Who is Michael Bay?
He was born Feb. 17, 1965, in Los Angeles and adopted shortly thereafter by Jimmy and Harriet Bay. Later, after a bit of sleuthing, Bay learned of rumors that his birth father was John Frankenheimer, the director of The Manchurian Candidate. Frankenheimer furiously denied parentage and took some DNA tests to prove it, but the idea has a poignant irony: Bay, a reviled summer-movie artist, as illegitimate son of a decorated auteur. (Only Bay knows for sure if The Rock was an homage to Frankenheimer’s Birdman of Alcatraz.) Bay went to film school at Wesleyan, where his professor Jeanine Basinger says he eschewed “film majors all dressed in black” for the brighter company of his Psi Upsilon fraternity brothers. Frat-boy adventuring is one of the hallmarks of Bay’s films, which always involve a group of men on a mission. In Armageddon, his troupe consisted of Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson, and Steve Buscemi—a honey of a pledge class, though you wonder what Buscemi would bring to th