14 DAY TRIAL // Director Michael Bay, he who gave us the “Transformers” franchise and is now working on a new installment, made a fool of himself (his words, not ours) the other day at CES 2014 in Las Vegas, walking off the stage during a Samsung event.
In the video below, he explains what exactly went wrong and why he felt like walking off was the only alternative for him given that his prompter had malfunctioned.
The whole thing went down at a Samsung event, with Bay booked to speak about the company’s new curved HDTVs. Instead of speaking, he mumbled a few words and eventually walked off, apologizing several times for not being able to “do this.”
In a phone call with TMZ Live, which you will find below, the director says that he simply had a “human moment” when he saw that he couldn’t read the prompter right. It did display the lines correctly, but the font was so large he couldn’t tell if it was his line or the interviewer’s.
“I’ve gone on stage a couple of hundred times in my life and I was about to talk about this very technical jargon and unfortunately I jumped the line meaning I started first and I was like ‘there’s no way I’m going to be able to improv my way out of this because this room looks so serious about their electronic products’ and I was like I’m just going to go or else I’ll embarrass myself even more,” Bay says.
“I tried to save it, I looked at the other but he had such a serious look on his face that I knew there was nothing I could do to get out of it. I just wanted to crawl in a hole,” he adds.
Even though he was aware that he’d embarrassed himself, he was still surprised how many people paid attention to him. Bay even jokes that it must have been a slow news day if his name popped up in the trends next to Dennis Rodman and Kim Jung Un’s.
He’s not complaining though. “I've got so many texts from attractive women saying ‘Are you OK?’ And I’m like ‘If you wanna cuddle, maybe we can talk about it’,” he laughs.