Both Michael Bay's blog, Shoot for the Edit, Playthings.com and WNED.org have information on the Transformers Movie preview event held at the US Toyfair in New York. Where as previous reports have been from the fans, this gives Mr Bay's views on how the event went.From Shoot for the Edit
Toy Fair screens 25 minutes of 'Transformers'
By DADE HAYES
The invitation at first sounded too wacky to be believed. At Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, hallowed province of Fassbinder and Truffaut, footage from Paramount and DreamWorks' Michael Bay pic "Transformers" would be shown to a crowd of toy enthusiasts.
But so it went Tuesday night for an audience stocked with consumer-product execs, toy collectors and general robot evangelists in Gotham for the American Intl. Toy Fair. The footage totaled 25 minutes from the film based on Hasbro's revived 1980s toy line -- "not necessarily the best scenes, but some of the scenes that were finished," cautioned Bay.
Ecstatic applause greeted each of the four long sequences.
The last time Bay took a high-octane passion project into a high-end setting, he presided over a similar screening for "The Island" at the Academy theater in Beverly Hills. That spring 2005 event began an anxious couple of months leading to one of the most troubled releases of recent summers.
This time, Bay seemed gratified to be playing to an inherently more sympathetic crowd. "You guys aren't really the target audience," he joked.
The footage contained plenty of what producer Jerry Bruckheimer has termed "Bay-os" -- automatic weapon fire, rumbling car engines, sweaty military dialogue ("Bogey in the weeds and he's not squawking!"
. But the scenes were spiked with
wit and exuberant popcorn energy. In one scene, John Turturro,
appearing as a mysterious, "Men in Black"-esque agent, savors the
line "Bingo! Take him and bake him!"A brief panel session preceded the footage. Bay was joined by DreamWorks production chief Adam Goodman and Brian Goldner, chief operating officer of Hasbro and an exec producer on the pic. "It reminds me of 'Back to the Future' or 'Close Encounters' -- real Amblin film from back in the day," Goodman said.
Beyond the trio onstage Tuesday, the film is exec produced by Steven Spielberg and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Don Murphy. None of the latter three was in Gotham for Tuesday's event.
But another producer who did attend, Tom DeSanto, compared the experience to the way "X-Men," which he exec produced, first snuck up on audiences in 2000. "People were really going to give that one the smell test," he said. "And it was a real surprise."
From WNED
To drum up excitement for DreamWorks' and Paramount Pictures' "Transformers" ahead of its July 4 bow, Hasbro hosted an event Tuesday night with director Michael Bay, screening four scenes and 22 minutes of footage for a packed theater of Toy Fair attendees.
"I thought if I could make this totally real, it could be a really fun movie," Bay said of turning the top-selling action toy line into a film. The Transformers and its back story of the Autobots and the Decepticons have already been turned into a comic book, nine different animated series and an animated movie in 1986.
"It is the first time ever that you will see the Transformers characters as real," said Hasbro chief operating officer Brian Goldner, who is an executive producer on the film. "We believe this movie will take the Transformers brand to the next level. 'Transformers' is the first of its kind in a summer where there are many movie sequels."
From Playthings:-
Goodman, president of production for Dreamworks at a sneak peak of the film last night, the company is dedicated to supporting retailers with this film and the product tied to it. "For Dreamworks and Paramount, it's the single biggest initiative we've ever had, globally," says Goodman. "Our effort in marketing is something we're putting together." He adds, "We don't have a Die Hard franchise or a Lethal Weapon sitting on our shelves, so we're always looking for the freshest, newest idea. When it started with the idea of Robots in Disguise, we had to do it. It's the first major franchise for Dreamworks."
Director Michael Bay, who was also on hand to discuss the film and told some of the property's inherent challenges, like how to make live actors look like they were interacting convincingly with something that is 35 feet tall. "It was a fun movie to do," he said. "And it has four quadrant appeal.
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