Word: bay
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...Hollywood's great rumors--perhaps the only one that doesn't end with the words "...is gay!"--was put to rest this week when director JOHN FRANKENHEIMER said he is not the biological father of Pearl Harbor director MICHAEL BAY. There is, however, something behind the tale. Bay was adopted in 1965, and Frankenheimer told the Los Angeles Times that he indeed had a one-night stand with Bay's birth mother in the early '60s. A few years later, when she threatened to name him as the father of her child, Frankenheimer paid the woman $7,500 to keep...
Enter Michael Bay, who had wowed young audiences for Bruckheimer as director of Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon. "I felt the time was right for him to make a spectacular movie," says Bruckheimer, who is known for his loyalty. "Michael is his generation's Spielberg or Lucas." (Pearl Harbor's costume designer, Michael Kaplan, is the same guy who cut up sweat shirts for Bruckheimer's 1983 Flashdance.) With screenwriter Randall Wallace (Braveheart), they took a cue from the Titanic playbook and composed a central fictional love story. Two strapping pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett), friends since boyhood...
...detail did not come cheap. Disney balked at the proposed budget of $208 million. No one knew how well a jingoistic American anthem would sound in the important overseas markets, "so we had to figure zero for Japan," says Disney studio chief Peter Schneider. He would later ask Bay to reshoot an inflammatory scene in which a civilian Japanese dentist working in Hawaii was depicted as a spy for his homeland...
Schneider is now hopeful about Pearl Harbor's prospects abroad (it will be released in Japanese theaters July 14 with minor changes in dialogue but with the same title); but before the studio would agree to make the movie, Bay and Bruckheimer had to shave the cost. They gave up their own up-front fees, persuaded cast members like Affleck to take pay cuts and canceled traditional studio-movie goodies like a wrap party and jackets for the crew. "We joked that this was the most expensive independent movie ever made," says Bay, who threatened to quit several times over...
...overkill," says Raymond Emory, who was a seaman on the Honolulu and is now, at 80, a historian for the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. "No nurses got killed. No torpedo planes late in the attack. Too many small explosions, not enough big ones." Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay counter that they are not making a documentary. In this, they are as accurate as that bomb roaring toward the Arizona...