Message control is a passion if not a fetish for Lusasfilm Ltd. - and I speak from professional experience. Back when I was Editor-in-Chief of Boxoffice, Lucasfilm once took the unprecedented step of exercising their alleged right to recall any file photos of George Lucas they had provided to us, based on the boilerplate “Property of/Used by Permission” language each image contained. They weren’t even pissed off - at least as far as I know. They just told me George liked to control the use of his image, and that we were free to contact them for a picture if we wrote anything about him in the future. We opted to use wildly out-dated, pre-Lucasfilm shots from the set of “American Graffiti” as an inside joke every time we mentioned the man instead.

That kind of behavior seems quaint in the web era, where “information wants to be free” as they say. So it was almost inevitable that bad internet buzz would eventually start circulating about the new Lucas/Spielberg “Indiana Jones” movie, and almost as certain that the place it would first emanate from would be Harry Knowles’ aintitcoolnews.com website - the Drudge Report for people who collect extremely expensive action figures. Sample line: “those of you that feel that the new Star Wars Movies robbed your childhood, expect some molestations from Uncles' George and Steven.” Ouch! But not unexpected. At some level, even Lucas and Spielberg had to be anticipating this.

What’s interesting though, especially for Boxoffice readers, is that “ShogunMaster,” the anonymous source of the widely discussed aintitcoolnews.com “review” of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is an EXHIBITOR, according to the New York Times, which tracked the man down.

Exhibition was always going to be the soft white underbelly of Lucasfilm’s defense against pre-release word-of-mouth, because of archaic state laws against the “blind-bidding” practices of the old Hollywood studios. In the bad old days, exhibitors were frequently forced to bid on movies they hadn’t seen, which meant a turkey with a couple of stars in it could ignite a bidding war, no matter how crummy the movie turned out to be. About twenty statehouses legislated mandatory industry screenings for bookers to ensure this wouldn’t occur, and those laws are still on the books.

As the Times’ article points out, such laws no longer serve as clear a purpose. The major exhibition circuits are countrywide entities on an industrial scale that surpasses the Hollywood studio of the “mogul” era (very roughly, the period from 1920 to 1950), and the movies they book come not from territorial auctions but via direct negotiations with distributors. Independents and smaller circuits negotiate directly too, albeit with less leverage.

Still, state-legislated exhibitor screenings are already being held. And now an exhibitor - and maybe a prominent one - is crying “Wolf!” on the most anticipated sequel of the summer.

There are a few things that seem a little queasy (if typical of the “new media” era) in all of this. By writing his opinion anonymously, “ShogunMaster’s” possibly mixed motives for his criticisms are impossible to determine. The Times mentions in passing that “theater executives may have an incentive to play down a movie’s prospects after such a screening, to get better terms,” although it has to be said that slagging a picture that could fuel a record summer if it ignites moviegoing the way its predecessors did seems like a hell of a way to conduct a theater business.

But there’s also a small bit of poetic justice at work here too. In the opinion vacuum Spielberg and Lucas have so meticulously authored, measurable damage will surely result, simply because writers with actual names, jobs and outlets haven’t had a crack at seeing the picture yet.

There’s a phrase for it that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages, source of the artifact unearthed by Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

It’s called being “hoisted by your own petard.”

Of course there's another possibility, which is that Indiana Jones and the Kingdon of the Crystal Skull is okay without being great (like every Indiana Jones movie but the first one, come to think of it), and that those clever folks at Lucasfilm and in the Spielberg camp are limiting expectations by ALLOWING ShogunMaster to use aintitcoolnews to lower the bar so that the resultant mediocrity seems brilliant by comparison. This would mean that Knowles, the New York Times and now Boxoffice are all being suckered, and playing right into their hands.

But maybe I'd better save that kind of paranoid thinking for the X-Files sequel...