Indiana Jones and the career move of doom

Director Steven Spielberg has cut an extra out of the next Indian Jones movie—Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—for blabbing plot details to a reporter, the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column reported Tuesday. Spielberg was reportedly furious that fledgling actor Tyler Nelson, who was making his debut as a dancing Russian soldier, had apparently violated his nondisclosure agreement. “Who knows whether that particular person will ever work in this town again?" said Spielberg’s spokesman, Marvin Levy, who declined to comment on whether the spoilers were true.

Nelson reportedly told his hometown newspaper, the Edmond, Okla., Sun, that Indy and the Soviet army both set out to find a crystal skull in a South American jungle. He also said, among other things, that the Russians try to stop Indy—played again by Harrison Ford in the fourth Indiana Jones movie—by kidnapping his ex-girlfriend. Evidently, Jones runs into more trouble in the film, due out in May. “I saw Harrison Ford strapped to a chair and being interrogated," Nelson—a 24-year-old professionally trained ballet dancer who studied at the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow—told the paper., although he wouldn’t say whether the spoilers were true.

“We're told that the forces of George Lucas took the lead in trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, getting the article pulled off the Web and stripping links from sites like Ain't It Cool News,” said Kim Masters on Slate.com. “Doing in the version on Page Six might be beyond even the powers of Lucas and Spielberg combined, which raises interesting questions about the laws that govern the media universe.”

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It “seems like a really funny thing” that the newspaper would willingly pull its big scoop, said New York magazine’s The Take blog. “Even funnier, is that Aint It Cool News, a site ostensibly dedicated to spoiling movies, also removed their story.” Oh, well. The Post said in Nelson’s scene he “celebrates Indy’s capture by dancing to balalaika folk music.” Thank goodness it was cut, because “that part sounds totally stupid.”