Completely misunderstanding the reasons that Transformers 2 was such a disaster, Shia LaBeouf promised recently that Transformers 3 would be "the craziest action movie ever made." Now we know it's a movie so crazy that it's willing to piss off the Park Service to get it made. Yeah, crazy.

According to The Washington Post, Michael Bay is tussling with the Park Service over a planned 14 days of filming in Washington D.C., where he was hoping to stage a car race on the National Mall and shoot the whole thing at night. Wonderfully cranky and logical Park Service spokesman Bill Line told the Post that the producers "have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall," and added, "A lot of this could be more appropriately shot in a Hollywood studio. The National Mall is not an area in which Americans come to see high-tech action movies being shot."

I'm not really sure why Bay and company are fighting so hard to capture the verisimilitude of our nation's capital, given that in Transformers 2 they had characters enter the Air and Space Museum-- in swampy, verdant D.C.-- and exit out the back into a desert. Surely they can just go to the Paramount lot and build a scale replica of the National Mall, add the Statue of Liberty and the Space Needle for good measure, and go to town on every national landmark imaginable. It's the American way.