WHEN Michael Bay, cinema’s reigning champion of vehicular carnage, thinks your idea for an explosive, special-effects-laden blockbuster is lame, you’ve got problems. A few years ago Mr. Bay, the director of “Armageddon,” “The Rock” and “Bad Boys,” was in his editing room when Steven Spielberg called to offer him a new project: an action movie about giant robots that metamorphose into cars, trucks and planes.

As Mr. Bay recalled in a recent interview, “I’m like, ‘O.K., great, great, great.’ And I hung up the phone. And I’m like, ‘That sounds like a dumb idea.’ ”

What helped persuade Mr. Bay to take the first “Transformers” movie — which in 2007 took in more than $700 million worldwide at the box office, and whose sequel, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” opens on Wednesday — was a visit to the Pawtucket, R.I., headquarters of Hasbro, which creates the Transformers toys.

 

Full Story: The Movie Industry’s New Playthings Source: New York Times, June 18th, 2009 Author: Dave Itzkoff Added on June 25th, 2009 at 1:09 pm, by Matt Mikula