Month: September 2009

There are lots of PR lessons we can learn from celebrities today. Firstly. Megan Fox has lived up to her name, biting the hand that feeds her. Or at least the hand that raised her from obscurity.

Director Michael Bay cast Fox in Transformers, and the starlet had some rather unkind words to say about him in a magazine.

In her interview with a British magazine, Fox had said of Bay:

“He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation.

“He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.

“He has no social skills at all.”

Ouch. That isn’t very nice. Some of the crew responded with a letter via Michael Bay’s blog – which he contributes to, but clearly doesn’t run, because he pulled it a couple of days later and posted his apology.

I subscribe to Michael Bay’s blog with google reader – so it’s not completely lost to you. And the SMH has a story on the letter today. Here’s an excerpt.

He granted her the starring role in Transformers, a franchise that forever changed her life; she became one of the most googled and oogled women on earth.

… Wait a minute, two of us worked with Angelina – second thought – she’s no Angelina.

…We know this quite intimately because we’ve had the tedious experience of working with the dumb-as-a-rock Megan Fox on both Transformers movies. We’ve spent a total of 12 months on set making these two movies.

We are in different departments; we can’t give our names because sadly doing so in Hollywood could lead to being banished from future Paramount work.

We actually don’t think she knows who Hitler is by the way. But we wondered how she doesn’t realize what a disgusting, fully uneducated comment this was?

Hopefully Michael will have Megatron squish her character in the first ten minutes of Transformers 3. We can tell you that will make the crew happy! …

Nice. Firstly, let me say, Godwin’s law needs to be more widely broadcast – comparing anybody – particularly a movie director – to Hitler is just plain silly.

Secondly, if you’re working in a close knit industry like Hollywood – or a regional area, or a city, or the Christian community – don’t bag out people who you’ve worked with. It’ll no doubt hurt you more than it hurts them.