Before we start out today, allow me to share this "Letter to Optimus Prime From His GEICO Auto Insurance Agent." This had me giggling quietly to myself all day long!
These overly-long posts recounting The Greatest Days Of My Life as an extra in the Transformers movie contain spoilers. They definitely have spoilers for the current movie. They might contain future spoilers for the dvd release(s). On the other hand, they might not have future spoilers, because really I know jack about what the production team is planning for the future. Just in case, this is your warning. IF YOU HATE SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW.
Glossary bits are provided as needed. If you're coming in at the middle and you see a term that doesn't make sense, check out the earlier entries of this week. Chances are that term showed up in an earlier glossary.
- Principal. Actors who are not background. Star, co-star, supporting, et. al. Basically these are the people who actually matter, unlike, say ... background.
- The Kid. That principal who turned out to be Shia LaBeouf. At the time I didn't realize I was surrounded by principals, what with me being there for the robots (more on this, myopia later). Figured I should go ahead and use here the terms I used there at the time.
- The Good Driver. This would be the guy who drove the Escalade. (That's right, the brunette staring in horror at the steering wheel as it transformed wasn't actually driving that car. Hollywood magic!) He's the one we really, really, really wished was driving the tow truck when we had to do worrisome things near the tow truck.
Delayed posting because I appear to have set the autopost for 6 p.m. today instead of 6 a.m. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Okay, so mostly we're focusing on that amazing final battle sequence, specifically the parts filmed along Broadway and that intersection a couple of blocks away where Megatron died. Not the stuff at the Wilshire & Hope location.
It was a couple of hours into the first day before the people in my part of the background herd actually saw Bay directly, as opposed to absorbing his commands by listening to the Countdown Guy or experiencing his will via the Alphas. Most of this I witnessed either between running, or while sitting at the light pole that was one of my launch pads. When I realized how many highlights were going on around me (all within five feet or so) I was so very happy.
- Bay is beyond detail-oriented.
- Some of that stuff I am convinced he made up on the spot.
- When he is working one-on-one with someone for a highlight, he is completely into it, focusing the broad energy into a narrow loop between he and the principal he was dealing with. Bay never changed his energy level, he just altered how he cast it and went back and forth as if flipping a switch. I'm probably not doing a good job of describing this. It would make sense if you could see it.
- Perhaps there was a little Type-A obsessive, maybe.
Examples!
Let's start with the guy with the X-Box and the uber-Blonde in
the pink bikini. Remember the brief glimpse of the guy on the street
holding the X-Box? They filmed him a couple of different ways, a few
times with a stack of dvds on top of the box and a few times without.
He also had to backup/fall/stumble in different ways. What was
happening was one of the new Transformers was to burst from the box,
grow six arms and attack with a frenzy (partly out of confusion). Bay showed him how he wanted him to react, and told him in which direction the new baby Transformer would be taking off.
What does that have to do with an uber-Blonde wearing gauze and a pink bikini? Well, she was just ahead of the X-Box guy on the sidewalk, another innocent bystander who happened to be directly in the path of an angry six-armed newly-hatched robot! When the X-Box Transformer races past her, it gets its arms snared in the cloth of
her gauze dress, spinning her around, ripping the cloth from her body and revealing
her pink bikini!!!!
I know it sounds stupid.
No, truly. I UNDERSTAND that it sounds stupid.
Really. I get it. Totally.
But!
It was delightful to watch Bay explain to her what was going to happen. I think this is one of the things he made up on the spot. He acted it out for her while the crew was wiring up her clothes. It was hilarious - he was really into it and he wanted her to be, too! She wasn't, really. But by the time he was done spinning and waving his arms and talking talking talking, I was COMPLETELY sold on the idea. The way he told it, it was funny as hell.
I must admit that I was looking forward to seeing this bit in the movie. Alas, it didn't make it.
Next! The segment with the kid, the cube and the uber-Blonde in the leopard print micro-dress, a sequence that was filmed but did not completely make it on the screen. This segment was in two parts. Let's call them A, B and C.
Part A: The principal Kid has the Energon Cube/Creation Matrix (there is some debate among geekdom as to which of these is in the movie ... I'll spare you because we're the only ones who care. During filming it was just a brown foam cube). He's running down the street in the same direction as background. Background is largely on the sidewalk, the Kid is in the street. He gets hit by a black Escalade, which screeches to a stop. He bounces off the car. He drops the cube. He picks it up and keeps running.
Bay worked intensely with the Kid on this, and man it was fascinating to see how meticulous and detailed he is. He got down on the ground with the Kid, showing him how he wanted him to
drop the cube, fumble it a bit. Bay snatched at it as if it were radioactive or
burning. He hunched over, he told him it was hot, hot, he told him that
when he finally grabs it, he's to protect himself from it with his jacket. Then he had the kid repeat his actions. Then he had the Kid get up and execute it.
I kinda liked that Bay had the Kid had to run flat-out just like the rest of us. (over and over and over again.) At the same time, the Kid had to do all of these things while running *and* trust that the Good Driver would stop precisely where he was supposed to and not run him over. (The driver worked his mojo every time to perfection.)
Part B: When the Kid bounces off the Escalade, the uber-Blonde in the leopard print dress leans out of the car and screams "jerk!" If I told you how long it took them to do this one tiny thing, you would never believe me. They
filmed this a couple of times from different angles. He told her how to shake back her hair, even. Truthfully, this is the one part where I started to get bored and wondered if they had put out new food out over at the craft services camp.
Part C: The Escalade starts transforming. The Good Driver is replaced by the brunette you see in the movie staring at the steering wheel. Bay describes to the women what's happening to the car so they understand how they're supposed to react. Eventually they clamp this huge mecha-hand on the brunette's entire head, and she struggles as if it's killing her. She falls out of the car onto a nice pad placed by the driver's side door. Meanwhile, the two UBs in the car scream, freak out, try to escape, one of them dangles her legs from the window. It was cool.
And though there's more, let's wrap it up with the Mountain Dew pop machine.
To me it appeared as if Bay walked past the pop machine, glanced up, looked at it as if he didn't realize it had been sitting there in the alley all this time, and then was struck with a brilliant idea. He said to somebody on the crew "can we light this up," and they told him sure. Then he'd continue on with whatever he was doing, then a few minutes later would look over at the pop machine as if it just appeared and say to a crew person "can we light this up," and they would say sure. A few minutes later, repeat. This happened four or five times until crew persons actually started to attaching wires and lights and such to the pop machine. It was pretty funny (to us, anyway) in part because of this whole The Mind of Michael Bay interior monologue thing I was doing with one of the background women at the time. Hey! A pop machine! I could blow it up! * Hey! A pop machine! I what if I blow that thing up? * Is that a pop machine? If I blew it up, that would be cool!
I figured they were going to blow it up extreme style, as in actually blow it apart dynamite or something. It alarmed me just a little bit because I was not aware they were allowed to do that. And it bummed me because it would be just like the Furby truck, they'd send us all away and I couldn't watch it go off. Lots of time was spent cutting the cage on the machine so it would collapse correctly. Bay also pulled a Blonde for a highlight of screaming and falling down in front of the pop machine.
When I went back downtown a couple of days later searching in vain for an overlooked scorched Furby, the pop machine was gone so I assumed they indeed blew it up after we left. I also figured someone got paid for the honor of their pop machine being blown to smithereens.
It wasn't until I was sitting in the theater and saw the Mountain Dew machine turn into a Transformer that it all made sense. It was gone because it was theirs to begin with! Bay didn't blow that thing to pieces. They brought it in, set it up, knocked it around a bit and took it back when they were done. Which meant every time he looked at the thing as if he'd never seen it before, what he was really doing was looking at it and wondering why the hell it wasn't yet wired up as he wanted it to be.
And that's enough babbling for now!
