Ex-Paramount Officer Frank Joins Disney

Richard Frank, who resigned Feb. 28 as president of Paramount’s television group, Monday was named president of the motion picture and television division of Walt Disney Productions.

Frank, 42, succeeds Jeffrey Katzenberg, 34, who has been promoted to the newly created post of division chairman.

With his move, Frank joins at least half a dozen other former Paramount executives who have taken key posts at Burbank-based Disney since last September, when former Paramount Pictures President Michael D. Eisner was named Disney’s chairman and chief executive.

Frank, who worked closely with Katzenberg and Eisner for seven years at Paramount, said in a telephone interview that he weighed offers from other studiosand television station owners but accepted Disney’s offer in part because it offered the opportunity to oversee motion picture production “without having to give up my first love, which is television.”

Frank, a former advertising agency executive, was president of the broadcast division of Chris-Craft Industries Inc., which owns KCOP-Channel 13 in Los Angeles, before joining Paramount.

At Paramount, Frank steered the television division into original programming for non-network affiliated stations and supervised the company’s entry into the home-video market, among other accomplishments. He also co-founded Telerep, a company that sells advertisements for client television stations and that has entered the TV programming business.

“He’s a superb administrator, a superb businessman and he’s got good taste,” Katzenberg said of Frank.