For sheer, head-exploding hubris and pride, everyone knows that nothing in the industry rivals the first day of going to work on a Michael Bay film. (Though, to be fair, the thrilling last day of going to work on a Michael Bay film is never far behind.) And bless their hearts, Wal-Mart of all places underwrote an unprecedented first-hand peek of the magic behind the myth in this video from the set. With his custom "Bay-os" ("a/k/a Chaos!") Nikes all but winged and greased to better aid his propulsive shooting style, the iconic fauxteur brings it all down to Earth with an admonition to have fun, be safe and "make a lot of kids' dreams around the world." No Shia sightings here, alas; look for the eventual follow-up from Day 65, this time co-sponsored by Blue Cross and Johnson & Johnson CelebriSplints™ — your pinkie-saving partners in the greater LA area and beyond. [YouTube via /Film]

In addition to catching an eyeful of Megan Fox upon his return to the Transformers set, Shia LaBeouf also received a very thorough and meticulous ass buffing with an industrial strength feather duster. In the midst of his ass buffing, LaBeouf said, "Michael Bay really knows how to make an actor feel welcomed. At first, it's a weird sensation, but after awhile, it feels like a tiny kitten delightfully romping in a dewy meadow." Although, the first shot of the day was delayed for a couple of moments when the crew realized that LaBeouf enjoyed his buffing a bit too much.

Taking a break from his campaign to play the Riddler in the next Batman film, Brian Austin Green went to lunch with his gal pal, Megan Fox. During the meal, Green wondered why the Transformers star was lugging around a giant backpack with her instead of her purse. Fox then confessed that the recent earthquakes made her afraid of losing her most valuable possessions, so now she's started carrying them around with her. She then proceeded to list out the contents of the backpack to a shocked Brian Austin Green. It includes: a makeup bag, two designer sweat suits, flip flops, books on Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, a laptop, Michael Bay's ego, a ton of scripts, running shoes, an assistant, four different sets of sunglasses, two Blackberry batteries, a lead paper weight, Mad Men season one on DVD and some tadpoles she caught down by the river. Green was rather impressed by Fox's ability to carry on all that weight, but was still a wee bit weirded out by the backpack.

First came news from the Sheriff's Department that Shia LeBeouf was not the one responsible for his spectacular accident in Hollywood early Sunday morning. But surely he was not to be forgiven—pitied, maybe, as he underwent emergency hand surgery to restore his Echo Parque gang-sign-delivery capabilities—but not forgiven, for the police stated the actor "exhibiting obvious signs of intoxication." Not so, says his Transformers: Rise of the Fallen Machines director Michael Bay, who's convinced of Shia's innocence, and tells Access Hollywood he'll be writing his injuries into the plot:

Isn't it strange how that rare affliction of being mystically "unable" to gain weight only strikes female celebrities? It seems poor Megan Fox has that very woe to deal with atop her many other personal struggles, like pretending her engagement to one-earring trendmaker Brian Austin Green is still on, and trying ever so desperately to let a director (any director!) just film her nude already. But the newly "scrawny" Fox has reportedly been chastised about her skinny frame by Transformers 2 director Michael Bay, who has demanded that the busty Jolie successor put on 10 pounds or find a new gig. While Megan's resorted to stuffing herself with cake every night in bed, we might suggest the Anne Hathaway Quick Speed Diet: apparently breaking up with a grade A loser leads to dropping 28 pounds in no time!

After more than four months of hype, it's getting to feel like there's increasingly less to discover about The Dark Knight except whether or not it's good. Variety pretty much took care of that on Sunday, overriding David Letterman's early, spoilerrific review with a bit more textural rave. That was preceded in the LA Times by more Heath Ledger superlatives and requisite bleakness reinforcement from director Chris Nolan. But Anne Thompson has an even better showing at her blog, featuring expansive Nolan quotes from a recent screening/discussion and, far more impressively, a look at Michael Bay's little-known original stab at the Dark Knight screenplay:

"On Sunday, June 29," the web-blurb legend goes, "Shootout aired a 'Best of' episode on Summer Blockbusters. Guests Jon Favreau, Michael Bay, and Brett Ratner shared their experiences working on major summer spectaculars." And so it was written, and so it should come to pass, that through the magic of repackaging, three of Hollywood's most venerated fauxteurs should share reminiscences and insights with Variety's Peter Bart and Peter Guber. Highlighted above, an exchange with Transformers director and unwitting spondylitis spokesperson, Michael Bay: Acknowledging Bart's observation that he was born into box-office brothels, Bay goes on to pay loving tribute to shlock-piloting cicerones Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. (Note their imposing, circa-Days of Thunder publicity-shot in high-contrast B&W.) Without them, not a single extraneous helicopter explosion or lingering shot of Megan Fox's ass-crack would ever have been possible.

THR readers today likely took notice of a full-page, back cover ad trumpeting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to possibly maybe rub shoulders with Hollywood's foremost detonative dreamweaver, Michael Bay—plus the entire cast and crew of Transformers 2!—at The Happy Ending Bar and Restaurant in Hollywood. As if that wasn't reason enough to swing by, the entire event is a fundraiser benefiting the Spondylitis Association of America. It all comes to you courtesy of the Bay-loving folks at TransformNate.com. Who are they? What's Spondylitis? Aren't happy endings for Thai massage parlors? All good questions. Let's start with the first: TransformNate.com is...well, let's Nate explain!

We should have known the epic fanboy disgrace following Transformers 2 HamburgerGate couldn't possibly end well for anyone — not deposed extra Reginald "Hedgehog" Brown, not robot-illiterate mega-director Michael Bay, and certainly not producer Don Murphy, on whose message board Brown's tragic tale of exile first found an outlet. Naturally more than just feelings were hurt in the end, and if you had "Wednesday, 2:18 a.m." — when Murphy published a few of Brown's angry e-mails "so that we can all figure out what he is trying to say" — as the official start time on your Litigation Pissing Match scorecard, then you win a prize:

A tipster sends word today of trouble having befallen the Philadelphia set of Transformers 2, where an extra was reportedly thrown off the shoot for conduct detrimental to the blockbuster. To wit: Reginald Brown, a regular contributor to Transformers producer Don Murphy's dysfunctional message boards, had nabbed the plum role of "Man Eating Hamburger" in one of the film's action sequences. Then, under his nom de fanboy Hedgehog, Brown filed a dispatch from wardrobe:

Congratulations to William Morris, which upped Hollywood's client-packaging stakes to dizzying levels Wednesday with the announcement of a film based on Hasbro's board game Ouija. But the manufacturer hardly matters as much as its WMA partners in the deal, including Elf screenwriter David Berenbaum and Mich... Mi... Christ, we can't even write it. Here, just take it from Borys Kit:

A stunning development could herald the return of one of the greatest way-above-the-title pairings in Hollywood history: that of superproducing entity Jerry Bruckheimer and überdirecting force Michael Bay, the former the explosion-loving ying to the latter's blowing-shit-up-obsessed yang. The pair's creative partnership resulted, of course, in some of the most beloved, absolutely-terrible blockbusters of the mid 1990s—but what project could satisfy their shared need for one mushroom-cloud-detonation per page and a stream of ham-fisted catchphrases that can only be fully appreciated when delivered by Nicolas Cage?

On one hand we're sick to near-death of German provocateur Uwe Boll, whose perverse viral antics have amused us barely enough to keep us watching over the last month. But today the son of a bitch is making actual news: First by suing his Bloodrayne star Billy Zane for misleading him on the film's failed distribution in 2006, and then by actually confirming his proposed boxing match with flaxen fauxteur Michael Bay. So topical! So... angry! Find out where he's coming from (sort of) after the jump.

Uwe Boll's 15 minutes of hammy artistic self-defense are just about through, but we find ourselves increasingly won over with his thrashing, language-butchering viral efforts on his own behalf. And while we're pleased to hear he'll be judging that Uwe Boll Movie Challenge we noted here yesterday, we are total suckers for his latest — and ideally his last — publicity stunt before vanishing into fauxter oblivion. Or, in his words: "Boll against Bay":

Megan Fox—whose coin-slot-baring performance in Transformers was egregiously overlooked by nearly all the major Hollywood awards (she did take Best Actress at the Golden Spankbaits)—is featured in this month's Paw Print Magazine. It's a publication for those who feel a little fenced-in by the rigid constraints of Dog and Cat Fancy, as demonstrated by the wide array of exotic photoshoot costars on display.

Further refining his sophisticated public persona from "egregiously self-aware Hollywood hack" to "egregiously self-aware Hollywood hack with a Web site," Michael Bay teased his regular readers Monday with the suggestion that he's making up Transformers 2 news as he goes along. "Sorry everyone, everything you are reading (other then we are shooting in Philly) is false," he wrote in a message-board forum after an open audition call yielded rampant story and script speculation. "We are going to give so much disinformation on this film to confuse everyone."

The Stop Dr. Uwe Boll online petition ticks ever upward, a sort of virtual career death clock whose every added signature brings us one tantalizing step closer to the million required to ensure the director never unleashes another atrociously realized video game adaptation on a public who strongly feel all the loose threads of BloodRaynes 1 thru 2 still don't quite justify a third. Not surprisingly, the feisty and outspoken cinematic visionary has opted to fight back, via verbal take-downs of some of his better regarded peers. From the MTV Movies Blog:

· Hollywood Out of Ideas: Michael Bay Instigating Another Completely Unnecessary Horror-Classic Remake Edition. After the announced despoiling of A Nightmare on Elm Street by his Platinum Dunes "horror shingle," the director is in talks to produce a remake of Rosemary's Baby for Paramount. Look for Megan Fox to star as the totally babealicious swimsuit model knocked up by Shia LaSatan. [THR]
· An historic SAG/AFTRA Accord has been reached in order to present a united front in the upcoming negotiations for a feature-primetime contract. (Does that include primetime-features? We don't know, but we imagine it does!) It all went down in Peter Chenin's office, but fellow Mt. Mogulmore models Robert Iger and Les Moonves couldn't make it, for out-of-town and lunch-eating reasons, respectively. [Variety]

Thanks to advances in CGI, reports The Onion, even Michael Bay will be getting his due on Oscar night, as green-screen technology will allow programmers to recreate with stunning proximity the illusion that the director is collecting an Academy Award right alongside his nominated Transformers sound and visual effects men. They even have made a grinning Jack in sunglasses out of millions of tiny vectors! [The Onion]

The world's worst filmmaker recently starred in a Verizon broadband ad parodying his blow-it-all-up-and-chant-"awesome" style, an ad which many received without critique, as if Michael Bay was letting everyone know he's in on the joke — that he knew he's just a soulless moneymaker. Bay has reduced of his body of work into a 31-second ad. And impressively, nothing has been lost. Before the analysis, watch the work in question: