I’ve been wanting to get this up since Thursday night, when the Writers Guild held its annual star-studded Beyond Words panel, but too many events piled up. The WGA’s awards-season closer turned out to be a bizarre laugh-riot that managed to skirt almost completely any discussion of the craft of writing.

In attendance were James Cameron (”Avatar”), Jon Lucas & Scott Moore (”The Hangover”), Scott Neustadter (”(500) Days of Summer”), Mark Boal (”The Hurt Locker”), Alex Kurtzman (”Star Trek”), Geoffrey Fletcher (”Precious”), Scott Cooper (”Crazy Heart”) and Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner (”Up in the Air”). Missing were Nora Ephron (”Julie & Julia”), Roberto Orci (”Star Trek”), Michael H. Weber (”(500) Days of Summer”) and Joel and Ethan Coen (”A Serious Man”).

Judd Apatow, who wasted no time in whipping out a dick joke, moderated the panel.

I’d thought the crowd would be packed with guild members, but the event was open to the public and they, uh, showed up with the spirited creepiness of a cult-TV show convention. Just the same, the panel, despite its awards-season weariness (both Cameron and Reitman launched into complaints about doing panels just like this one), kept everybody laughing.

So, here, then, are the Top 25 moments of the night, which are heavy on Cameron because, well, his fans have a lot of questions (he was later physically mobbed on the sidewalk as he tried to leave).

1. WGA secretary-treasurer David N. Weiss (”Shrek 2″) introduced the evening by referencing Cameron’s stellar boxoffice achievement with “Avatar”: ”How about that — $2.4 billion worldwide! And if you add up all the other films represented here tonight, it’s $2.4 billion worldwide!”
2. Apatow described “Funny People,” which wasn’t nominated for a WGA award, as the year’s “11th-best screenplay.”
3. Neustadter, answering a question about the fallout from his loosely basing the “(500) Days” script on an old girlfriend: “When the movie came out, she de-friended me on Facebook.”
4. Boal mentioned that he and director Kathryn Bigelow had shown a version of “Hurt Locker” to Cameron for his input. Cameron: “I only had one note: Cut negative. You’re fucking done.”
5. Apatow asked Kurtzman if taking on the “Star Trek” mantle was nerve-wracking because he had to worry that “nerds will murder you.”
6. Turner ended one of his answers by saying that “it’s healthy for a writer to feel alienated, so I encourage it.” Apatow to crowd: “Let’s give Sheldon a standing ovation so he feels better about himself.” Everyone stood and clapped.
7. Apatow asks a question about comedy to Lucas, who self-deprecatingly comments that it’s hard to answer while “sitting next to the ‘Precious’ guy.” Fletcher: “My movie’s funny!” Apatow: “Yeah, I laughed my ass off in ‘Precious.’”
8. When Apatow directs a question to Cameron, Cameron says, “I just want to thank you for letting me be on your show.”
9. After asking Cameron if he ever gets scared at night from the pressure, Apatow asks the “Avatar” writer-director how stoned he was when he came up with all the flora and fauna of Pandora. Cameron: “You don’t have to be stoned to write this stuff. It helps if you have been stoned.”
10. Question from an audience member to Boal: “What was it like working with Kathryn Bigelow?” Cameron: “Are you asking me or him?”
11. Asked about the toughest scene to cut from the movie, Cooper mentioned a scene he had been forced to cut, where Bad Blake goes to visit his son in Texas, because he did not have final cut on “Crazy Heart.” Cameron: “That won’t happen next time.”
12. Asked the same question, Cameron described a scene where Laz Alonso as Tsu’tey talks to Sam Worthington as he’s dying and remembers feeling that it was “the fucking heart of the movie.” After determining that it messed with the pacing, though, he cut it out two weeks before locking the print.
13. When Cameron was discussing how he deals with notes, Boal interjected: “Your notes come from Rupert Murdoch!”
14. Cameron on the involvement of marketing executives at the studio: “I like them to be sweating. I want them so freakin’ pregnant they’re thinking a year ahead of time how to sell it because their jobs are on the line.”
15. Cameron on how “terrified” the studio was of the “spiritual,” “hippie,” “tree-hugging” material in his script: “I like all that ‘Ferngully’ stuff!”
16. Cameron on having made his movie at, of all places, Fox: “I can’t wrap my head around it. Rupert funded the movie that attacks all his core values.”
17. Cameron on how much criticism he expected about some of the thematic material: “I think Rupert told Fox News to stay out of it.”
18. Discussing the lessons of “Avatar,” Cameron says that the industry will be drawing the wrong conclusion if it’s: “It must be the 3D.”
19. Asked by an audience member about being compared to D.W. Griffith, Cameron says: “Because of the racism?”
20. Lucas on the origins of “The Hangover”: “It’s funny. When we sat down to write it, we were just thinking: ‘Awards season.’”
21. Asked to compare working with J.J. Abrams and Michael Bay, Kurtzman gives a long, serious answer in which he describes Bay’s method this way: “Bay has a tape of the film in his head, he records that and then he puts those images on screen.”
22. A young woman from the audience begins by telling Cameron how into the movie she was, then veers into a criticism about the one thing that pulled her out of it: the knife Stephen Lang pulls out at the end when he’s in the battle suit. Cameron quips, “Think of how much better it would have done…” as Apatow cuts in with: “It’s the most popular movie in the history of Earth!”
23. After the geek quotient starts to take over the mike, Cameron mutters, “How did this become a town hall meeting?”
24. An audience member asks Lucas and Moore about coming up with a new plot for the “Hangover” sequel. Lucas informs him that they aren’t actually writing the sequel.
25. Reitman comments on a piece of advice he got from Apatow years ago when he was having trouble moving forward on the “Up in the Air” script. Apatow apparently said: “Just write the ending. Because, theoretically, you’re done.”