July
7
Transformers: Bay Squabbles with Producers Over Credit
Like many Hollywood folks today, Michael Bay knows that maintaining a good homepage and blog is the best way to promote yourself with fans. But sometimes pushing that publish button on a late-night blog post is not a great idea. Luckily for us, while the offending blog post attacking his Transformers producers Tom DeSanto and Don Murphy has been taken down, several folks have saved it for our reading pleasure.
I can tell you this. While DeSanto and Murphy acquired the movie rights from Hasbro and shopped them, once DreamWorks and Paramount got involved, they placed studio producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura in charge of the movie for Paramount and production exec Adam Goodman for DreamWorks. DeSanto and Murphy had little to do but handle some marketing and PR chores and deal directly with the fans. Two people, Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay, ran this movie. Thanks to DreamWorks, the script is better than Bay's other pictures, and with a summer blockbuster to his credit, Bay wants to take full responsibility for repairing his reputation post-The Island.
UPDATE: The NYT reports on how Murphy and Bay used their web sites to communicate with fans.
Here's more from Bay in EW.
And Transformers continues to score at the boxoffice, according to this Fandango release:
Fandango's Top Five Ticket Sellers (as of 7/06/07 9:00 a.m. PST)Movie Fandango User Rating* % of Fandango’s Sales
Transformers “Must Go” 62%
Ratatouille “Must Go” 13%
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix “Must Go” 11%
Live Free or Die Hard “Must Go” 4%
License to Wed "Go” 2%
LOS ANGELES, July 5 -- Fandango, the nation's leading moviegoer destination, announced today that Transformers generated the top Fourth of July ticket sales in the company's seven-year history. (Previously, 2006's Superman Returns was the top Fourth of July ticket-seller, followed by 2005's War of the Worlds.) Earlier in the week, Transformers was responsible for Fandango's top ticket-selling non-holiday Mondays and Tuesdays in company history.Transformers is currently selling twice as many tickets on Fandango as the movie 300 at the same point in the films' sales cycles. The robust ticket sales on Fandango follow a record-breaking May 2007, which was the company's top ticket-selling month of all time. In a recent Fandango survey, several thousand moviegoers responded with the top reasons they are seeing the movie. The results are as follows:
-- 75% were fans of the Transformers cartoons when they were kids;
-- 65% had played with the Transformers toys;
-- 24% had read the comic books;
In addition, the Fandango survey results reveal that:-- 73% of Transformers moviegoers on Fandango are male;
-- 70% are between 18 and 34;
-- 77% said that the summer movies they've seen have either met or exceeded their expectations;
-- 71% said they would like to visit locations where Transformers was filmed;
-- 92% said they would like to purchase a copy of the film when it comes out on DVD.
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So according to your version the two years of developing the script that got Bay involved didn't happen?
Also, I don't believe I ever said anything to you other than "If it's great it was all my idea and if not, no one really listened to much that I said?"
Posted by: Don Murphy | July 07, 2007 at 10:44 AM
I'm sorry to say this movie sucked! Two hours of humans running around and transformers for 2 sec's. You should be ashamed for making this movie. How hard was it to make a movie when you have everything already handed to you. If you really want to see transformers the movie watch the one that came out in '86.
Posted by: Jay Dunn | July 07, 2007 at 10:46 AM
Without you and Tom the movie would never have happened. But you did, at a certain point after getting the project launched, pass the baton?
Posted by: Anne Thompson | July 07, 2007 at 06:00 PM
Jay- you are a moron and that movie is dated and moronic.
Yes, once Bay came on I focused more on Shoot Em Up that TF where the egos were not worth my time.
Posted by: Don Murphy | July 07, 2007 at 06:48 PM