Abstract
The much-maligned Transformers franchise is exemplary of the contemporary Hollywood vernacular. While colloquially stupid, this franchise also represents an industrial trend that moves the cinematic closer toward the model of the theme-park ride. Critics predictably lambast the films for their incoherence, however, the spectacular is not a design flaw, but the point of it. Furthermore, screenwriters for these films, understand that they are writing for a global market, and thus a premium is placed on action. As a consequence, the experience of writing a Transformers movie might be more akin to writing a Cirque du Soleil show than a Hollywood movie. The style of these films, especially in their choreographed action and editing, intends to amplify the visceral roller-coaster like thrill.
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Notes
- 1.
The Good Place, season two episode ten, “Rhonda, Diana, Jake, and Trent,” NBC Television, aired January 18, 2018.
- 2.
Roger Ebert, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” rogerebert.com , June 23, 2009, accessed April 4, 2018, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transformers-revenge-of-the-fallen-2009.
- 3.
Mikel J. Koven, La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film (Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2006).
- 4.
Christopher Wagstaff, “A Forkful of Westerns: Industry, Audiences and the Italian Western,” in Popular European Cinema, edited by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 1992), 245–261.
- 5.
Lutz Koepnick, Michael Bay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 50.
- 6.
Chris Gardner, “‘Transformers’ rolling out in live-action pic,” Hollywood Reporter, June 11, 2003, A1.
- 7.
Koepnick, 51.
- 8.
Even though several Transformers movies made more individually at the box office than many MCU movies, a snapshot comparison highlights the power of the development strategy at Marvel/Disney that has dominated the tentpole market with 19 releases since 2008 against Transformers’s 5 releases since 2007 (excluding the previous iteration of the franchise in Transformers: The Movie from 1986). However, Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) performed relatively poorly domestically ($130 million against $475 million international, figures from boxofficemojo.com , accessed June 6, 2018.) which may influence the direction of future Transformers iterations, starting with Bumblebee (2018) which was marketed very differently and represented a move back toward conventional narrative—the film is a “girl and her pony” movie only with a giant robot. To date Bumblebee has grossed $459,512,841 internationally, its $127 million domestic playing somewhat more strongly than its most recent comparator in the franchise given the movie’s much lower budget point (officially $135 M against $217 M). Figures from boxofficemojo.com , accessed March 18, 2019.
- 9.
Koepnick, 18.
- 10.
Per boxofficemojo.com , the Transformers franchise is approaching $1.5 billion gross domestic and over $4.3 billion worldwide, as of January 2018, accessed January 11, 2018, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=transformers.htm.
- 11.
Oliver Jones, “‘Transformers: The Last Knight’ is Sloppy, Stupid and Quite Possibly Evil,” observer.com , June 21, 2017, accessed January 10, 2018, http://observer.com/2017/06/transformers-the-last-knight-is-sloppy-stupid-and-quite-possibly-evil/.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and Frank Kelleter, “Die Dynamik Serieller Überbietung: Zeitgenössische Amerikanische Fernsehserien und das Konzept des Quality TV,” In Kelleter, F. (ed.) Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012), 205–224.
- 16.
Koepnick, 50.
- 17.
William Bibbiani, “Transformers: Age of Extinction: Ehren Kruger Interview,” craveonline.com , posted June 27, 2014, accessed January 15, 2018, http://www.craveonline.com/site/715045-transformers-age-of-extinction-ehren-kruger-interview#/slide/1. Kruger’s writing credits include Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), and Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014).
- 18.
Manohla Dargis, “Car Wars With Shape-Shifters ‘R’ Us,” nytimes.com , July 2, 2007, accessed January 13, 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/movies/02tran.html.
- 19.
Bilge Ebiri, “Here’s What the New Transformers Movie is Like,” villagevoice.com , June 20, 2017, accessed March 23, 2018, https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/06/20/heres-what-the-new-transformers-movie-is-like/.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Roger Ebert, “Transformers,” rogerebert.com , July 5, 2007, accessed January 13, 2018, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/transformers-2007.
- 22.
Armond White, “Bay Watch: Armond White’s Transformers 2 review for CityArts,” nyfcc.com , May 5, 2013, accessed January 13, 2018, http://www.nyfcc.com/2013/05/bay-watch-armond-whites-transformers-2-review-for-cityarts/.
- 23.
Josh Tyler, “Transformers movie review,” cinemablend.com , no post-date, accessed January 13, 2018, https://www.cinemablend.com/reviews/Transformers-2362.html.
- 24.
Ibid.
- 25.
Phalen adapts her terms closely from P. H. Thornton’s model of “editorial logic” and “market logic” (outlined in P. H. Thornton, “The Rise of the Corporation in a Craft Industry: Conflict and Conformity in Institutional Logics,” Academy of Management Journal, vol. 45, no. 1 (February 2002): 81–101). Patricia F. Phalen, Writing Hollywood: The Work and Professional Culture of Television Writers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 74.
- 26.
Jason Scoggins, “2015 Year-End Spec Market Scorecard,” The Scoggins Report, March 29, 2016, accessed January 28, 2018, https://medium.com/scoggins-report/2015-year-end-spec-market-scorecard-bb572a2055fb. This compared to the high three figures in spec sales in the early 1990s.
- 27.
By no means all of those 50,000 registered screenplays are either intended or ready for sale, and many never will be, but the illustration is still powerful.
- 28.
Chris Erskine, “R.I.P. for the spec script, long a source of some of Hollywood’s most beloved films,” latimes.com , January 19, 2018, accessed January 19, 2018, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-st-spec-scripts-20171219-htmlstory.html.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
John Robert Marlow, “lonely keyboard interview, Ehren Kruger,” johnrobertmarlow.com, no post-date, accessed January 28, 2018, http://johnrobertmarlow.com/lonelykeyboard/sa_ehrenkruger.html.
- 31.
Fantasy genres, broadly defined and often creatively iterated (Stranger Things, Legion), are also popular in expanded television, of course. Our point is that the rise of the tentpole, the adaptation, and the franchise have transformed the movie business in a way that the development of fantasy genres on smaller screens have not.
- 32.
The one step deal and other employment trends such as “bakeoffs” are discussed in detail in Daniel Bernardi and Julian Hoxter, Off the Page: Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
- 33.
Lucy V. Hay, “How to Write a Screenplay Bomb: Transformers: The Last Knight,” bang2write.com , June 26, 2107, accessed February 19, 2018, http://www.bang2write.com/2017/06/how-to-write-a-screenplay-bomb-transformers-the-last-knight.html.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Bibbiani.
- 37.
Russ Fischer, “‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ Writer Ehren Kruger: Logical Sense Doesn’t Have to Be the Be-All, End-All,” slashfilm.com , June 27, 2014, accessed January 15, 2018, http://www.slashfilm.com/transformers-logical-sense/.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 213–214.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
David Denby, Do the Movies Have a Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 29.
- 42.
Ibid., 32.
- 43.
“Michael Bay Presents: Explosions!” Robot Chicken, posted to YouTube by Adult Swim December 20, 2011, accessed February 14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7ssUivM-eM.
- 44.
“What if Michael Bay directed Up?” posted to YouTube by MrStratman7 August 15, 2014, accessed February 14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5KQQWlIgGc; “If Michael Bay directed Toy Story 3,” posted to YouTube by Un Gordo Gamer on January 4, 2015, accessed February 14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrzEYO1vtso.
- 45.
James Todd Uhlman and John Heitmann, “Stealing Freedom: Auto Theft and Autonomous Individualism in American Film,” The Journal of Popular Culture vol. 48, no. 1 (2015): 87.
- 46.
David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2002), 51.
- 47.
David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly vol. 55, no. 3 (Spring 2002), 16.
- 48.
Matthias Stork, “CHAOS CINEMA: The decline and fall of action filmmaking,” IndieWire, August 22, 2011, Accessed November 10, 2018, http://www.indiewire.com/2011/08/video-essay-chaos-cinema-the-decline-and-fall-of-action-filmmaking-132832/.
- 49.
Bordwell, 16.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Erika Balsom, “One Hundred Years of Low Definition,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 80. Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of a Sixth Art,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1939: Volume One, 1907–1929, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1911] 1988), 61.
- 52.
Jacques Aumont, “The Veiled Image: The Luminous Formless,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 35–36. Italics in original.
- 53.
Balsom, 87.
- 54.
Matt Patches, “Firefly, Snap Zooms, and Joss Whedon’s influence on Man of Steel,” New York Magazine, June 19, 2013, accessed March 26, 2019, https://www.vulture.com/2013/06/how-joss-whedon-influenced-man-of-steel.html.
- 55.
Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Washington: Zero Books, 2010), 174 n. 55. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 131.
- 56.
Bordwell, 16.
- 57.
Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 78.
- 58.
Cory Perkins, “Watch: The Secret Sauce That Makes Pacific Rim’s Fight Scenes So Thrilling,” wired.com, posted July 19, 2013, accessed June 23, 2019, https://www.wired.com/2013/07/visual-effects-as-design-solutions-in-pacific-rim/.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Vincent Crampton and The Universal Soldier, “Universal Orlando simulator ride review: Transformers: The Ride 3-D,” orlandosentinel.com , posted July 10, 2017, accessed June 23, 2019, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/travel/attractions/universal-orlando/os-universal-orlando-simulator-ride-review-transformers-the-ride-3d-20170710-story.html.
- 61.
Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 188.
- 62.
Ibid., 189.
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Kerner, A., Hoxter, J. (2019). The Stupid in the Contemporary Hollywood Vernacular: Spectacularly Stupid Transformers. In: Theorizing Stupid Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28176-2_2
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