DISNEY’S FRANK TACKLES TV ACADEMY PROBLEMS

For the last seven months, Richard Frank has been immersed in the overhaul of Walt Disney Productions. As president of the motion picture and television division, he has been one of the key players in the studio’s aggressive attempt to re-establish itself as a major creative force in Hollywood.

Today, he begins what in some respects may be an even tougher job. He becomes president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

It’s not that the academy, which is best known for bestowing the Emmy Awards for outstanding prime-time TV programming, is beset by problems. Far from it. “It’s in better shape than it’s ever been in,” Frank says.

There are, however, two major issues confronting the academy that are extremely thorny and, unlike the problems that faced Disney, cannot be resolved by money, management edict or business acumen. They are: whether to extend the Emmys to cable programming and whether to reconcile the Los Angeles-based association with its New York-based counterpart, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Frank, 42, has his own feelings about these matters, but he says the nature of the nonprofit organization precludes him from imposing them the way an incoming president of a corporation might.

“The academy is a very political organization--and I don’t mean that in a negative sense,” he explained in an interview this week. It is comprised of 24 branches, representing every aspect of the commercial TV business from studio executives to writers, directors, performers, editors, publicists, animators and hairdressers. Each has its own special interest represented with two members on the board of governors.

“So it’s not like someone walking into a situation where you can say, ‘This is how we’re going to do things,’ ” Frank said.

A professional association with about 4,800 members, the academy devotes much of its energy to noncontroversial efforts to enhance the medium of television. It sponsors seminars and speeches for the benefit of its members, runs an intern program to give college students on-the-job training, operates an archive at UCLA to preserve old TV programs and commercials, and publishes Emmy, a magazine about television.

Its activity with the highest visibility to the general public remains the Emmy Awards, though, and it is there, ironically, that its most sensitive problems lie.

The academy has been grappling for several years with what to do about the burgeoning amount of original programming being done for cable television. At present, cable programs and their producers are prohibited from consideration for an Emmy because of the academy’s definition of a national telecast as one that can be viewed by at least 50% of U.S. homes. Only about 42% of them have access to cable, and not every program is carried on every system.

Angered by the academy’s refusal to change its rules, the cable industry formed its own National Academy of Cable Programming last March and promised to expand and enhance the 6-year-old Awards for Cable Excellence (ACE) prizes. True to its word, nominations in 52 categories were announced Tuesday, up from 32 a year ago.

Frank, who was elected to the academy’s board of governors in 1981 and served the last two years as treasurer, said that resolving the matter is all the more difficult because of the need to consider the interests of ABC, CBS and NBC, which contract to broadcast the Emmy Awards ceremonies on a rotating basis and aren’t keen on promoting the cable competition.

“The networks are contending that the Emmys should recognize excellence in (broadcast) television, which is a valid argument,” Frank said. “The (academy) membership, most of whom are involved in production, thinks they should be for excellence in production for television, no matter how it’s delivered. That’s a valid argument too.”

His own feeling? “I find it personally hard to differentiate between someone who goes out and produces a variety special for HBO and the person who produces a variety show for NBC,” he responded. “Both have their tasks before them; both are striving for excellence.”

But, he added, “80% of our revenue (at the academy) comes from the network license fees (for Emmy telecast rights). So we have to be responsive to the networks’ desires or else they won’t carry the show.”

Frank said that he will press to find a compromise within the next year. The academy has made the abolition of the ACE awards a condition of making cable eligible for the Emmys, and he doubts that that will seem practical if the cable prizes get much more entrenched.

Meanwhile, there is no such deadline on patching up differences with the other broadcast TV academy in New York, nor even a clear-cut mandate to do so, Frank said.

The Los Angeles-based academy broke away from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1977 following a bitter battle over membership standards and voting procedures for the Emmy Awards. The Los Angeles organization got custody of the prime-time Emmys; the New York body was to give out the Emmys for daytime, sports and news programs.

Last August, for the first time since then, the two academies joined to present the daytime Emmys. Frank credited his predecessor, actress Diana Muldaur (who chose not to seek re-election), with making a “giant stride forward” with this cooperative venture.

“So now the question is, can this be used as a springboard to do more toward getting us back together?” he said. “It’s a difficult situation. There are lots of strong feelings about it that never surface until you start poking into it.”

He acknowledged that it doesn’t make “logical sense” to have separate television academies giving out different versions of the same Emmy Award--leading him to lean toward a full reconciliation--but he said it does make “emotional sense” to those members on both sides who were parties to the divorce. Thus the reunification process will continue to be a slow one, he suggested.

Of more immediate concern for Frank is juggling the demands of the academy job with those of his new position at Disney. He admitted that when he had agreed to run for president of the academy, he was still at his old job as president of the TV division at Paramount and hadn’t known he would be changing studios. He decided to stick to his commitment.

“If you’re in a community, you owe it to that community to be a part of it, both on the work side and on the social side,” Frank explained. “If television is an important part of my job every day, I have to give a little back on the nonwork side to an association that does all of these good things--recognizing excellence, promoting it, getting involved in educational activities.”