Michael Bay

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Michael Benjamin Bay (born February 17, 1965) is an American film director. His films are known for their fast paced action sequences and ultra-kinetic cinematography.

His most recent film, The Island, was released in 2005. It was the most high concept Michael Bay movie to date (a sci-fi thriller about cloning) and the first of his movies to flop at the U.S. box office, an unusual fate for a director whose first three films collectively grossed over $1,000,000,000.

Two of his films, Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, were nominated for Golden Raspberry Awards.

Prior to his film career, he directed music videos for artists including Aerosmith, Tina Turner, Meat Loaf, and the Divinyls.

Bay is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Art Center College of Design. A Film Studies professor of Wesleyan, who met Bay when he was eighteen, wrote an essay about Bay and Armageddon for The Criterion Collection DVD release of that film:

It is true that Armageddon, a perfect example of Bay's work, illustrates his "take-no-prisoners" form of storytelling, in which he trusts an audience to figure things out. (One of its strengths is its minimum of dreadful exposition that over-explains the inevitable pseudoscience.) Yes, it gives audiences a lot to absorb. Yes, it cuts quickly from place to place, person to person, event to event. But it is never confusing, never boring, and never less than a brilliant mixture of what movies are supposed to do: tell a good story, depict characters through active events, invoke an emotional response, and entertain simply and directly, without pretense.

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Personal life

Bay was raised in Westwood district of Los Angeles by a child-psychologist mother and an accountant father.

According to a 2001 Rolling Stone article, written as part of the publicity for Pearl Harbor, Bay is adopted, and he decided to try to find out who his biological parents were when he was twenty. The article says "someone told him it was John Frankenheimer," but the claim is deliberately vague:

"I got it out of my [biological] mom, I think...anyway, it's now this big rumor around Hollywood."

The article later points out that Frankenheimer denies that Bay is his son. As of 2005, his official website has an FAQ entry about the subject, which reads:

Q: Is it true that Michael's biological father is a Hollywood director? Who is it?

A: While this issue is none of our business, I'll answer this question in Michael's own words: "You can probably hurt a lot of people by saying [who it is]."

Image:Bad Boys.jpg

Frankenheimer eventually took a paternity test to demonstrate that Bay was not his son.

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