My Brilliant Career: Hollywood Ending

For agent Michael Van Dyck (BSM ’81), the entertainment business is more than just a career. It’s a calling. Which is fitting, considering that his life sounds a little like a Hollywood script.

Van Dyck’s journey began when he graduated from Tulane in 1981. Ambivalent about the idea of joining a big company, he moved to Hawaii to clear his head and ended up getting involved with the Chart House restaurant chain. He went through the company’s management training program and then traveled the country on behalf of the chain, managing restaurants in Lahaina, Hawaii, Oceanside, Calif., and Sun Valley, Idaho.

After a few years in the restaurant business, Van Dyck was ready for a change. Reconnecting with an ex-fraternity brother, he moved to Dallas on a whim and started an oil company. Van Dyck may not have loved the oil business, but he loved living the life of a Texas oilman.

“I think it was more about the ’80s, the decade I was in my 20s,” Van Dyck explains. “Candidly, it was just a way to make a lot of money and have enough free time to have fun. I mean I was in my 20s. That was what it was all about.”

At the time, the television series “Dallas” was still among the top-rated shows in the nation, and by chance Van Dyck happened to work at the same office building where the show filmed some of its location scenes. Van Dyck became friendly with the show’s executive producer and members of the cast and crew, and the more he talked with them, the more he thought about the idea of going into the entertainment business.

Then, in 1987, Van Dyck was seriously injured in a water skiing accident. While lying in a hospital bed recovering, he had a religious experience that led to a reassessment of his life. In addition to reawakening his faith in God, the experience refocused Van Dyck on his career. Everyone has a purpose in life, he concluded, and his purpose wasn’t to be in the oil business. It was to be in the entertainment business.

“I realized it was time to embark on what was more of a calling than just what was in front of me,” he says. “I knew what I had to do and there was no doubt in my mind.”

For the third time in his life, he changed careers overnight. Without knowing a soul, he moved to Los Angeles and got a job in the mailroom at Triad Artists, one of the big three talent agencies at the time.

“I went from making well over six figures in the oil business to making $18,000 a year,” he says. “My brand new BMW 533i was repossessed by the bank. I remember sitting in the mailroom thinking this isn’t a calling, it’s a nightmare. But it was out of that place of need that everything good was built into my life. I think starting from scratch was an appropriate place for me to begin.”

Van Dyck had initially planned to become a theatrical agent, representing actors and actresses, but he quickly realized there was more opportunity in television packaging, which involves representing writers, producers and directors. He worked his way up to being an assistant to a literary agent at Triad, but the prospect of working in the background for four years—the typical length of time it takes an assistant to become an agent—was too long for Van Dyck. He jumped ship to a smaller agency that promised to make him an agent in six months.

“It all starts with agents,” Van Dyck says. “You package the shows, you attach talent, you go into networks and you sell them. I’m a salesman at the end of the day.”

In his first two years as an agent, he sold seven spec feature scripts, including the scripts to what would become True Lies and Big Momma’s House, before moving on to television packaging.

Since joining Paradigm Agency in 2004 as a television literary agent, Van Dyck and Paradigm have packaged such critically acclaimed shows as “24,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Rescue Me,” “The Good Wife” and “The Event,” but his biggest success thus far has been “Dexter,” Showtime’s breakout hit about a Miami forensic expert who moonlights as a serial killer.

“We had an Emmy-Award-winning writer from ‘The Sopranos’ who successfully adapted the book Darkly Dreaming Dexter into a one-hour drama,” Van Dyck says. “Michael C. Hall became available after ‘Six Feet Under’ was canceled, and he agreed to star as Dexter.

“‘Dexter’ has branded Showtime,” he adds. “The chance of having a series not only get picked up by a network but also become a success and brand the network is incredibly slim.”

Looking back on the twists and turns of his career, Van Dyck can’t help but see it from a spiritual perspective.

“All of us are born for a purpose, and it’s a relationship with God that makes that purpose clear,” he says. “There are certain jobs, certain career paths, where you can utilize everything you are naturally born with, and, for me, that purpose has been the entertainment business.”