I probably have a different perspective on this than most people. It represents some of the public fallout over Megan Fox’s – let’s call it, “involuntary departure” – from the upcoming third Transformers movie. As someone who has yet to find in her overmuch talent or star charisma, and has largely seen anything resembling acting to be all-but-irrelevant to the success or failure of a Transformers movie, I do not view this is a tragedy, or an injustice, or even likely to have much effect on the final product. To borrow from Rob Lowe’s mega-agent in Thank You For Smoking, to change from one provocatively-lit young body to another in this giant robot spectacle is “an easy fix. One line of dialogue.”
To sum up – what most people care about in this kerfuffle, I do not. But if you want to hear more…
I want to look at the charges brought up by the bravely-anonymous crew members who decided to take a giant public dump all over their now-former leading lady. Fair context – I do not know, and have never met, Megan Fox; nor did I work on a Transformers movie, or any other Michael Bay movie, in any capacity. This is strictly based on my experience working on film sets and with Hollywood personalities in general. I want to examine the charges against Ms. Fox and provide a few rebuttals.
Charge #1: The Great and Powerful Michael Bay made Megan Fox, and she betrayed him by criticizing his Awesome Self and Awesome Works!
Fox did compare Bay’s on-set personality to Hitler – which is not exactly adult or bright – and such opinions usually do not get projected quite so loudly. There is a cultish aspect to the Hollywood community, and a weird, unspoken-but-constantly-evolving code about what’s “appropriate” to say to outsiders. Venomous and demeaning opinions about beautiful women are pretty much always allowed, obviously. Intimations that a director with clout can be an raging a-hole on the set – not allowed outside of a joking and dismissive context until he loses a studio’s money. That’s a handy outline for how I see what’s happening right now.
The Director is by and large the Alpha on-set – for better or worse that’s the social structure that has evolved around this loud, expensive, strenuous activity called Movie Production. As such, the Director tends to attract a great deal of worship and loyalty, deserved or not.
And you have to understand that people outside the business have no idea just how much sh*t we make that no one ever sees. So when a movie like the Transformers sequel Revenge of the Fallen is called bad (which I quite readily did), it ignores that just about any movie that actually reaches theaters has probably done at least 75% of what it was supposed to do not just correctly, but extremely well. Audiences grade on a pretty unforgiving curve, because of how often Hollywood has managed to produce greatness. But here in Hollywood we know how GENUINELY bad it’s possible for a movie to be – I have the dubious honor of having written a plot synopsis that became a DVD bonus feature because the delivered cut of the movie makes almost no goddamn sense without it. So it can be difficult for a lot of people out here to put that much effort into something that big and then just dismiss it as worthless afterward.
The crew members in this example go out of their way to praise Bay’s filmmaking genius, his unparalleled ability to inspire wizardry out of the ignorant sub-humanoids around him, his devotion to his crew (they work with him repeatedly!) and the good ol’ U.S. of A. (HE FILMED HERE!) That last bit I respect. I note for the record that of the eight feature films he has so far made, he has used six different cinematographers, which might be a significant fact in examining whether or not people really want to work for this guy over and over again. As for lower-paid crew members, I cannot imagine why they might jump at the chance to work on multiple Michael Bay films. It might (call me crazy!) have more to do with the fact that good-paying employment out here is harder to get than it’s ever been, that Bay is constantly making films, and that his films tend to involve massive, 4-6 month shoots at a studio-level budget, which means high-quality free food around the clock, fat per diems you never fully spend unless you’re an alcoholic, and paid travel to exotic locations where you hang out with beautiful people. It’s even possible that someone might be willing to work for him – and speak kindly of him – under those circumstances if he were less that a superhuman seer/saint.
So a lot of this you can chalk up to typical tribal hyperbole. Guys like that are on every set, and if they’ve really been working these jobs for Michael Bay for 10+ years, there’s a reason they haven’t been promoted. There are a small number of people out here who genuinely have the drive, talent, guts, and luck to actually make something special happen. Then there are the sturdy professionals who find a craft, stick with it, and make a living. All the rest talk a good game but are here for the parties. That’s very important in understanding all this.
As to Bay doing Fox a life-changing favor by plucking her out of “total obscurity“, defending her against all doubters, and making her a movie star; well, he did cast her. Whoever else from among the producers or studio folks might have argued the call, it was his call, and you can’t take away that fact. But it was the PR people who put her on the magazine covers. That’s their job – sell the movie by selling the star. Was Bay personally supervising all those Maxim photoshoots? No. This was a giant team effort, undertaken by machinery that would have rumbled to life no matter who he cast in the role. These people are professionals and it’s what they do. Whether she had the necessary qualities to occupy that role…I’ll get into that below.
And “total obscurity” is farm-organic B.S. Total obscurity is someone sitting in a dark bedroom in Iowa. Megan Fox was a working actress and model who, before Transformers, had appeared in multiple feature films and over 150 episodes of television, including a leading role in two seasons of a prime-time network sitcom, Hope and Faith. Go ahead and ask any actor looking for work in LA or New York if that constitutes “total obscurity”. Then be ready to watch a grown-up cry.
Charge #2: She can’t act!
So I might not defend this charge too directly and vigorously. I generally agree that she has been tremendously over-hyped as a movie star and an actress, and has yet to show me too much to indicate she can hold that status. But as an employable actress tasked to play uncomplicated but (let’s be honest) f*ckable characters, you could do far, far worse; and she will eventually settle back into that far more natural and appropriate category.
But tribalism is best-revealed in unselfconscious hypocrisy; so my question is: If she’s such a terrible actress – what does that say about Michael Bay? It was his supposed wizardry and damn-the-simpletons faith that inspired him to choose her for that role, so how could he not see that she was actually terrible? This is especially ridiculous after making one whole Transformers movie and choosing to make a second with her.
If she got elevated beyond what she could earn on her merits, it was Bay and the studio’s doing, and now that she has a “reputation” of not being able to make blockbusters with her breasts alone, this is a pretty graceless retreat on their part. And the fact that the below-expectations-but-still-profitable gross of a single movie, Jennifer’s Body, is actually capable of making a “reputation”, should give you some idea of just how disposably attractive young women are treated out here.
Charge #3: She didn’t say hi to us or party with us!
Wikipedia says that the production of Bay’s Pearl Harbor eventually involved as many as 3,000 different crew people. I can’t imagine Bay shot Transformers Dogme 95 style, so even on a light day you’ve got many hundreds of people milling about. And again, call me crazy, but it might just be that there were some days in those many months where she just didn’t have the time or energy to make them all feel goddamned special. I can tell you from personal experience that, again, on every set, there are at least a few guys on the crew of the opinion that any beautiful actress who isn’t actively lap-dancing them is a joyless c-word, and make a tidy side income selling such opinions to the tabloids.
I just can’t imagine why she wouldn’t want to tuck into a booth and get drunk with a guy who boasts about getting paid to touch her panties.
As an out-of-the-closet introvert, it always amuses me how people don’t understand that someone might not choose to go socialize at every available opportunity. Her job is to show up to the set and act in the movie. If she wants to go to none or all of the cast and crew parties – and the thought of fifteen parties for a single movie already makes me want to crawl into my bedroom – then that’s her right, damn it. Like I said – most of the people out here are not celebrities or power-brokers or artists or even genuinely interesting people, but live off of getting into parties and events and jobs where they can feed off morsels of attention and acknowledgment they get from the real thing. And the spoiled bastards quickly learn how to hate anyone who doesn’t provide what they consider their richly-deserved fix.
And so she didn’t want to spend downtime going to a State Dinner or tour the pyramids. I probably would have chosen differently – but I didn’t notice it causing any international incidents or causing her to miss work (WORK, remember? IT’S A JOB), so now we’re in the territory of pure, catty point-scoring. If they had a different fundamental opinion of her, these would have been held up as evidence of her seriousness, discretion, and dedication to her craft.
The sh*tstorm for Megan Fox is just getting started, and unless the upcoming Jonah Hex defies both the odds and the early reviews and becomes a hit, it’s likely to carry on for several months. It’s going to be a hideously hard time for her, and my primary emotion about it is sympathy. Has she, in the past few years, shown lack of creative ambition, a willingness to use her sexuality for money and attention, a lack of endurance for fluffing each and every one of the tens of thousands of people who cross her path, and the ability to say all manner of un-informed and/or dingbatted things into a microphone? Sure. But that doesn’t make her horrible; in fact it makes her extremely normal.
And that’s probably the secret to the vitriol right there.