News, Etc.

Michael Bay: Scab?

This is a good one. In an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Michael Bay said he’s been busy writing either the full script or at least just an outline of Transformers 2 despite there being a Writers Guild strike going on. Bay said:

“We had to because I want to make my date. I’m not going to let the strike take me down.”

That’s great. It’s not like the writers were actually fighting for anything important. Fuck those writers! They’re not taking Michael Bay down, baby! The Tomatoes article takes it easy on Bay by just calling the practice of doing work during a strike “unorthodox” behavior. Yeah, unorthodox could be construed as scab behavior. Bay further elaborated on what he actually worked on:

“I’ve been writing Transformers 2,” said Bay. “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.”

It sounds like the director is trying to skirt around the issue that he did any writing with that statement by claiming that he really only worked on an outline so that’s not actually writing the script, which is nuts because writing an outline — or a “template” as he calls it — is still writing.

© 2008 Cinema Snark.