not attacks. They're just people ranting away, lost in their little bubbles of reality, steeped in their own hatred, their own fear and hatred. That's where it all comes from. Let's just call it out. Let's have a public discussion. That's what movies are supposed to do, you know, you can have a mindless entertainment film that doesn't affect anybody. I wasn't interested in that."

The Avatar director was equally unsparing in his comments about those who don't accept global warming as fact. "That's right," Cameron said. "I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads."

Turning more serious, he added: "Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their ass I'm not sure they could hear me."

Beck has yet to respond as far as I can tell, but heaven knows he will, and furthermore, what a synergistic grand slam for Fox! The only thing that would keep Beck from accepting Cameron on his show would be the moral aversion to selling more of the guy's DVD's, which is precisely why Rupert Murdoch might personally escort the filmmaker into the studio and sit him down in front of the host at gunpoint. Canny, gentlemen -- very canny.

Anyway, this will happen. No doubt the only thing left to decide is whether to simulcast it in nationwide in IMAX 3D. Don't tell me you wouldn't buy a ticket; it'd be even better than Avatar.

· James Cameron trashes Glenn Beck [THR]