Spielberg Dodges Lawsuit

This blog posting is purely personal and probably of limited interest to all but a few, but I need to communicate this in a public forum. At the New Age conspiracy conference this weekend, a number of friends and acquaintances came up to me and asked if I was planning to sue Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for stealing the plot of my novel. They were only half serious, but that also means they were only half kidding me. These were people who had read “Stonecypher Road” when it was published in 2005, and then had recently seen the movie, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” Both the novel and the movie involve the discovery of an ancient crystal skull, which turns out to be one of a group of 13 such legendary artifacts. The plot of both stories revolves around the quest to dispose of the crystal skull in the proper way. Since the novel came three years before the movie, the readers wondered if Spielberg’s screenplay writer might have ripped off the novel.

I say here and now that Spielberg can rest easy, and his lawyers can take a vacation. The fact is that I ripped most of my crystal skull material off the Internet. On New Age websites, crystal skull information is as common as tulips in Holland. The legend of the 13 skulls is not proprietary, and it’s as widespread as the Old Testament. The story of the F.A. Mitchell-Hedges Skull of Doom has been told a thousand times. So what all this means is that Spielberg’s screenplay writer ripped off the same sources that I used. Good for him.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, I promise that tomorrow I’ll get back to postings with some journalistic relevance. This time I really mean it.