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Megan Fox, Hitler, and Spielberg

Yes, you can put the three together in one sentence

by
Marc Tracy
June 20, 2011
Megan Fox last week.(Michael Buckner/Getty Images For Maui Film Festival)
Megan Fox last week.(Michael Buckner/Getty Images For Maui Film Festival)

When the third installment of director Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise hits theaters next month, the eye candy female lead of the first two, actress Megan Fox, will not appear (the new eye candy female lead is Rosie Huntingdon-Whitley, whose previous films include no films, because she is a lingerie model). Fox’s omission was attributed last year to fairly vague circumstances, including a desire to take star Shia LeBoeuf’s character in a new direction (which is a funny notion if you have seen either of the Transformers films) and, ominously, “a dispute [that] emerged between Megan, unnamed Transformers crewmembers and even the director.”

We now know what it was. According to Bay, producer Steven Spielberg instructed Bay to fire Fox after she committed the old reductio ad Hitlerum rhetorical and career fallacy. In 2009, she 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.” That was enough to provoke Spielberg’s ire.

This is a good time to read the parody Michael Bay Batman script, if you haven’t already.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.