Cranking up the Disney machine: President Richard Frank hikes Walt Disney Studios' movie, TV output, maps route to superhighway.

When Richard Frank was growing up in Bayside, N.Y., in the 1950s, his family had the lone television set in a group of duplexes. The small television with a grainy picture had a large magnifying glass sitting in front so everyone could see "Zorro" and "American Bandstand" on that small screen.

Today,

Frank, 51, himself casts a large picture in Hollywood. As president of Walt Disney Studios, he is responsible for all production, marketing and distribution of Disney's movies and television shows. The company's collection of movie marketing/production units, Touchstone, Hollywood and Caravan Pictures, all report to him as well as the venerable Walt Disney Pictures. Since joining the Burbank-based entertainment conglomerate in 1985, Frank has been one of the architects of the studio's production explosion. When he joined the studio, Disney was producing just 10 films a year. But this year, 60 films will come out of the pipeline.

Some of Disney's most successful films -- including "Pretty Woman," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and "Aladdin" -- have come out of the studio since Frank, Jeffrey Katzenberg (chief executive of Disney Studios and Frank's boss) and Michael Eisner, (chief executive of parent Walt Disney Co.) have been together. Frank admits that last summer's crop was not as strong as in years past, but says he is confident the studio has blockbusters in its upcoming animated films "The Lion King" this summer and "Pocahontas" next year. On the TV side, Disney has become a major force in network programming and now supplies 28 hours of shows, including the sitcoms "Home Improvement," "Empty Nest," "The Sinbad Show" and "Blossom."

During Frank's tenure, The Disney Channel has gone from a start-up to 7 million subscribers, making it the second-largest pay cable channel. Only HBO is larger. He is also responsible for the studio's lone broadcast television station, KCAL-Channel 9, a Los Angeles station that has been battered by the recession and hasn't returned the kind of profits Frank had envisioned when Disney acquired the station in 1988 for $320 million. The station is profitable, Frank said, but the company doesn't release specific breakdowns for its various entities.

Frank is Disney's unofficial futurist and explores ways in which Disney might plug into the emerging electronic superhighway. Despite that heady mission, he considers himself a low-tech guy. He still has trouble programming his VCR.

As president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Frank organized and recruited everyone from Vice President Al Gore to Disney rivals Rupert Murdoch (Fox Inc.), Michael Schulhof (Sony Corporation of America) and Barry Diller (QVC Network Inc.) to speak at the academy's highly publicized "Superhighway Summit" last month at UCLA.

Frank pulled the event together in only six weeks and hosted the daylong program. The event captured reams of front-page coverage in the national press, and executives in the industry are crediting Frank with single-handedly revitalizing the academy.

"The academy needed to step forward, and it was time for the academy to be known for something more than just giving out the Emmy awards," Frank says. "In my job here at Disney, I see many aspects of the convergence of communication businesses. And this is on the minds of many people in our industry. "At the summit, we were able to define the two driving forces -- programming and the pipes (cable wire, phone lines). The question is not if this electronic highway will be built, but when. It will be coming sooner rather than later." Unlike the generation of hotshot "baby moguls" who have held influential studio posts, Frank has paid his due and made several career switches to get to the top in Hollywood.

At the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, Frank enrolled in the architecture school, but discovered he didn't like foreign languages. To avoid the architecture school's language requirement, he switched to the business school to get a degree in marketing.

Frank now wishes he had learned foreign languages because much of Disney's growth has been coming in the international market. As a result, he spends much time abroad.

Beginning his career on Madison Avenue working for BBDO, a major advertising agency, Frank focused on media planning and buying before he left the agency side and came to Los Angeles to become sales manager at KTLA-Channel 5 in the late 1960s. That post led to the presidency of KCOP-Channel 13, and he was promoted to the president of Chris-Craft Industries' broadcast division. Chris-Craft owned television stations including KCOP.

Frank rode his television success into the studio system in 1977 by joining Paramount Communications Inc., where he was president of the studio's television group. "Cheers," "Family Ties" and "Taxi" were among the hits Frank worked on. At Paramount, he worked alongside Katzenberg and Eisner and, when they moved to Disney in the early 1980s, Frank followed.

He says he and his Disney cohorts have decided not to get involved in the hardware side of the superhighway and will remain committed to programming. This strategy differs from that of Disney's main competitor in the movie business, Warner Bros. Inc., which, through its parent, Time Warner Inc., is investing $1 billion in a new video on demand system for its Queens, N.Y., cable television system over the next five years, according to Gerald Levin, chief executive of Time Warner.

"We don't plan to invest in cable systems, and we don't own our own theaters. But I'm never going to say we never will," Frank says. "It's not our philosophy to be scattered, and that is why we have done well and are well received in the financial markets. We are an easy-to-understand company.

"We believe programming will drive the electronic highway. Consumers don't care how many wires connect into the back end of their TVs and computers. They only care that they can turn it on and look at something."

Frank's task is to broaden Disney's programming, and he is looking into many different ways to accomplish that. Educational programming, game shows and interactive programming are all areas he is probing.

A virtual workaholic, Frank works parts of seven days a week, but does spend every Saturday morning on the golf course. He functions on less than five hours of sleep a night and typically goes to bed at 1 a.m., staying up to read scripts.

"I don't have a literary background, and I've not read all the classics, but I wish I did," he says.

Frank spends about 15 percent of his time working for the academy.

Although clearly devoted to the industry, Frank is also protective of his privacy, especially when it is threatened by invasive film crews.

When Universal Television sent its film crews to his neighborhood in Malibu to shoot an episode of "seaQuest DSV," Frank complained because the crew planned to stage late-night gunfire and pyrotechnics near his house. Frank called the Los Angeles County film office to ask if they could postpone the shoot until the weekend.

"This has nothing to do with Universal. I'm handling this strictly as a citizen," Frank told the Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety in a front-page story. Production hours were altered to accommodate Frank. Connections still reign supreme in Hollywood.

Snapshot

Richard Frank

Resident of: Malibu Native of: Brooklyn, N.Y. Age: 51 Education: B.S. in marketing, University of Illinois