Michael Bay is Being a Huge Douche About Transformers 2

Posted by Neil Miller (neil@filmschoolrejects.com) on April 21, 2008

Well documented is my love for filmmaker Michael Bay. With his perfection of “whip-ass action”, as director David Gordon Green called it, Bay has been able to captivate me in a way that no director has captivate a fanboy since that George Lucas guy rose to the top of his own pseudo-religion. And when it comes to Bay, there are many people who are with me, forever fans of the spectacle, while others constantly sink into the throws of being Bay Haters, those who think he is just a commercial-friendly hack.

And while I will never call Bay a hack, a belief that I hold simply because Bay is a director who makes his kind of movie his way, the antithesis of a hack, I will say that he has sunk to a bit of douchebaggery in his conquest to keep fanboys away from the secrets of Transformers 2, the Summer 2009 follow-up to last summer’s blockbuster hit.

I realized this all today, first when I saw an article over on Slashfilm about Bay’s commitment to secrecy. My good friend Pete referenced a post on Bay’s website Shoot For The Edit in which Mr. Bay himself said “Sorry everyone, everything you are reading (other then we are shooting in Philly) is false. We are going to give so much disinformation on this film to confuse everyone.”

My anger was further heightened when I was flipping through the most recent issue of Empire Magazine, which coincidentally showed up this afternoon. Empire reporter Chris Hewitt writes a great article about scripts and the underground script trading that takes place. In the article, he interviews El Mayimbe, our good friend over at Latino Review who is one of the foremost experts on finding scripts before the studios want him to — lets put it this way, Mayimbe is so good, we don’t even try to compete when it comes to script reviews. On scripts such as The Dark Knight and Transformers 2, Mayimbe said, “I’m telling you, some scripts are better protected than the President.”

The Empire article also mentions Bay’s claims of feeding false information to web outlets in order to keep fanboys in the dark. What he doesn’t realize though, is that a situation like is going to get worse before it gets better. By making statements such as this, Bay is inviting people to try harder, and they have. This isn’t like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg keeping a tight lid on Indiana Jones and just not talking about it, this is more of a Uwe Boll type publicity stunt to get people even more interested in the film. If he wants to keep the movie a secret then fine, keep it secret. None of us are going to complain too much, assuming the film actually gets made. But if you want to keep it a secret and make a bunch of unnecessary noise about it, I have a problem with that.

Fans want to know what is going on with the production, and if they can’t do that, then they are okay waiting — what they absolutely do not want is the director intentionally feeding the press bum info and then saying “See, I fooled you all!” Don’t get our hopes up with false tales, Mr. Bay. Just shut your trap and make your awesome movie, like you’ve always done — well, except for Pearl Harbor, but I thought that was assumed.

Sound Off: Do you think that Michael Bay is right to spread false information about Transformers 2 just to keep the real details a secret?

Read more articles by Neil Miller