The WGA strike may have prohibited Ehren Kruger from banging out a finished draft of Transformers 2 (based on a story by A-listers in disguise, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci), but this didn’t mean shit to Michael Bay. While Kruger paced on the picket line, Bay plopped his butt in a $10,000 ergonomic chair (based on experimental designs by the late Isamu Noguchi) and wrote his own damn screenplay.
Here’s how Bay put it to our unauthorized biographers at Rotten Tomatoes: “I’ve been writing Transformers 2. We’ve got our characters all designed. I always write all my scripts, my movies anyway so at least I’ve got something to give the writers. It’s like a template. We have a really good outline so I worked on that.”
Bay added: “We had to because I want to make my date. I’m not going to let the strike take me down.”
Sight unseen, I think the production would be wise to forgo paying Kruger his seven figure salary and make whatever Bay tapped out; now that we’ve got the origin nonsense out of the way, all that’s left to do with the Transformers is to have them wallop each other in densely populated areas with lots of tall buildings. Want a plot? Here goes: the Decepticons don’t like the Autobots, and the Autobots don’t like the Decepticons; and when you get them together, shit gets busted up real good. I don’t know how you insert Shia LaBeouf into all of this, and, somehow, I don’t think he’d care if he’s relegated to the sidelines for the next two movies (that Indiana Jones flick might make just find an audience). As for Bay, the fewer humans he has to deal with, the better (actually, he’s very generous with allowing his performers to improvise, but making stuff explode is inarguably his true métier).
You seem very pleased with what you wrote, Michael. Don’t let Kruger go all Rock car chase on it.
Transformers 2 will cause partial deafness on June 26, 2009.