Michael Bay Biography

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 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.
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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.

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

of people by saying [who it is]."

Poster for Bad Boys.Frankenheimer eventually took a paternity test to demonstrate that Bay was not his son.

MICHAEL BAY PICTURES

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MICHAEL BAY BIOGRAPHY