D.C.: This could have been you. (AP photo)

The "3," it turns out, stands for the number of days Michael Bay's third Transformers film will be in town. Shooting is scheduled for the week of Sept. 27, according to Kathy Hollinger, the head of D.C.'s film office. "They're going to be here, but not as long as anticipated," she says.

What she means is, Transformers's producers wanted to shoot here for longer — as many as three weeks — but their requests to shoot around certain National Park Service locations, including the Mall, were met with nearly an equal number of denials. When that story broke in June, she says, "I was trying very hard not to throw NPS under the bus, but we had spent a lot of time meeting with the executives of Transformers when they were coming to town."

And now what does she have to say?

She calls NPS the "most challenging" federal agency to work with.

"We put a lot of energy into this because we knew it would be this huge positive economic impact for the city," she says. "So it was going to be a few weeks, and now it's dwindled to a few days, and it dwindled to a few days because NPS shot down a few of the locations."

The Washington Monument was among those locations, though she couldn't recall the others. A scene planned for the Lincoln Memorial was approved. Park Services spokesman Bill Line's phone was busy during several attempts this afternoon.

"We worked our butts off more than we ever have before, to go as high as we could at NPS, to say, 'This is crazy,'" she says. "It's so frustrating, because it was an opportunity to really show the industry that this could be done in the District, that residents could be hired at a time when a lot of people are out of work. Business could have been booming in the fall."

Like it is, no doubt, in Chicago, where the film began shooting on July 10. Production doesn't wrap there until Aug. 23.

"Three days of Transformers is going to be a lot," says Hollinger. "A few weeks would have been tremendous."

Good luck getting discovered by Michael Bay now.