What can we learn from Bay’s speech fright?įirst, we see not one, but two aspects of the classic fight, flight or freeze response at play. Then the prompter went up and down – then I walked off. I got so excited to talk, that I skipped over the Exec VP’s intro line and then the teleprompter got lost. I rarely lend my name to any products, but this one is just stellar. Wow! I just embarrassed myself at CES – I was about to speak for Samsung for this awesome Curved 105-inch UHD TV. Later that day, Bay wrote on his personal blog:

Before he can finish, though, Bay wheels around, head down, and scurries off stage, stammering, “Excuse me. The Samsung VP tries to prompt him again. Stinziano tries to prompt Bay by saying, “Tell us what you think.” The director only gets out, “I try to take people on an emotional ride…” before he starts to freeze up. In fact, he tells the audience, “The type is all off, but I’ll wing this.” He didn’t get far in doing so, however. It certainly shows that successful experience behind the camera doesn’t automatically translate into ease in front of it.īay might have made it through the presentation if the technology had cooperated maybe, but he apparently discombobulated the guy running the teleprompter by skipping ahead in the script. Bay looks more like a nervous high schooler than the director of the popular Transformers movies. We’ve all been there at one time or another, one way or another, haven’t we? You feel for the guy. He’s also physically ill at ease and avoids looking at the audience. You hear his shallow breathing and the slight tremor in his voice.

You can tell that Bay is nervous from the start. Bay stood before a crowd of reporters with Samsung VP Joe Stinziano to tout the company’s new curved screen televisions. It ran off the rails almost as soon as it started, though. It was apparently meant to be a well-scripted moment staged for the press at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. How else do you explain the more than one million views the YouTube video of the incident has attracted?

However, it seems to be painful in an entertaining sort of way except perhaps for its subject, the Hollywood director Michael Bay. Speech fright can be painful to watch, and this video certainly proves it.

Michael bay teleprompt