Michael Bay

Michael Benjamin Bay (born February 17, 1965) is an American film director and producer. 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 and the first of his movies to U.S. box office bombs, an unusual fate for a director whose previous four films made more than $100 million each.

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. He has also directed television commercials for brands including Got Milk?, Budweiser, Nike, Levi's, Victoria's Secret, Chevrolet, Lexus and AT&T.

Bay is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Art Center College of Design.

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 ^* 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 it is."

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

Bay is a keen amateur conchologist (shell collector). His favourite shell is the Peppery furrow shell (Scrobicularia plana).

Romantically, he has had relationships with former Playboy playmates Jaime Bergman and Lisa Dergan.

Filmography

As of 2006 Bay has directed six feature films and is scheduled to direct a seventh:

Director

Producer

Criticism

Bay is the focus of the song "The End of an Act" from the World Police soundtrack. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of South Park, criticize the film Pearl Harbor as one of Bay's worst films in this romantic parody. The song opens with "I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor."

In the fifth-season South Park episode "Cartmanland," Kyle said, "Cartman gets his own amusement park, and Michael Bay gets to keep making movies. It's true. There is no God."

Many critics blasted Bay for apparently reusing a scene from his 2003 Bad Boys II in his latest film The Island (2005). The sequence in Bad Boys II involves a freeway chase in which the villains throw cars from a flatbed truck to discourage police pursuit. In The Island the protagonists are forced to throw massive iron tires from a moving truck in order to defend themselves against a mercenary force. In the commentary track for The Island, Michael Bay claims that all he had done was "improved upon" the Boys II scene.

The Island came under fire for its blatant use of product placement. For example, the Xbox logo is prominently displayed in a scene involving a virtual fighting simulator. When Ewan McGregor's character accesses a search engine on a computer terminal, the MSN butterfly logo is also clearly featured. Bay defended this criticism on the DVD commentary by saying that it's not realistic to portray a world without advertising.

External links

Official website, with FAQ and blog
Fast Cars, Hot Blondes, Big Budgets, Bigger Explosions, a June 2001 Rolling Stone article
Criterion Collection essay on Armageddon, from a Wesleyan University professor under whom Bay studied
What Has Our Society Come To When March Of The Penguins Is The Blockbuster Hit Of The Summer?, an August 2005 article from The Onion, "written by" Bay
Serrurier
Article confirming relationship between Michael Bay and Jaime Bergman