Most of us have an opinion about Robert Blake’s culpability in his ex-wife’s death, but trial prosecutors “couldn’t put the gun in his hand” (in the words of a Blake trial juror) and that’s the name of that tune. For a reason that had nothing to do with the case, a part of me that felt glad when I read of his acquittal yesterday. I used to tool around on a scooter when I first came to L.A. in ’83, and one day it was stolen. I reported the loss to the cops right away, and a few hours later an officer called to say it had been found in Studio City. I was told where to go to pick it up (i.e., a location on the concrete L.A. river bed near Magnolia), and when I got there I saw two uniformed cops approaching from a couple hundreds yards away with a much shorter civilian walking between them. The civilian was Blake — he was the one who had spotted the abandoned scooter and made the call.

Seven and a half years…whoa…after the opening of Titanic in late ’97, writer-director James Cameron has finally gotten down to assembling material for a special-edition DVD. Actually, two Titanic packages will hit the market next October — a two-disc special edition and a four-disc collector√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥s edition. Among the bonuses with be all those deleted scenes fans have been talking about for years. (Roughly an hour’s worth, including the longer build-up to Kate Winslet’s attempted suicide and the Leo “payback” scene when he wallops David Warner.) The “arduous” process of making Titanic was so hard on Cameron’s psyche, he says in the press release, that “until recently, I wasn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥t really ready to dive back into it all.” In fact, Cameron hasn’t been ready to dive into directing a movie since. He’s supposed to be working on a 3D adaptation of a Japanese graphic novel called “Battle Angel”…but he’s been so slow or reluctant to pull the trigger on various other “maybe” projects, I’ll believe the “Battle Angel” stories when I hear the film has begun principal photography.