Alums Unscripted

Sun Devils Make Their Mark On "Reality" Television Shows
By Bill Goodykoontz

Reality shows aren’t as ubiquitous a presence as they once were — for a while there they sprouted like mushrooms after a soggy rain — but thanks to a few of the better ones they’ve definitely established themselves as a major part of the television landscape for the foreseeable future.

Since the action is presumably spontaneous, the shows rely on snazzy editing instead of snappy writing to do the storytelling. Thus, they’re cheaper to produce than traditional sitcoms and dramas; not having to dip into the pool of union actors helps keep productions costs down, as well.

But their heroes and villains have to come from someplace, and for at least a few of the higher-profile reality series, that place lately has included ASU.

Whether it’s trying to impress Donald Trump on “The Apprentice” or doing the off-camera set-up preparations to make the on-camera work go smoothly on “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” Sun Devils have made their mark. No, they haven’t walked off with millions, but that’s the thing about reality shows: You don’t always have to finish first to win.

Stephanie Myers, The Apprentice

It’s easy to describe Myers, who graduated from the W.P. Carey School of Business in 1997, as driven. After all, she did that and then some when uttering one of the show’s more memorable lines: “I always get what I want, and I never take no for an answer.”

Well, maybe not always. Trump fired Myers, who works as a consultant for IBM in San Diego, in the most-recent season of the show, which ended in May. But she lasted till the final eight, her confidence very much intact.

“ I have a lot more skills than what they showed, but they can only show so much,” she said. “They didn’t show me having fun, my real personality.”

If that sounds as if Myers is complaining about her experience on the show, she’s not.

“ I went through the Trump master’s program, and I ended up with the Trump MBA,” she said. “That was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life . . . I learned a lot from Mr. Trump, and I still talk to some of his executives to this day. You meet a lot of people, and you can learn from everybody.”

Particularly, she said, she learned from her professors at ASU.

“ Looking back on it, I’d say every business class I took helped me on the show,” she said. “Time management, simple management skills were important. Everything I do on the show or in a day involves negotiations. You’ve got to have negotiation skills, and my basis for negotiation skills came from ASU. . . I negotiate every day. I negotiate with my boyfriend at home about who does the dishes.”

While some of the tasks she was assigned during the show may have seemed a little bizarre — Myers delivered pizzas by subway to a Brooklyn construction site in one episode — she found value in the experience.

“ I take bigger risks now,” Myers said. “I thought that I was a great risk taker. No. Mr. Trump always said, ‘Stephanie, take bigger risks, take bigger risks, take bigger risks.’ He taught me a valuable lesson. Don’t take little risks. Take big ones. Worst-case scenario, you’re back to where you started.”

“ The Apprentice” is different from most reality shows in that it generally selects as contestants people who are already accomplished — Myers had the job with IBM before Trump came calling — and aren’t necessarily looking to use their flirtation with fame to make their fortune. But once you’ve tasted life on the other side of the camera, the siren song is hard to resist. First off was the now-standard carousel of post-firing interviews and photo shoots. While she posed for FHM, “I will not do Playboy,” she said. “I’m a businesswoman first. . . . I won’t sacrifice my business integrity for anybody.”

And though she’s back at work, don’t be surprised if you find Myers back in the spotlight eventually.

“ My dream job would be to have a morning talk show,” she said, perhaps modeled on “Good Morning Arizona.”

“ We need that in San Diego,” she said. “I think it would be great to have a business perspective on it. Like Maria Bartiromo (of the Wall Street Journal), but Stephanie’s perspective.”

Rick Dircks, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

The amount of time Rick Dircks, who graduated in 1982 with a degree in marketing, spent on camera during the March 13 episode was easy to calculate: none.

“ Eh, you don’t want me on-camera,” he said.

Fair enough. But with “Extreme Makeover,” what goes on behind the cameras preparing for houses to be torn apart and rebuilt is interesting enough to have spawned a spin-off that shows exactly that. Certainly what Dircks and his crew did was impressive.

“ The very first part of the project is getting everything out of there,” Dircks, the executive vice president of Dircks Moving Services, said. “They needed to do it as quickly as we possibly could.”

Quickly? That’s an understatement. They emptied the house of everything in about three-and-a-half hours.

“ That’s a move that normally would take two full days,” he said. “We came in with the army, and we did it very quickly.”
The “army” consisted of five trucks and about 20 movers, nearly half the local crew - on a Sunday, no less.

That’s no surprise. The house being redone belonged to the family of 8-year-old Kassandra Okvath, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2003. She had requested that the producers repaint the children’s floor of the University Medical Center in Tucson. They did - and while one crew was doing that, another was back in Gilbert tearing down her family’s old home and building a new one.

“ People wanted to do this,” Dircks said. “Normally getting people to work on Sunday is like pulling teeth. . . . Our people were lining up, wanting to do it.”

Dircks knew his company wouldn’t play a large part in what eventually aired, and that was fine with him. “We knew our best publicity going in is the local media and however we promoted it,” he said.

And if you drive around with Sparky painted on your truck, you’re no stranger to local media.

“ It’s good for the university, it’s good for us,” Dircks said of the Sparky design. His company handles moving chores for the athletic department, and he is a big Sun Devil fan. The company is also official mover for the ASU Alumni Association members. Dircks’ company has also been involved with the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Phoenix Suns and “we were involved with the Coyotes, once upon a time,” before the National Hockey League lockout.

That leaves only the Arizona Cardinals among local teams he hasn’t provided moving services for.

“ We’ll be happy to do it for the Cardinals,” Dircks said.

Bill Goodykoontz is a television critic for the Arizona Republic, and is an adjunct instructor for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

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Photo: NBC/Universal

Stephanie Myers (left) on "The Apprentice"

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Photo: Dave Tevis

Rick Dircks (standing)