I feel your pain. "The Negotiator," from the summer before last, is, I think, a great and intelligent action thriller -- but the enjoyment I got out of it was hugely diminished by its trailer, which literally told the whole story. All the character tension was revealed in two minutes -- seeing the movie was just to see how it was established. I still enjoyed the movie, but not nearly so much, and now I'll never know.

I'm told "The Iron Giant" is quite a good animated movie; many are disappointed and frustrated that American audiences didn't turn out for it, presumably because it wasn't Disney. Well, I'll tell you why I didn't go see it. The trailer pretty much told the whole story. (I'll still see it on video, of course.)

I wish more people felt as I do -- then surely Hollywood would figure out that spoilers in the trailers mean reduced ticket sales. But alas, no, for Paul is quite right -- there is an inexplicably huge number of insane people out there that seek out spoilers, post them on web pages, and blurt them out in chat rooms. I can only surmise that doing this gives these people an air of authority -- that knowing something about an upcoming movie in advance of when you're supposed to somehow makes them feel that they're in the business. At the very least, they think it should win the admiration of all. It wouldn't win MY admiration to have a spoiler blurted out to me.

I'm lucky. I actually managed to see Terminator 2 without knowing what the plot twist was. I thought of it a *split* second before the revealing actions occurred, and man, let me tell you that was cool. But that was when I wasn't following movies at ALL. Now that I'm actually paying attention to movies that come out, there'd be no way I could miss such a widespread spoiler.

The worst worst worst worst plot twist that *was* spoiled for me, which I naturally won't reveal here, was the big one in "The Hudsucker Proxy." Thinking about it, although there's really no way I can objectively say, there was absolutely no way I could have predicted it. But it was spoiled for me not by an ad campaign but my a "making of" documentary on the Discovery Channel. Bah. But that movie is a good example of this in more than one way. One of the other plot twists in the movie (a less important one, but one nonetheless) is revealed RIGHT ON THE VIDEO BOX! That's the ultimate in obnoxiousness. Miraculously -- and I can't to this day understand how this happened -- that particular plot twist *wasn't* spoiled for me. I guess I just wasn't paying attention to the cover when I rented the thing. (I rented the title based on a recommendation from a friend and from liking what I saw in the making-of documentary, so I fortunately hadn't selected it based on a careful scrutiny of the box.) That movie, by the way, I wholeheartedly recommend.

At any rate, as you can tell, my unfortunate adventures with spoilers are not much different from your own. I hope I can make it to Sleepy Hollow without knowing that one, too.