Fans Get To Talk About ?Transformers,? And The Knives Are Unsheathed

LOS ANGELES, June 8 — Hollywood is a town of talkers, not listeners. Thats why studios handsomely pay consultants to parse the results of focus groups and audience exit polls or eavesdrop on online chat rooms.

A composite photograph, designed by a “Transformers” fan for the donmurphy.net Web site, shows Mr. Murphy at the head of a group of fans, calling themselves “Stooges,” who post most frequently on the site’s forum.

Only rarely do the filmmakers themselves talk directly to fans but Don Murphy, one of the producers of the summer blockbuster Transformers, decided to do just that.

Four years ago, Mr. Murphy, a comic-book lover since growing up on Long Island in the 1970s, turned a forum on his personal Web site (donmurphy.net) into a rolling conversation about the movie, which was released on July 2. And much to the delight of some of the fans who posted on the site and engaged with Mr. Murphy, they actually had some influence over changes in the script and casting.

The site would seem to be a perfect example of a modern media company reaching out to potential audience members in a new, interactive conversation. But in an unorthodox twist — one that might give media companies some pause — Mr. Murphys site quickly became a home not only for fans to debate whether Megatrons form should be a tank or a gun (he ended up as an alien jet) but a place to vent frustration with the movies production as well as with the executives who worked on the film.

The site also helped expose the internal politics of making movies, where credit is hard fought and studios seek to distance themselves from things or people they cant control.

With Transformers we had this really rabid following, said Mr. Murphy, whose films include Natural Born Killers and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. To be frank, I wanted to have some way where we could at least hear what people think.

Other filmmakers, like Peter Jackson and Kevin Smith, have fostered close relationships with their fans, And Michael Bay, who directed Transformers, has said he spent a lot of time early on looking at online postings to understand what fans might like.

But Mr. Murphy, who started the forum in June 2003 and can be alternatively deferential and combative, took a more confrontational approach.

Mr. Murphy would answer questions about studio meetings, who was being hired or what characters would be included in the film and solicited complaints from fans so he could share them with Mr. Bay. And once he almost banned a poster who used all capital letters.

I had my own persona, the angry sheriff, said Mr. Murphy of his Web site. I will mock fans if that is what I have to do.

With a decades-old property as beloved as Transformers, fans were bound to want to have their say. Jarek Zabczynski, a 26-year-old self-described struggling filmmaker who lives in upstate New York, first went on DonMurphy.net after hearing Mr. Murphy was interested in feedback.

He would start replying to people and I thought, This guy is really reading this stuff, said Mr. Zabczynski. I checked that board more than my e-mail. We formed a tight community.

For some, Mr. Murphys directness had its appeal. One poster from England, Stanley Joel, wrote in an e-mail that the site was refreshing in that you could pretty much say what you liked within reason, and within reason was usually determined on the fly.

Mr. Murphy and a fellow producer, Tom DeSanto, had initially shopped a Transformers treatment around Hollywood in 2003 but got no takers. Instead Paramount Pictures wanted to develop a Transformers idea of its own.

Upon hearing those plans, Steven Spielberg of DreamWorks bought the Transformer treatment from Mr. Murphy and Mr. DeSanto and then partnered with Paramount to co-finance the film. The two were named producers along with Lorenzo di Bonaventura, a former Warner Brothers executive, and Ian Bryce, who both handled day-to-day producing.

Mr. Murphy said the studios were worried from the start about how his site might be perceived.

There was concern that it was going to be an official site, he said. All three of the partners — Paramount, DreamWorks and Hasbro — said I needed to make it clear it was the Don Murphy board. I was never intending for it to be an official Web site or that I was a spokesman for the film.

To put some distance between Transformers and Mr. Murphys personal and sometimes caustic musings, he said he called the message board, The Movies, although the majority of the postings were about Transformers. Mr. Murphy included a disclaimer too, saying the site was not approved by the studio. And last year he almost shut it altogether as vitriolic fans criticized every aspect of the production.

Mr. Murphys site and its nearly 950,000 posts caused a rift between Mr. Murphy, the studios and his fellow producers because some of the angry attacks were lobbed at them, particularly Mr. di Bonaventura, who had a tense relationship with Mr. Murphy, according to people involved with the film who asked not to be named because they still work with both producers..

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