Steven Spielberg Mulls Canceling The Internet To Preserve An Unspoiled Moviegoing Experience

It's been a rough week for you, the Internet-Enabled Movie Fan with Something to Say. Just a day after noted haimishe Luddite Barry Sonnenfeld's semi-hysterical vision of a Facebook-infiltrated culture in which Big Brother will monitor our every Twittered activity, comes a similarly technophobic conversation with the creative duo behind the Indiana Jones series (and possessors of 68.2% of all the world's wealth), Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Playing a sort of good cop/bad cop routine, Spielberg bemoans the eroding of the moviegoing experience by keyboard-tapping chatterboxes, while Lucas tempers all the grumpy-old-man talk by pointing out that the internet is also capable of producing some good things (e.g. an audience who actually cares what Indy has been up to after his 19-year sabbatical). We quietly slip in mid-conversation:

STEVEN SPIELBERG: It really is important to be able to point out that the Internet is still filled with more speculation than facts. The Internet isn't really about facts. It's about people's wishful thinking, based on a scintilla of evidence that allows their imaginations to springboard. And that's fine.
GEORGE LUCAS: Y'know, Steven will say, ''Oh, everything's out on the Internet [in terms of Crystal Skull details] — what this is and what that is.'' And to that I say, ''Steven, it doesn't make any difference!'' Look — Jaws was a novel before it was a movie, and anybody could see how it ended. Didn't matter. SPIELBERG: But there's lots and lots of people who don't want to find out what happens. They want that to happen on the 22nd of May. They want to find out in a dark theater. They don't wanna find out by reading a blog.... A movie is experiential. A movie happens in a way that has always been cathartic, the personal, human catharsis of an audience in holy communion with an experience up on the screen. That's why I'm in the middle of this magic, and I always will be.

While this may be the first official comment made by Spielberg on his utter contempt for Spoilers and the Spoiling Poison They Spread, his passionate and conservative views on the topic should come as little surprise to anyone who followed the story of Tyler Nelson—aka the "dancing Russian soldier" extra who spilled precious Crystal Skull plot secrets to his home town newspaper, and was subsequently disappeared in the dead of night, lest his blabbermouth ways further pose a threat to the experiential catharsis of witnessing Greaser LaBeouf for the first time.

[Photo: AP/]