Dean of USC Film, TV School Plots a Controversial Course

Unabashedly provocative, Frantisek Daniel has emerged as what one USC student describes as “our own David Puttnam.”

Puttnam is the outspoken Englishman who twitted Hollywood for its faults during his 1 1/2 years at the helm of Columbia Pictures. In much the same spirit, Czechoslovakia-born Daniel has made plenty of waves since leaving Columbia University to become dean of USC’s Film and TV School in May of 1986.

One of his stronger opinions applies to the artistic bent of USC students before he began changing the program. “Most of them were great directors of mechanisms. They directed the freeways beautifully. But when actors, human beings, step in, they were weak,” Daniel says.

To overcome such weaknesses, the 61-year-old Daniel has been tinkering with the curriculum, scrambling for new money and, generally, exhorting students to worry less about becoming technicians than storytellers.

Though avid for his students’ commercial success, Daniel is also an admirer of the European conservatory approach to film education, which emphasizes extensive humanities training and close student-mentor relationships that extend long into professional life. Thus, he is broadening literature requirements at USC and urging students to take more courses in music and the arts.

Originally a music student, the bearded, Hemingwayesque dean studied film at Prague’s Film and Television Academy and Moscow’s State Institute of Cinema. He has written 18 feature scripts and produced or developed 40 movies, including “The Shop on Main Street,” which won an Oscar as best foreign-language picture for 1965.

Daniel’s biggest complaint about USC was weak writing. To shore up the school’s script department, he recruited working writers like David Rintels and Frank Pierson to serve as adjunct professors, and soon plans to match Columbia, UCLA and other schools by offering a graduate screenwriting degree.

Daniel’s thoughts on the business of film education can be salty. A sampler:

-- On the impatience of film students: “All schools create people who behave like fools. They have the mentality of servants and want to be seen as great masters. To go through the journeyman training seems too bad or too humiliating.”

-- On the teachability of writing: “It can certainly be learned, just like music. When students go through their etudes, inevitably, they end up writing a script. There’s no way to escape it. . . . Whether you have talent, that is something else.”

-- On the success rate at USC: “The percentage of successes at Columbia is higher. Here you have 600 students, versus 35 or 40 a year at Columbia. But you have had the same number of successes (in landing industry jobs).”

Such opinions haven’t always endeared Daniel to USC faculty members, some of whom privately complain that he shoots from the hip and doesn’t understand their programs. “Problems aren’t going to be solved by bringing in a bunch of adjuncts to tell you what’s bad,” says one professor.

But, recent graduate Mary Beth Fielder says the dean’s broader approach to learning is long overdue. “In my four years at the school,” maintains Fielder, “nobody asked who I was, what I thought about.”