By Alissa Sandford
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.
Cut to: Claremont Men’s College, 1969.
A 30-year-old Riley, a recent addition to the literature department, enters the recently built Bauer Center, stepping around students who are protesting the Vietnam War who occupy the halls. George Benson, founding president who had "invented this college almost single-handedly, " in Riley’s words, has now been retired as president for more than a year. His replacement, Howard Neville, leaves within a year. Former assistant to the president, Jack L. Stark ’57, is running the school as its acting president. Anti-war protests have hit Claremont hard, and issues of diversity and gender equity, even—gasp!—coeducation—have been raised. CMC, less than 25 years old, finds itself at a crossroads, and Riley, originally hired as a graduate student to teach a few humanities courses, finds himself in the center of it all.
"It certainly began modestly, " Riley recalls of his hiring, "and with no expectation that it would set into motion what turned out to be my life’s career."
"I did arrive at a transitional moment," Riley says. "In some ways I didn’t know the College very well in the period before Jack. I came at the same time that [professors] Ed Haley and John Roth did. And I don’t think I thought of it as a young college then. It was fully functioning and sophisticated and complex and an ongoing enterprise. I only came to realize as time went by, that it was young."
Fade out. Fade in: Fall 1971.
Riley, now teaching literature, gets the green light to teach what will become his signature class, Film and Fiction, under the larger umbrella of film studies—a brand new field for the traditionally business-oriented CMC. Says Riley, "It occurred to me—here we were, sitting on the doorstep of the largest and most influential film industry in the world," he says, "and that it would be foolish not to capitalize on that proximity."
In coming semesters, Riley plans field trips for students to movie studios, and later makes a valuable friend in Oscar-winning director Delbert Mann (1955’s Marty) who would not only visit Riley’s classroom but prove instrumental in bringing in other industry guests. Among them are composer John Williams, cinematographer John Alonzo (China Town), director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid) and actor Richard Thomas, best known as John-Boy on The Waltons. "What I wanted students to know is that a film is made by people," Riley recalls.
"It’s a human artifact. It’s not something that just happens up there. I wanted them to talk with a director or a writer or whatever, to have some glimpse at what the actual human process is; something distinct from just the amusing anecdote or what you might read in a gossip column. I wanted them to talk with people about the kind of choices that were made, and the rationale behind the choices."
Cut to: Several years later, the mid-70s.
Anne Rice is speaking on the CMC campus as a personal guest of Riley’s. No one knows much about her, other than the fact that she is a fledgling writer who is married to Stan Rice—now a celebrated poet and fixture of the Bay Area’s literary scene. Several years later one spring afternoon, there is a message in Riley’s mailbox to call Anne. He does. They talk. She’s just sold her first novel for $12,000. It’s called Interview With The Vampire (1976). A few weeks later, there’s another note in Riley’s mailbox to phone Rice. This time, she’s sold the paperback rights to the story for $750,000, and the movie rights for $150,000.
Dissolve to: 1980.
A previously shelved proposal by College namesake Donald McKenna to build a formal home for the Athenaeum is being revisited, and Riley finds himself central in its coordination. A faculty-student club—a building that would serve as the academic heart of the College—was first discussed in the 1960s, but with building residence halls and faculty offices still the priority, the idea was put on the back burner where it collected dust. During the 1970s, the Athenaeum was housed in the President’s House (which is now the home of the admission office) at 890 Columbia Ave. Central to its functions was the regular melding of minds over meals—where faculty and students could leave the formality of the classroom to interact together, without desks or lecterns separating them. Students and professors dined together at the same table, while mentally chewing on heady fare—be it related to political science, literature or economics.
The new building was to be more than just a home for the speakers series, however. Defining the role of the athenaeum took three years devoted to meetings with architects, refining the vision for this new structure. Says Riley, "What made it exciting was that it wasn’t a building that we had to decide what to put in it. It was an idea, and how would we implement that idea? And what kind of building do we want to house it?"
From the get-go, Riley was asked by Stark to put to use the networking skills he’d developed for film studies. How about bringing in some featured guests that could engage faculty in students in topics of the day? Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel agreed to be one of the first guests—later came notables such as John Irving, William F. Buckley, John McPhee, Francis Fitzgerald, and Peter Drucker.
Says Riley, laughing, "I think what got me The Ath job, frankly, is that Jack decided that if I could get all these people (to my film classes) without paying them a dime—having no budget at all—then maybe I was the guy to run the Ath." And so it was that the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum became the campus hotbed for meaty discussions and fine dining. Riley always had one antenna up reading newspapers or magazines, always on the lookout for potential guests. With a little ingenuity and the telephone, "I found I could get almost anyone" to do it, he says.
Cut to: 1993. The Athenaeum.
Commencement speaker and Paris Review founder George Plimpton is being honored at an Athenaeum dinner. The actor, writer, and editor is approached by Riley with an idea for his influential journal—an interview with author Anne Rice, whose Vampire Chronicles books have now sold millions. Plimpton says yes, and Riley spends the summer reading Anne’s books and prepping for the interviews to follow. One day—after looking over an exhaustive 400 pages of transcript—Riley half-facetiously says, "What I ought to do is slap covers on the damn thing and publish it!" He ends up pitching the idea to Rice on a fax, which she accepts. The book, Conversations With Anne Rice, is published in 1996, and earned raves from Rice fans who assert that Riley’s handling of the project was the "next best thing to being there," in the room, with Rice and Riley.
Dissolve back to: present day. Riley’s office.
Riley’s yogurt sits mostly untouched on his desk. That’s OK, he’ll get to it, he says reassuringly. He is back to the present, thinking about the College and where it is headed. "It will be a different college in some ways," he says. "It’s a kind of organism that evolves and matures and changes and adapts to circumstances." He is thinking about his colleagues and the students and the administrative faculty he will miss. He is thinking about the professor who will take over film studies and make it "his own thing" just as Riley did. There will be a heavier burden on that professor to bring technology into the course in ways that Riley didn’t. He is thinking about the battles that were worth fighting for on campus; and about how whichever side people were on, they were sincere. He is explaining that another reason he stayed here so long is that Claremont McKenna has always been a "fascinating, interesting and lively place to be." And it’s not surprising that one of the toughest questions he has answering is how he will spend his retirement years.
"The first thing I’m not going to do is have a set
of plans or obligations I’m committed to," says Riley, although he
will be working on a book that examines TV’s Golden Age, involving Delbert
Mann. The bigger challenge is figuring out what to say to his students on the
last day of school. "I can’t walk out of the door that day, not saying
goodbye," Riley says. "I’ve really loved them." In all aspects,
he considers himself a blessed man, having been able to combine his literary
interests, his lifelong love of movies, and his deep satisfaction being at CMC.
Says Riley, "I think there became a time, quite clearly, when what I do,
and who I am, became the same thing. It’s made my life wonderfully gratifying."
Dissolve to credits.