 In summer of 1915, when the Ottoman soldiers rampaged through Kharpert, Michael's mother hid her child in a mulberry bush and prayed that the soldiers would not find him.Both escaped, and moved to Fresno, California.Hagopian received an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and after receiving a doctorate in international relations from Harvard University, he went into cinema and founded the Atlantis Films Company, which produced over fifty documentary films on ethnic minorities and foreign lands.