Joss Whedon and Michael Bay were classmates !

I had no idea.



Bay

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He graduated from Wesleyan University in 1986, majoring in both English and Film.[15][16] He was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity and a favorite student of film historian Jeanine Basinger.[17] For his graduate work, he attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena where he also studied film.[18]

Quote:

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 BruceWillis, Ben Affleck, Owen Wilson, and Steve Buscemi—a honey of a pledge class, though you wonder what Buscemi would bring to the spring formal. Bay's fealty to the Greek aesthetic made him something of a curiosity at Wesleyan. While his classmates angsted over mannered senior projects, Bay submitted a film about a very good-looking guy driving very fast in his yellow Porsche. The movie's exuberant texture, says Basinger, was recognizably that of a "Michael Bay film."

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Jeanine Basinger says a lot of good things about Bay, here's her review of Armageddon:

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Quote:

Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion. (It was no surprise to me to learn that as a thirteen-year-old, director Michael Bay blew up his toy train set with firecrackers so he could photograph the result with his mom’s 8mm camera.) If he weren’t working in Hollywood, Bay would be the darling bad boy of the intelligentsia. As it is, he sometimes falls under suspicion for having been nominated for multiple MTV Awards, and for having won every accolade available to directors of commercials, including the Clio and the prestigious Director’s Guild of America “Commercial Director of the Year” title. Armageddon is only his third movie, but it came under fire from some critics who had praised his second, The Rock, and for its same characteristics: fast cutting, impressive special effects, and a minimum of exposition.

Whedon

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Whedon graduated from Wesleyan University in 1987



If you look at this book preview and go to page 13:

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Basinger qualifies him as one of the top 4 or 5 students she's ever had. There's a three page interview about the kind of student Joss was.



Here's a comment Joss Whedon made on Michael Bay's student film:

Quote:

The “Avengers” director Joss Whedon, who was a classmate of Mr. Bay’s at Wesleyan University in the 1980s, remembered him as being “very sweet” and for making a student film in which Mr. Bay’s car, a yellow Porsche, featured prominently. “It was way better than mine,” Mr. Whedon said of the film. “I don’t mind making fun of his because I burned the negative of mine.”

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Here's an article on many of Jeanine Basinger's former students talking about her:

http://ift.tt/1n3cdfo