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Michael Bay

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Michael Bay
Michael Bay filming Armageddon

Michael Benjamin Bay (born February 17, 1965) is an American film director and producer. Bay has achieved financial success with such movies as Transformers, Armageddon, The Rock, Pearl Harbor, Bad Boys, and Bad Boys II. Bay is also one of the members of the LA music video production company Propaganda Films.

Biography

Early life

Bay was born in Los Angeles and raised there by his adoptive parents. He was educated at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and graduated from Wesleyan University.

Director

After graduating from school, Bay broke in to the music video industry and worked on videos for artists such as Meat Loaf, Richard Marx, Donny Osmond, Lionel Richie, and Tina Turner, among many others. He also began directing television commercials for many large companies, including Nike, Reebok, Budweiser, and Coca-Cola. His most successful advertising campaign creation was the series of "Got Milk?" commercials, which won him the Grand Prix Clio for Commercial of the Year and the Cannes Silver Lion.

The first movie to be directed by Bay was Bad Boys in 1995, which was a box office success. He has since followed this with several more large-budget, action-oriented films. All these movies combined grossed in more than $1.9 billion dollars worldwide.

His films are known for both their fast paced action sequences and ultra-kinetic cinematography reminiscent of director Tony Scott.

Bay and Wydncrest Holdings recently bought the special effects company Digital Domain from James Cameron and Stan Winston.[1] He also runs his producing company Platinum Dunes that produces horror genre films (mostly commercially successful remakes of 1970s films).

Bay's new movie Transformers has broken the world record for largest seven day box office debut of a non sequel at $153 million, beating out Spiderman 1.

Awards

In 1995, Bay was honored by the Directors Guild of America as Commercial Director of the Year.

Bay has won many MTV Video Music Awards.

Bay has also been nominated several times, but has never "won", a Razzie Award. His past nominations include Worst Director (Pearl Harbor, 2001), Worst Director (Armageddon, 1998), and Worst Picture (Armageddon, 1998, shared with Jerry Bruckheimer and Gale Anne Hurd).

Transformers got a box office award.[who?]

Filmography

As of 2007 Bay has directed seven feature films and is scheduled to direct five more.

Director

Feature films

Music videos

Producer

Signature techniques

Bay's films contain several common directorial and cinematographic trademarks. For example, there is often a 360-degree pan at some point in the movie, often with the character alone in some setting. Cinematographically, his films have a strong industrial feel to them and Bay uses lots of greys and blues to emphasize this. There is also usually a high-octane car chase or some other vehicle chase in every movie as well as multiple explosions with high levels of destruction of cities, buildings and vehicles (especially cars). In Transformers he had a scene where it viewed an x-ray of a building with Megatron dragging Optimus Prime through one side and out the other. Very similar to the scene of Bad Boys II with a slow motion bullet breaking through glass bottles. His films also tend to feature very modern, high-end vehicles, such as the Solstice Prototype and the Hummer in The Rock and the Fifth-generation Chevrolet Camaro in Transformers. He typically makes cameo appearances in many of his movies. For example, in Bad Boys 2 he plays a guy driving a small beat-up old car which Martin Lawrence attempts to borrow, and in Armageddon he plays a small role as a NASA scientist.

Criticism

  • Critics have attacked Bay for a brash, shaky quick-cut editorial and directing style that many feel emphasizes superficial dramatization and pointless action. [who?]
  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park spoofed the work of Bay. Bay is the focus of the song "The End of an Act" from the Team America: World Police soundtrack, which criticizes the film Pearl Harbor as one of the worst films ever produced. The song opens with "I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor" and contains the line "Why does Michael Bay get to keep on making movies?". In the fifth season South Park episode "Cartmanland", Kyle says, "Job has all his children killed, and Michael Bay gets to keep making movies. There isn't a God."
  • Bay has recently drawn criticism from many online journals and blogs for the redesign of the robots from Transformers in the movie. On February 13 2007, a "Wrap Party Poem" from a staff member involved in the movie was posted on the Internet: whilst it was promptly deleted from its original source, it began spreading quickly to other sites. The poem criticized the movie's quality and questioned Bay's overall control of the product.[2]
  • In Ultimate Spider-Man Number 15, "Confrontations", the character J. Jonah Jameson refers to an unbelievable news story as having "more holes in it than a Michael Bay movie."
  • A SuperNews! cartoon posted on YouTube further criticizes Bay for his direction in the Transformers movie. It depicts Bay as only caring about movie sales and criticizes him for not caring about creativity and originality, as well as criticizing how Hollywood "transforms people into total Hollywood sellouts." In the end Bay transforms into a giant douche.[3]

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.digitaldomain.com/press_release.html
  2. ^ "How Michael Bay Screwed Up 'Transformers': A Poem". Defamer.com. Retrieved 2007-05-17.
  3. ^ "SuperNews! - Transformers 2?". youtube.com. Retrieved 2007-07-18.
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