Ever have that nightmare of being on stage and flubbing your lines in front of a huge audience. Well that just happened to notoriously temperamental film director Michael Bay, who fled the stage at the Samsung CES press conference after an apparent teleprompter error.

Bay, director of the Transformers movies and other blockbusters, had been brought on stage by Samsung exec John Stinziano to help shill for the company’s new line of curved UHD sets (more on all that in a later post).

Bay immediately started giving a speech about how his job as a director is to make dreams a reality, but it quickly became apparent by the look on his face that this was actually something he was supposed to say later in the program.

“The lines are all screwed up,” Bay mumbled. “I’ll just wing it.”

And he tried, for all of about 30 seconds, with Stinziano doing his best to feed him talking points, but it was all too much for Bay, who exited stage right in a huff.

An obviously embarrassed and shocked Stinziano was left to apologize for Bay’s vanishing act and then just moved on to the next topic.

The Samsung press event is just wrapping up now, so I’ll have more on their massive curved TVs and other topics shortly.

UPDATE: Mr. Bay has updated his personal site with an explanation for his unusual behavior at the Samsung event. Samsung products are just too exciting! According to Bay, he got “so excited” to talk that he skipped over Stinziano’s line and then the teleprompter apparently “went up and down.”

“I walked off,” Bay explains. “I guess live shows aren’t my thing.” Rest assured, he does love the product. “I rarely lend my name to any products, but this one is just stellar.” We’re sure Samsung deeply appreciates the clarification.

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