I arrive at my round table room fifteen minutes early to find that every seat at the table has already been taken, and that a second row of chairs have been dragged into the hotel suite, for a second tier of interviewers now hugging the walls. I haul another chair into the room and find a position off to the side, then settle into to listen to my fellow junketeers - faces I recognize from previous months of this sort of thing - gossip and complain. At one point, one of Warner's press girls comes in and summons the woman sitting directly to the right of where our subject will be sitting to come with her and move to another room.

As soon as she leaves the rest of the room explodes in relief - it seems that she's foreign press, not domestic, and notably unloved by the other junket veterans, who tell each other how much they were dreading her apparently aggressive questioning style and preoccupation with the more gossipy, personal questions that the European press lives on. One of the veterans - a white-haired older gentleman I see at most of these things - admits that he was the one who alerted the Warner press girls to her presence in the room and got her moved, for which he receives a round of congratulation. The junket press is an organism, timidly but functionally self-policing, which deals with threats and irregularities like an immune system, isolating infection in the interests of self-preservation.

Or at least that's how I see it. I wonder how long I'll be able to cultivate - at least for myself - a provisional outsider status on the junket circuit. I'm probably already fooling myself.

The afternoon goes smoothly, after the almost ritual 15-minute delay in starting. We get Dark Knight's producers first, then director Christopher Nolan, then the stars. Gary Oldman is funny, adopting a perhaps-calculated blokey persona peculiar to some English actors to a subtly distancing effect, and uses his familiarity with some of the veterans to buy himself some happily-proferred goodwill, just a little gesture of recognition flattering them into docile interrogators - not that an L.A. press junket is HUAC, exactly. Christian Bale is intense, his eyes hooded and almost expressionless, and he's clearly thought his way through his interpretation of his characters with a thoroughness that would do a critic proud. He's a real oddity in Hollywood today - someone known entirely for his work, with a personal life about which not a single detail comes readily to mind.

I've gotten used to discovering, with few exceptions, that too many female actresses are much prettier onscreen than in real life. The pounds - 10-20 depending on which truism is being invoked - that the camera really does add (it looks more like 30 to me, going by my handful of TV appearances) suggest flattering curves on actresses who look dangerously underweight in real life. I recall being surprised at how attractive Diane Lane was in person during a junket for Untraceable last year - she's done her level best to look haggard in several recent roles - and I have the same reaction to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has the sole female role of any real size in Dark Knight.

Onscreen, Gyllenhaal is often cast as the oddball - the eccentric girl, the smart and randy weird chick in a larger group of women (see Mona Lisa Smile.) At the junket, her appeal is as much personality as looks - she comes off as amused, engaged and confident, and the assembled press fall into the approved rapt attitude. She ends her stint in our room - her handlers practically tugging at her shirt - telling us that the Hollywood indie film is dead, and that there is no way she could make the films that made her name just a few years in today's harsh entertainment economy. An interesting statement to make at an event for a movie whose budget - never mind potential earnings - could probably fund a whole city's elementary school budget for a year.

Almost everyone makes a point of talking about the late Heath Ledger, whose absence is noted continually all afternoon, in nothing but the most glowing of language; many even conspicuously use the present tense when referring to him. All of them make a point of insisting that he didn't seem in any say depressed or emotionally fragile while making the film - there are rumours that Ledger's portrayal of the Joker absorbed him to an unhealthy degree. His death, they all insinuate, was misadventure - an accident, not a suicide. This is clearly a message we're supposed to take away from this afternoon.