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Samsung snafu at CES causes Michael Bay meltdown

Turns out he does implosions as well as explosions

CES 2014 Hollywood auteur Michael Bay experienced something of a meltdown at CES this year after being hired to pitch for Samsung's 105-inch ultra-high definition curved TV.

Samsung USA president Tim Baxter introduced Bay onto the stage for the company's CES press conference, where the filmmaker was supposed to wax lyrical about the stunning colors and realism of the Korean manufacturer's hardware and how it would transform living rooms across the globe.

Unfortunately for Samsung, Bay was working from an autocue and fluffed his lines before losing the plot completely. He apologized for the error and decided to "wing it" on stage but then stalled completely. Baxter tried to help him with a softball question about how films would look on the new TV but Bay just turned and walked briskly off stage.

"I got so excited to talk, that I skipped over the intro line and then the teleprompter got lost. Then the prompter went up and down – then I walked off. I guess live shows aren’t my thing," Bay blogged shortly afterwards, adding that he would be doing events with the curvy screen to promote Transformers 4 later in the year.

Celebrity appearances at CES are always fraught with hazards. In 2006 Bill Gates brought on Conan O'Brien to promote Microsoft's media center, which promptly crashed. Four years later Taylor Swift was on-stage with Sony, only to be visibly creeped out by a lecherous Sir Howard Stringer offering to take her shopping.

Certainly Samsung will be conducting a "what went wrong" exercise following this year's debacle and it's likely some tech support guy is getting his marching papers right now. But El Reg really can’t see what Michael Bay's problem is.

After all, this is the man who gave us Pearl Harbor, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and The Island. Surely, by now, he must be used to things going horribly wrong onscreen? ®

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