Michael Bay melts down at tech conference over broken teleprompter

The action spectacular director goes from infomercial schlock to complete humiliation in less than a minute

Published January 6, 2014 11:50PM (EST)

 Director Michael Bay at the Consumer Electronics Show
Director Michael Bay at the Consumer Electronics Show

If it's been said once about Michael Bay, the director of the "Transformer" movie series, along with other explosion-tastic fare such as "Armageddon" and "Pearl Harbor," it's been said a thousand times: The man could benefit from some better scripts.

Or any script at all! Words do not appear to be Bay's strong point. Case in point: Bay's appearance today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The director was onstage to deliver some meaningless, vacuous blatherings in praise of Samsung's new curved HDTVs. It's not clear exactly what happened next, but apparently there was a teleprompter malfunction, leading an embarrassed Bay to first declare that he would just "wing it" and then, moments later, abandon the stage entirely.

I'd like to believe that Bay's stunning attack of existential despair was actually a subtle critique of the absurdity of the notion that entertainment consumers are craving curved TV screens, but that might be giving Bay too much credit. Sometimes an embarrassing meltdown is just an embarrassing meltdown.

In any case, the Verge has the video:


By Andrew Leonard

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21.

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