Man, given that I just wrote about Trans4mers yesterday, I really would've preferred not to today. But this is too impressive to ignore.

Transformers: The Premake is Kevin B. Lee's half-hour long "desktop documentary" that digs into the making of the latest Michael Bay blockbuster, mashing up amateur footage of the film's shooting with a razor-sharp look at how a massive production like this is something far bigger than just some dumb movie. It's a towering business investment that has ties to controversial tax incentives (Detroit!), viral marketing, product placement (Samsung! Vogue! General Motors!), blatant pandering to international markets, and Hollywood's happy, continued capitulation to the demands of the not-sketchy-at-all Chinese government. Plus, it features Bay condescendingly telling a slew of straight-up lies right around the 10-minute mark.

Or, as Dan Kois put it, far more succinctly:


Yes, that. This is fascinating, and it will give you 100 answers the next time anyone asks why movies like these almost always have fucking awful scripts, and half-assed acting, and everything else that's made the word "blockbuster" into an insult: Because making a movie isn't even near the top of the list of things studios have to worry about when they're making a movie.