Fade in: Bauer Center North, present day. Second floor.

Faint sounds of copy machines down the hall. Professor Michael Riley is eating yogurt at his desk in his office. A framed production poster of London’s stage adaptation of Hamlet is to his left. Next to it hangs another framed picture, this one of his first film students with Hollywood director Delbert Mann. Riley stands, offering a handshake to his guest, pointing to a chair across from his own. Is this interrupting his lunch hour? "Not at all," he answers kindly. "Have a seat."

When Riley’s last class ends in May, so will a career that has spanned 34 years, and Riley is still grappling with what to say to those last students—how best to eulogize three decades of teaching literature and film studies. Of all the things Riley talks about in the next hour, it’s the reality of issuing that final goodbye that makes his voice a little tremulous. People have sometimes asked him why he didn’t take his film interests to a bigger college or university—a place like UCLA or NYU. "And the simplest answer is that I love it here," Riley says. "Certainly there are attractions to being involved in (larger) programs, but I really wouldn’t trade that for the freedom that I’ve had here to do whatever I wanted to do."

Dissolve to: Dallas, October 1961.

Riley is in his early 20s, and his best friend, Stan Rice, is getting married—to a pleasant woman named Anne O’Brien. The newlyweds move to San Francisco, and Riley heads to Southern California for grad school. Despite living hours away, they stay in touch with each other while earning their respective degrees, with Riley often joining the Rices for Christmas in their Bay Area apartment. One evening in 1966, Anne presents Riley with a 66-page typewritten story called Nicholas and Jean. He sits down with the manuscript with no expectations, shocked to find it "mesmerizing."

"I suddenly took Anne very seriously as a writer," he says. The manuscript has the earmarks—mood, tone, and voice—of what will be characteristic of the gothic, best-selling novels that Anne Rice would later write.

Up until that breakthrough novel, says Riley: "Anne was the anonymous little wife typing away in the back bedroom, quite literally!" And he watched their lives suddenly metamorphose into an extraordinary success story. "I knew Anne and Stan when they didn’t have enough money to pay for their telephone bill in San Francisco!" says Riley, laughing.

Michael Riley in 1970