Genre: Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) Packed with enough C4 to split an asteroid in two, this tell-all Michael Bay origin story reveals the explosions that defined him, the fire that ignited his little heart, and the fate that sealed his Hollywood destiny.
About: This writer’s name may sound familiar as I’ve reviewed one other script of his on the site. That one was called Super Dad. Here’s the logline: A subversive superhero story about the world’s only superhero living a bachelor lifestyle, learning he has two very different teenage twins he never knew existed, and now has to figure out how to be a father.
Writer: Sean Tidwell
Details: 91 pages
I’m happy to see that they still put stuff like this on the Black List.
Good clean goofy entertainment. Not a single message to be found.
With that said, there is a bigger lesson to be learned here, which is that, if you do want to send a message out, it’s more effective to do it through comedy.
There are probably 50,000 dissertations on the internet about how terrible a director Michael Bay is. How he doesn’t care about story. He’s obsessed with explosions. He keeps making the same movie and over again.
But if you’re angrily stomping your feet in an attempt to get that point across to others, it’ll barely make a dent.
It’s much more effective to do what Tidwell has done with this script. Which is to comically show how ridiculous Michael Bay is. If there’s anything that came out of this script, it was that.
With that said, the comedy is so insanely broad, it takes a certain juvenile attitude to enjoy it. I mean, at one point, Michael Bay, at 10 years old, tries to kill his teacher with a makeshift flamethrower.
And we also get moments like this, which occurs after Michael Bay inadvertently drops acid…
Maybe the most interesting creative choice in today’s biopic was to focus solely on our subject at 10 years old. That’s when we meet Michael Bay, flying a kite, eagerly awaiting his imprisoned father, who’s flying into town along with 150 other prisoners. Michael is so excited to see his father’s plane approaching, he accidentally lets go of his kite, which zips up and gets lodged in the plane’s engine, blowing it up, crashing the plane, and killing everyone on board.
Michael’s mom is so mad that he killed his father, she disowns him, forcing Michael into an orphanage. From there, Michael somehow finds himself filming a wedding, where he accidentally knocks over a candle, starting a fire and killing everyone at the wedding. When the news plays Michael’s footage, an aspiring filmmaker named Steven Spielburger recognizes Michael’s insane filmmaking talent and adopts him.
Steven then sets about teaching Michael how to be a director. He teaches him how to act (by robbing a bank). He teaches him about wardrobe (by breaking into Macy’s and stealing clothes). And he teaches him how to man a camera (by making him walk across a tightrope above a canyon while filming).
As this is happening, Michael must fight his pyromaniac urges and his desire to blow up as many things as possible. He must also avoid the mob, who’s mad at him because the mob boss’s father was on that Con Air flight he accidentally blew up. But Michael is about to learn some shocking news about his new father, news that threatens to destroy his filmmaking apprenticeship and his love of the perfectly lit shot… forever.
“Michael Bay” definitely brings its share of lols. I particularly liked a lot of the dialogue exchanges. After a 10 year-old Michael Bay attacks his teacher with a makeshift flamethrower and gets sent to the principal’s office, the principal tells his mom. “This is the third fire incident this week.” The school counselor follows up with, “And it’s only Monday.”
Or after Michael Bay killed everybody at the wedding recession by starting a fire and was being arranged in court. The prosecuting victim says, “Judge, this boy’s carelessness killed 30 of my friends!” “Anything else?” “He mouths off, too!” “He mouths off? Jesus.”
Or, when Steven is trying to get Michael to cross the valley while carrying a heavy camera on a tightrope, Michael says, “But. But I’ll die.” Steven responds with, “Boy. Have you looked in the mirror? You’re already dead.” Just imagining that line delivered to a 10 year old boy had me on the floor laughing.
If I had a complaint, it would be that this is the loosest broadest comedy I’ve read all year. The story is never grounded. Sometimes we were so far off the ground we might as well have been in space. But then I started wondering, “Is that the point?”
It seems ridiculous (and kind of barbaric) to kill off 30 innocent people in a fiery death. But maybe this was Tidwell’s subversive commentary on how little Bay respects human life in his own films. It’s meta to the max. The thing is, the script is so wild that it’s hard to make yourself believe that any commentary is actually being done.
Another problem I had was the whole Steven Spielburger character. At first I thought it was supposed to be Steven Spielberg in disguise and we were going to learn that he was secretly Michael Bay’s mentor before something terrible happened that broke them up. But then I realized he was just some random guy named Steven Spielburger. It didn’t make a lot of sense, even in the context of a wild comedy. There were these random references to Steven Spielberg movies as well and all I could think was, “But we’ve established this is just a random guy, lol. Why are we making Spielberg movie references in a Michael Bay biopic?” I couldn’t figure it out.
A somewhat smaller issue is that Michael Bay movies aren’t very memorable. At least in my opinion. So there were a bunch of moments here that I assumed were references to Michael Bay movies but because Michael Bay movies are like popcorn – they’re in and out of your system in a day – I didn’t recognize them.
Take the opening shot with a kid flying a kite. I vaguely remember a famous kite shot in a Michael Bay movie. Maybe Pearl Harbor? Armageddon? Or we meet this crack dealer named Mike Lowrey who Michael has a fleeting friendship with. At the end of their friendship, Michael promises to make a movie called Bad Boys and name one of the characters after him.
I had zero idea that a character in Bad Boys was named Mike Lowrey. 99% of the people on the planet know those two characters as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. I guess there are Bay enthusiasts out there who will fight me on the memorability factor of a Bay movie but, if I’m being honest, the scene I remember more than any other scene from his movies was the animal cracker scene in Armageddon. And not for the right reasons.
This script is light and airy fun. I did laugh. In the end, though, it was too loosey-goosey for my taste. A comedy script should feel effortless. But it should not feel like the writer didn’t put in their full effort. I kinda got the feeling that this script was written in under two weeks which is why it doesn’t hit a ‘worth the read’ for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I am begging -BEGGING – comedy writers to stop using acid trips in their comedy scripts. They are in literally 7 out of every 10 comedy scripts I read. In general, I believe all writers should tattoo the phrase, “I’m not as original as I think I am,” to their foreheads and then, every thirty minutes while in a writing session, go look in the mirror, just to remind yourself that, yes, something like an acid trip would be funny, but if the guy that reads your comedy script has read an acid trip in the last five comedy scripts he’s covered, you’re going to look unoriginal. It’s better to push yourself and come up with that scene that nobody else has yet.
