You can tell that the Internet is The Big Thing right now. There've been portents. Namely, that a politician has already given it a horribly stupid nickname ("the information superhighway," what else?), and that my grandmother talks about being "jacked in" as if she just stepped out of The Matrix.

Considering these signs of impending doom, it's no surprise that the Internet's great dark power is being used for both good and evil. Naturally, computer nerds and movie buffs the world over have been putting technology to work in their own geek-anarchy way: bootlegging, baby! Everything from film trailers to television episodes to entire feature films is up for grabs and up for sale on the Internet. And while fans find it to be a nice enough route to getting their hands on the entertainment they crave, those in the industry tend to see it quite differently.

Director Barry Sonnenfeld, whose most recent credits include Men in Black and Wild Wild West, is less than thrilled with Internet reaction to his films. In fact, he blames the Internet in part for the bad press received by Wild Wild West even before it premiered. "The Internet, and the bad reporting based on the Internet, is ultimately going to hurt the quality of movies," Sonnenfeld told Entertainment Weekly. "You can ruin a movie through anonymous reviews on the Internet," he adds.

Well, hot damn! Maybe we ought to beef up the reviews section here at The 11th Hour and hold the movie studios hostage! We will give you a positive review for... one million dollars! Oh, wait. That's Dr. Evil. Nevermind. Anyway, it's obvious that some large sites like ain't it cool news may actually influence whether people bother to see the latest flick, Sonnenfeld's position seems a little alarmist; especially considering that while bad reviews can affect box office receipts... hell, bad movies kind of deserve to be punished that way. Especially considering the decidedly negative review of Wild Wild West that I just read in Time Magazine, which just goes to show that the film's negative buzz really can't be blamed on the 'Net...

While Sonnenfeld's take on it is obviously somewhat hostile, Ed Sanchez, one of the directors/writers/editors of The Blair Witch Project, offered The 11th Hour a much different point of view on the value of the Internet. "For independent film, you've gotta use the Internet. It's the only way to compete with the big boys these days. Somehow you've got to give people a reason to go on your website, don't just make it a behind-the-scenes thing or have the directors' bios: unless you're Steven Spielberg, nobody cares about that."

Indeed, Blair Witch is practically a cult classic already, and it hasn't even hit most theaters yet. And positive Internet word of mouth and rave Sundance reviews isn't all that does it, either; the forces behind Blair Witch clearly know what they're doing as far as promoting the film on-line. Far from being dependent upon the standard media to introduce their film to its audience, they've constructed a couple of web sites (blairwitch.com and haxan.com) that are well-designed, enticing, and downright creepy, offering everything from sound clips and intriguing photos to downloadable video trailers, discussion boards and screensavers. The film's creators even run an announcement mailing list where they post periodic updates on the film's status, what they've been doing to promote it, and related amusing anecdotes; they even have their own personal web sites that provide some serious surfability. This is precisely the kind of online promotion that has me, for one, drooling for more. It's just a natural assumption that when the film's website is capable of making me shiver at three in the morning, the movie's going to make me pee my pants. A film like Blair Witch can't get a better reputation than that, as far as I'm concerned.

But of course when one speaks of the Internet and movies, reviews are only a small issue. The big debate is in the bootlegging. When entire movies and TV episodes find their way onto the Internet, even if the quality sucks and the download takes forever, that's obviously dollars lost to the studios and the filmmakers.

While Sanchez seems to like the buzz that surrounds Blair Witch on the Internet, he's got a whole different outlook on the issue of bootlegging. "The way the Internet is hurting independent films is the fact of the bootlegging situation that's going on with a lot of films right now, including ours, the fact that you can just go to a website and download an entire film. Something has to happen here; I don't know how they can control it but as soon as the bandwidth expands and you can download a movie in an hour, a half an hour, that's going to be a huge problem. I don't know what we're going to do. We cannot let this happen."

But there's another side even to that brazen thievery. As reported in our last issue, the season finale of the WB's Buffy the Vampire Slayer was postponed by the network because they felt its content was inappropriate after the slew of high school shootings. Unfortunately for the WB, they made one huge mistakes: they postponed the episode after it had already aired in Canada. While it was pulled by American affiliates, fans further north had the episode on tape, and wasted no time in springing to action. The result was that we Americans stopped making Canadian jokes for a little while and got to sucking up for copies instead. Well, okay, that wasn't the only result. Bootleg videos also flooded the great Internet yardsale known as eBay, and some fans encoded the entire episodes to RealVideo and slapped those suckers up on-line so that others could view the hallowed episode in a tiny window with grainy video and horrible sound quality.

While the studio was obviously not thrilled by the fans' efforts, considering that they paid a million dollars for the episode and don't get advertising dollars from those Internet broadcasts, Buffy creator Joss Whedon, probably quite peeved with the studio for the postponement, found it a little more amusing. Whedon was quoted by USA Today saying, "OK, I'm having a Grateful Dead moment here, but I'm saying, 'Bootleg the puppy.'"

Preach it, brother Joss.