James L. Brooks had his first encounter with showbiz royalty as a student journalist at Weehawken High School in New Jersey in the 1950s, when he managed to wrangle a one-on-one interview with legendary jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong.

“I asked him a question that nobody had asked him up to that time. I said, ‘How do you take care of your lips?’” recalls Brooks, who conducted the interview at Armstrong’s house in Queens. “And the answer was a 45-minute show where he’s taking out more creams and things, because he really had an elaborate routine for taking care of his lips.”

And what was his reward for this precocious celebrity get?

“I was loathed,” says Brooks. “The fact that I was an unpopular kid whose picture was on the front page of the school paper [with a celebrity] …

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