· In earning $27.4 million on its first full day of release, Transformers sets the utterly meaningless record for the biggest Tuesday ever. Equally exciting and inconsequential box office milestones are sure to follow the conclusion of the movie's six-and-a-half-day "opening weekend." [Variety]
· Following an unexpected volume of complaints about how many commercials clogged the feeds of MTV and VH1's Live 8 concerts in 2005, NBC Universal pledges that the ad load for this weekend's Live Earth telecasts will be "significantly lighter than what a normal hour of network television would be." Hooray for somewhat reduced corporate greed! [THR]
· Can Tom Cruise and the German government fuck already and put all this weird tension behind them? It's really getting a little uncomfortable for everybody at this point. [Variety]
· 8 million shut-in pyrotechnics fans tune in to NBC's Macy's Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular, giving NBC a Wednesday night ratings win. [THR]
· Foreign nations are enjoying American cultural imperialism about as much as the military kind. [Variety]

Positing that just-released Michael Bay blowing-shit-up-tacular Transformers might have the most impressive specials effects work ever, Popular Mechanics profiles the brave Industrial Light & Magic technicians charged with the near-impossible task of translating the notes that the notoriously demanding director shouted at them through his omnipresent megaphone into workable computer models involving tens of thousands of virtual moving parts. Revealed one engineer on the pressures of toiling underneath such a hands-on taskmaster:

We realize many of you would find it difficult to improve upon two-plus hours of watching Shia LaBeouf perfect his "whoa" face accompanied by top-notch visual effects, but at least one Craigslist user is seeking to enhance his moviegoing experience by bookending it with a little non-Transformers action. Since we here at Defamer would like nothing more than to pair a horny Michael Bay fan suffering from intimacy issues with their dream match, we thought we'd helpfully reproduce the ad (it's NSFW) after the jump:

Sure, you may have enjoyed three-time Biggest Movie Star in the World titleholder Shia LaBeouf's fine work in Disturbia and Holes, but how much do you really know about the up-and-coming superstar handpicked by both Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg to be chased around their movie sets by giant fucking robots and old fucking archaeologists, respectively? Did you know that his unusual name, the bane of copy editors everywhere, means "Thank God for beef?," or that one of his parents was a pot-smoking hippie clown whose act once prominently featured a trained chicken?

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and tell everyone about the time you spotted Ryan Atwood quietly plotting his next career move at a Venice eatery.

We'll admit to a little cheating by peeking at MichaelBay.com to pinpoint the Transformers director's whereabouts, but yesterday the peripatetic master of blowing shit up brought his Giant Fucking Robots roadshow to Seoul to generate some excitement for the movie's June 28th premiere. According to the Korea Times, after some banter about how "foxy" lead Megan Fox got her job ("Just look at her."), Bay got down to the deadly serious business of scaring his assembled Koreans fans shitless with his apocalyptic vision of our robot-controlled future:

Having already blown untold millions of promotional dollars into 300-foot-long, building-sheathing Transformers prophylactics and custom-built Lamborghini-bots that will assist director Michael Bay in his premiere night groupie-acquisition plans, DreamWorks has apparently run through most of its advertising budget, and must now settle for more modest local campaigns for its upcoming blockbuster. While forking over some petty cash to slap some decals bearing Bay's unofficial catch-phrase on an economy sedan (would it have bankrupted them to buy the car new hubcap?) obviously lacks the sizzle of the aforementioned, flashier efforts, the strategy nevertheless did successfully raise the release-date awareness of at least one cameraphone-carrying Defamer operative passing through the parking lot of the Burbank Staples where it was parked earlier today.

· Despite Fox's attempts to boost the struggling On the Lot's fortunes by editing the show into a more compact, once-a-week, we-will-give-five-dollars-to-anyone- who-can-explain-what-the-fuck- is-going-on-at-any-given-moment format, the show draws just 3.1 million viewers in what we assume will be one of its last airings. We did, however, enjoy Michael Bay's guest judge appearance, during which he repeatedly shared his moviemaking philosophy of "get a good editor and cinematographer and they'll cover for your lack of talent," then seemed barely able to restrain himself from hitting on the director of his favorite film. [THR]
· Shadowy Hollywood Foreign Press puppetmaster Phillip Berk is replaced by five-time president Jorge Camara, who assumes the important tasks of coordinating his organization's locust-like decimation of the industry's free buffets and the handing out of meaningless awards to shitfaced actors. [Variety]
· The Agent Dance Mini Edition: UTA poaches agent Sarah Clossey from Paradigm, potentially absorbing a middling client list that includes Amanda Peet's Shouty NBS Boss and The One Jim Could Never Love As Much As Pam. [THR]
· Peter O'Toole joins the cast of Showtime's The Tudors for seven episodes as Pope Paul III, a performance that's preemptively been nominated for an Emmy. [Variety]
· Judd Apatow Comedy HegemonyWatch: The Apatow-produced, Seth Rogen-starring Pineapple Express is given a summer '08 release date following the success of Knocked Up. [Variety]

While we're well aware that it's the rapidly approaching Transformers premiere that's inspiring the look of "Look upon my hacky works, ye mighty, and despair!" pride on the face of Michael Bay, we imagine that not everyone who finds themselves confronted with the countdown clock currently ticking away on the fauxteur's web presence will know exactly what will happen when it reaches zero. Still, the unlabeled doomsday timer is an appropriately unsubtle reminder that no individual Bay blockbuster is larger than the blowing-shit-up visionary behind it, even if that movie will soon be launched in one of the most over-the-top promotional orgies ever staged in a city known for its love of excess. Reports the LAT:

When the marketing team for Knocked Up conceived its cute Make-Your-Own-Bastard web game, they couldn't have foreseen the horrifying parental combinations that the Hurty Elbow blog would soon feed into it. We hope that when they come across the dead-eyed spawn resulting from the commingling of superproducers Brian Grazer and Jerry Bruckheimer or hacky directors Brett Ratner and Michael Bay, they realize that their once-fun project has been hopelessly corrupted and destroy the infernal apparatus that produced such abominations.

Transformers director Michael Bay is more than just the force-of-blowing-shit-up-nature behind some of the wildly successful, underscripted summer blockbusters that help you drown out the drudgery of your life with two hours of awe-inspiring mushroom clouds and balletically twirling Ferraris; he is also, as you may know, an unquestioned master of a more intimate (if equally mercenary) form of filmmaking—the commercial. Bay's must-read news blog shares this behind-the-scenes clip of a recent Pepsi One ad he helmed, giving us a rare glimpse of how the fauxteur is sometimes willing to put aside his ego to better serve the narrative, resisting every impulse to spectacularly detonate star Kim Cattrall's bathtub just for the selfish purpose of putting his creative stamp on the project.

Upon reading that movie-star-of-the-internet-people Bruce Willis had virtually kneecapped Armageddon director Michael Bay ("Bay...Would have ruined DH4. Few people will work with him now, and I know I will never work with him again.") while communing with his fans on the AICN message boards, we had a feeling it wouldn't be long before Bay used his own online forum to retaliate against his mouthy ex-collaborator. With an emotional mixture of hurt, disbelief, and defiance far more complex than any moment in one of his movies, a wounded Bay responds:

Perhaps realizing that the impromptu, beer-soaked promotional appearance he made on behalf of Live Free or DieHard at halftime of a recent Nets playoff game might not reach as many hardcore film nerds as he'd like, onetime wisecracking animated critter and resurgent action star Bruce Willis has taken to the Talkback boards at Ain't It Cool to get the word out about his comeback vehicle, which he swears will contain all the brain-splattering, hard-R violence his fans crave despite a PG-13 rating that limits him to a mere two "fucks." Here, Willis dramatically outs himself as suspiciously defensive poster "Walter B":

Lately, we've found that if we don't check in with leading fauxteur Michael Bay's infrequently updated web presence on a daily basis, we sleep fitfully (if at all), so tormented are we by thoughts that we've somehow missed out on important developments in the Bayniverse during our distressing periods of neglect. Our late afternoon visit uncovered news both good and bad; on the positive side, we've now been officially introduced to Bonecrusher Bay, the director's new mastiff, but this happy news is balanced by the troubling revelation that some total dickwad online predator has gotten all up in the director's MySpace:

This weekend will be all about Spider-Man 3's inevitable march to the all-time opening weekend box office record (we're still waiting for reports about how audiences at the Thursday midnight screenings volunteered to pay triple if that helped beloved Sony get to $140 million), but that's not going to stop competing studios with their own summer products to overhype from trying to steal some of Spidey's thunder. As we speak, motorists stalled in traffic on Sunset Boulevard are enjoying the spectacle of witnessing one of the Strip's most famous buildings wrapped in the largest pulsating, promotional prophylactic ever attempted by mortals:

[*Which, we're told, changes into a twenty-foot-tall robot that shoots lasers out of his tailpipe/schlong! Nice!]

Yesterday, we linked to a photo of the skeleton of the 360 Sunset building getting wrapped in a gargantuan, four-sided ad touting Michael Bay's latest make-shit-go-boom masterwork, Transformers. Well, as anyone who has ventured outside the office today (or caught a glimpse an airborne valet sailing past their window) already knows, gusty conditions have beset the accident-prone building with yet another small-scale epic disaster, stunningly captured by an intrepid Defamer operative and citizen photojournalist. Is it merely a random and destructive act of nature, or possibly a harbinger of ominous things to come, as prophesied in a sacred, anonymously authored verse? Only time will tell.

Hollywood Elsewhere has reposted a "wrap poem" penned by an anonymous Transformers "inside operator" who apparently was so overjoyed by the job visionary filmmaker Michael Bay did with the project that he was inspired to express his elation in verse, a work that was originally posted to (and then quickly removed from) an unnamed "certain website," but which was saved by a helpful cut-and-pasting web archivist and has been subsequently popping up in inboxes (including ours, more than once) all over town.

The less we say to prepare your for this cock-rock tribute to Hollywood's most accomplished practitioner of the blowing-up-shit arts the better, as we hope you'll be open to experiencing its glory without the interference of prematurely heightened expectations. Have we already said too much? Probably. Enjoy, and don't let the suspicion that the celebrated fauxteur himself somehow commissioned the piece himself reduce your inevitable rapture.

Sunday's NY Times explored Warner Bros.' outwardly inscrutable decision to hand over the reins of holiday "tear-jerker" We Are Marshall to Charlie's Angels fauxteur McG, whose seizure-inducing directorial gifts and well-documented fear of flying would appear to be fundamentally incompatible with a project requiring a heavy reliance on gimmicks like "story" and "emotion" and which prominently features a phobia-flaring plane crash. In the article, McG (given name: not actually McG) bristles at length over the baseless perception that he's artistically limited to the attention-span-destroying aesthetic established in the Angels movies: