Most of y’all may ridiculed the notion of Michael Bay deigning to write an actual screenplay, but I’d personally welcome the idea if it meant throwing over whatever Ehren Kruger has fashioned from the hackneyed storytelling of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman for Transformers 2. Why shell out upwards of ten figures on three writers when “And then Optimus Prime throws Megatron through the State Hermitage Museum lengthwise” is all the story we require?
Sadly, Bay is going against his purest instincts and letting the aforementioned trio gang bang his precious… whatever it was he claimed to have a few weeks ago. An outline, I guess. But he kind of contradicts his earlier assertion with this comment to Variety’s Michael Fleming and Patricia McClintock:
“[The writers] did a detailed outline before the writer’s strike, and now they are in Michael Bay jail, holed up in a hotel and working feverishly,” Bay said. “We’re paying for a beautiful suite and they are getting a lot of work done. Hiring three writers was unusual, but it has been a godsend in getting us to where we need to be. Somehow you find a way to get it done.”
By “they are”, I assume he means that Orci, Kurtzman and Kruger are jointly banging away at the screenplay for Transformers 2 like Inspector Clouseau and Kato erecting The Silver Hornet (Orci and Kurtzman were originally contracted for story only). This raises a couple of questions: 1) Isn’t this the way the world ends?, and 2) If Orci and Kurtzman are truly locked up in “Michael Bay jail”, who’s rewriting Star Trek?
If the answer to that second question is “J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof”, then yay. All told (and no offense to Mr. Bay), I’d rather have Orci and Kurtzman fucking up another Transformers movie than the reboot of Star Trek. But if they’re just multitasking… well, geez, I’d hate to see what a distracted Orci and Kurtzman screenplay looks like.