Continued coverage of George Clooney’s visit to Pelham last night. First, better photos of the event, courtesy Jay Ackerman and the Picture House:

More photos, quotes from Clooney, and my thoughts on the event after the break. Many thanks to the Picture House for inviting me to the Q&A, which was a fundraiser for their planned expansion project.

First, let me just say that, like the editors of Esquire, I think I’m developing a man crush on Clooney. I’m not ashamed to say that. How, after hearing him last night, you could not feel the same way?

The evening began with a screening of “Leatherheads,” which, you might have heard, wasn’t exactly one of Clooney’s biggest box-office successes. What was surprising was just how candid Clooney was about the movie’s shortcomings when he took the stage.

After his big entrance, host Peter Travers asked the audience, “Did you enjoy the movie?” The audience respectfully applauded and cheered. To which Clooney deadpanned, “So the good news is that between you and six other people, well, that’s our entire audience.”

Travers went on to point out that all of Clooney’s directorial efforts—”Good Night and Good Luck,” “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” and “Leatherheads”—have failed to yield the box office receipts that “Iron Man” got in its first five minutes. Ever the affable interviewee, George admitted to “psychosis” and “stupidity” and the need to do “Oceans 47″ to help ensure his next project (”They’re changing my colosomy bag. ‘Brad, get over here. Roll over here.’”).

The biggest irony about “Leatherheads,” Travers pointed out, is that Clooney’s sport of choice in real life is baseball. In fact, he was so good that he actually once tried out for the Cincinatti Reds. “I only lacked … skill,” said Clooney. “I had the hat wearing and uniform part down. … I thought I need something that doesn’t take any skill, so I thought about acting.”

Next, Travers fired out a quote from Roseanne Barr—a blurb she wrote for the new Time magazine “100 Most Influential People in the World” story—which goes as follows: “He can drink too much and still, while standing in a bar parking lot at 3 a.m., discuss the world with such passion and good sense that you actually stop imagining him nude and really listen.”

“Don’t you want Roseanne writing your obit?” said Clooney. “The first time I met her she said, [in Roseanne voice] ‘George, you’re really good looking. Why don’t you take me out back, behind the stage, and make me stink.’”

Thus began the serious part of the interview.

As I said, Clooney was spectacularly candid about “Leatherheads.” “Coming here tonight was an interesting thing for me,” he said, “because this movie bombed. And when I say it bombed, it really bombed. So people ask, ‘how does that make you feel?’ It stings. It’s not like you just showed up. This is a couple years and a lot of work and seven or eight months of a tremendous amount of work. You get knocked back a little bit.” He went on to say—forgive the sports aphorism—that it isn’t how many times you get knocked down, but how you get back up that’s important. “Winning cycles are what we like nowadays. … People started keeping tabs on box office [around 20 years ago]. Now it’s sort of a contest, which I think is kind of funny. Most of the films you’ll see at the Academy Awards didn’t make much money.”

Travers then brought up the infamous Time cover story, “The Last Movie Star,” remarking, “that’s worse, right, being the last of something.” “Well,” replied Clooney, “It’s better than being the last reality TV star. You know, I couldn’t figure that title out. They said that it came out on the day of the Oscars. So I went to the Oscars, and the thing had just come out, and Jack Nicholson sat down and said [in Jack rasp], ‘oh, so you’re the last movie star?’ Uh, sorry, I didn’t write the thing. I was trying to figure out what he was saying. Then I figured out that what he was saying was that movie stars used to play a version of themselves,” he continued, trailing off. “So really, what I’m saying is that, what they meant as a nice compliment—it was really just a slap in the face.”

Clooney talked about how most of his best films (”O Brother, Where Art Thou,” “Out of Sight”) have bombed at the box office. Which of course bridged nicely into a conversation about what Travers termed “your Coen brothers trilogy”—which includes the forthcoming “Burn After Reading” (which Clooney filmed, in part, in New Rochelle last fall). Like his other Coen bros. roles, Clooney said, “He’s no mental giant. I read the script and thought, this guy’s terrible, he’s an idiot. He’s winey all the time. I called them up and said, ‘I don’t even know how to play this guy.’ And they said, ‘We wrote him for you, man!’”

And his prediction for how “Burn” will do at the box office? Clooney explained their track record: “They do ‘Fargo,’ then we did ‘O Brother’ (people like it now, but we got burned at the time). They did ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There,” then we did ‘Intolerable.’ Now we’ve got the film following ‘No Country,’ which won all the Oscars.” Well, you get the picture. Still, whether Clooney was lowering the bar intentionally or truly thinks his Coen flicks are jinxed, he was eager to point out that if it’s going down in flames, there are plenty of other A-list actors (Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, etc.) going down with him. “It will open September 12,” Travers plugged. “And close September 13,” Clooney added. “That’s what makes me the last movie star!”

Clooney is nothing if not self-deprecating and funny, and the conversation was littered with offhand jokes about his acting resume—1988’s “Return of the Killer Tomatoes,” “Batman” (”The nipples on the front—for feeding little bats”) and “The Facts of Life” (”that’s right, I was the next door neighbor of Tutti”). It’s hard not to like a guy who, when asked if he wears boxers or briefs, admits to going “commando” when shooting on location.

There were at least a dozen other fascinating, hilarious Clooney stories from the evening, including his trips to Darfur, his proudest career moment (hint: it’s not squeezing corns into pumps at women’s shoe stores), and the liberal movie-star conspiracy cabal. That’s last one: not a joke. There really is a lefty cabal! Frankly, it’s too much good stuff to fit into one post. So for the next week or so, I’ll continue sharing about a Clooney anecdote a day.

And in the meantime, if you haven’t already seen my liveblog of the evening, be sure to check it out. This may be the first and last time I ever attempt bloggging via iPhone. An interesting experiment, though one that I suspect Clooney himself would find no less disturbing than Gawker Stalker.