Guiding the Future of Film : It took experience. It took vision. It took an inside track to Hollywood’s elite. Elizabeth Monk Daley put it all together to place USC on the cutting edge.

Part of the problem was the buildings.

No, not problem. Elizabeth Monk Daley hates the word problem . “Let’s say, a real challenge , which is by far the better word,” says the dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television.

OK. So the school had this real challenge--overcoming the impact of a cluster of campus buildings named after such industry mucky-mucks and USC supporters as George Lucas and Johnny Carson.

“You look at the names on the buildings and you say, ‘USC Cinema’s a real rich school.’ Well, hello . It’s not.”

Indeed, when Daley became the nation’s first female film school dean in May, 1991, USC Cinema was lugging an $800,000 deficit. Endowment? Ha.

And now, a mere 3 1/2 years later, it has not only paid off the deficit, but it’s more than $8 million closer to its $60-million endowment goal. How?

“A lot of help from our friends,” she says somewhat demurely.

In other words, by doing what the industry does best--networking. And Daley is a networker par excellence. In her relatively short stint as dean, she has parlayed her talent for it into a bouquet of forward-looking changes for USC.

For her trouble, USC recently gave her a second top job--as executive director of the new Annenberg Center for Communication. The center was spawned last year with a $120-million grant from media mogul and former Ambassador Walter Annenberg to nurture research and teaching about new and interactive media. Daley, selected from more than 30 candidates, was prized for her film and television experience and contacts, USC President Steven Sample says.

“The other thing Dean Daley has in my judgment is her great vision,” he says. “I think more than any other person I’ve ever met, she can articulate and understands what’s happening in this communications revolution. She has a great ability to inspire and motivate other people.”

Under Daley’s tenure, the film school, which she continues to head, has done more with its money than sock it away. It has wooed advice and financial support from a wide swath of industry professionals; made the first university-produced feature-length motion picture; hired a former William Morris agent to help ease students’ transition into the real world, and attracted a $2-million donation from Time Warner Inc. to endow the dean’s chair and get her salary off the annual operating tab of $21 million.

Chunks of the curriculum also have been turned on their heads: USC has cross-fertilized new programs and degrees with the engineering and business schools; founded a master’s degree program for computer animators, and established a seminar series for minority screenwriters.

Even industry grown-ups are being invited to share USC Cinema’s glimpse into the next century: The school recently formed the Entertainment Technology Center, a think tank of pros in entertainment, computers and technology that’s looking at new ways to join forces. One embryonic ETC blueprint targeted at the film industry, Holly Net, would consolidate a wide range of motion picture services in a computer database. The plan is for USC to help provide long-term R&D; for Hollywood, which tends to be focused on short-term goals and profits.

“It’s extremely important to me that we constantly have our finger on the pulse of what’s going on out there,” Daley says, “and that we’re taking a long-term look at where this industry’s headed and that we’re making sure that everybody who leaves here is ready for the next 10, 15, 20 years.”

Her approach appears to be paying off. Last spring, USC and New York University tied as the nation’s top film schools, according to the U.S. News & World Report Annual Guide to America’s Best Graduate Schools, which weighs scholarship, curriculum and quality of faculty. USC Cinema, shepherding more than 900 students a year, has graduated such industry luminaries as Ron Howard, James Ivory, Robert Zemeckis and David Wolper.

One industry executive recruited by Daley to help steer the ETC lays much of the credit for USC Cinema’s latest advances at the dean’s feet.

“I always say that figuring out what to do is 5% of the assignment and figuring out how to do it and getting it done is 95%, and she’s really great at both but particularly at getting it done,” says Steven Koltai, Warner Bros. senior vice president for corporate strategic planning and development. “She has a way of dealing with people and motivating people that is quite extraordinary.”

Even Daley’s office bears evidence of someone who focuses on other people. Emmy nomination plaques lining a wall honor “Tell Them I’m a Mermaid” and “Who Parks in Those Spaces,” TV documentaries about the disabled that she produced for Taper Media Enterprises in the mid-’80s. Daley, 51, is equally unassuming, given to easy smiles and conservative suits in muted colors. A faint lilt in her voice betrays her Dallas beginnings.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Daley’s mother was a teacher, now retired. What is surprising, though, is that her mother’s experience initially turned Daley off to a career in education. She had a ringside view of the difficulties of living on a paltry teacher’s salary after her father, a housing contractor, died when she was 12.

“This woman did not have an easy life,” Daley says of her mother. “And I can remember saying as a little girl that I would never teach. But obviously a university’s a little different situation. They take much better care of us.”

Still, Dean Daley is very much her mother’s child.

“It wasn’t teaching as much as she was very interested in theater and she did a lot of storytelling. My earliest memories with her are of being taken places to tell stories. She would go tell stories in hospitals and drag me along and let me tell part of the story.”

Daley studied theater at Tulane University, and then took off for Paris for a year during which she studied mime and commedia dell’arte with Jacques LeCoq and acting at the Comedie Francaise.

When she returned to the tumultuous United States in 1965, Daley pursued a doctorate in theater, with a minor in film, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. There, she hid from the furor surrounding the Vietnam War, a climate that helped breed her concern for social problems.

She followed her first husband to Washington, D.C., where she helped set up an experimental theater program for the Wolftrap Foundation. From there, Daley segued into experimentation with video, forming Videocraft, an independent producer of documentaries for public television, the federal government and the private sector.

By the mid-’70s, Daley was divorced and raising her daughter, Shannon, now a 24-year-old clinical psychology student working toward a doctorate at UCLA. She met her current husband, American Film Institute Deputy Director James Hindman, while they were teaching at American University, Daley’s professional home from 1978-82.

Daley and Hindman recognized, however, that their TV and film production opportunities would be limited in Washington. When AFI offered Hindman a job in Los Angeles in 1982, they shipped their careers west--they now live in Santa Monica--and Daley spent five years producing TV movies and specials for Taper Media Enterprises. That company was swallowed by MGM/UA Television, and Daley developed a couple of HBO movies for it before launching her own production company in 1988. Daley/Hodges Productions has developed cable-TV movies.

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It was while Daley was finishing a project for MGM that people started calling her with the same proposition.

“A friend called and said, ‘You know you’re always talking about how important you think it is for women and minorities to be more involved in the industry and about new kinds of creative work getting done.” Rather than take another studio deal, would she consider USC’s opening for a production program chair?

Daley initially balked at the idea, then remembered that she’d been impressed by the USC interns she had worked with.

“They knew that they weren’t supposed to direct the picture, but they would put on their gloves before they touched a hot light,” she says. “And there was a professionalism about them that I really liked.”

So after a USC recruiter called, Daley agreed to join the school in 1989 as chair of the Film and Television Production Program.

“I like the ethics of the place. I liked the sense of the ethical responsibility of media. I also liked their sense of responsibility to another generation.

“And it’s a pretty phenomenal legacy. You know, this place is 65 years old. And when you look at the filmmakers they’ve turned out, you thought, ‘Well, if there’s a chance to kind of shepherd that and keep that going, that’s really a very worthwhile thing to spend some time doing.’ ” At the end of her first year, then-Dean Frank Daniel resigned to return to screenwriting.

“The next thing I was in the provost office with him saying, ‘Your colleagues think you ought to be dean of this school,’ ” she says. “It was just such an overwhelming mandate from the faculty to do it.”

Daley became dean and quickly went to work. Her top priority was to recruit a board of councilors, a band of the industry’s heaviest hitters who could help with fund-raising, networking and carving out school policy to keep USC in tune with the needs of the business.

She picked up the phone and asked for a meeting with producer Ray Stark because he’d endowed USC’s Peter Stark Motion Picture Producing Program, named after his son who died in 1970.

Stark picked up the phone and called producer and former Columbia Pictures chief Frank Price, who agreed to see Daley.

Price picked up the phone and lined up a board, which includes among its 16 members David Geffen, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Brandon Tartikoff, Marvin Davis and David Wolper.

Voila .

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Price, who chairs the board, applauds Daley’s ability to recruit people to the cause.

“I liked what she had to say about her approach to the school,” Price says. “I was particularly interested in her attitudes about making sure that there would be a great emphasis on recruiting women and minorities for the student body.”

Indeed, the board’s makeup illustrates the problem. Much like the industry itself, the panel is made up, except for Sidney Poitier and Marcy Carsey, of white men.

The board is “mostly guys and it’s mostly white,” Daley says. “And one of the goals of the board when they begin to set out their mission, and one of the reasons they’re anxious to raise endowment, is they firmly believe as I do that this school is one of the major gateways into this industry.

“About 75% of our grads walk straight out of here into Hollywood. Now if we can diversify the school, then we have somehow begun to diversify this industry. And yes, it’s ethically right to diversify it. It’s also just darn good business.”

Key to that strategy is raising endowment, so the school can depend less on its steep tuition and offer more financial aid. Tuition is $16,000 a year, and students are told to expect to spend $25,000 figuring in living expenses. Even with USC Cinema far short of its endowment goal--which yields interest that ultimately frees up funds for the operating budget--70% of the students receive financial aid toward tuition.

“At this point, we’re very heavily tuition-dependent,” Daley says, “which means that if I get a terrific minority student walking in the door or a terrific--doesn’t have to be a minority--a terrific student walking in the door who I’d really like to fund, I often don’t have the flexibility to do that. And what endowment provides you is stability. Otherwise, it’s much too volatile a situation.”

So last June, USC Cinema saw to it that a chunk of the industry suited up for a 65th anniversary benefit, the first fund-raising bash in recent memory. Art Buchwald spoke. Eight hundred supporters ate chicken. Benefit co-chair Steven Spielberg regaled the audience even though USC Cinema had rejected him because of crummy grades: “Standards were so high that many of today’s finest filmmakers were unable to attend.”

One who slipped in was George Lucas, among the school’s most prominent supporters, who was given the first USC Award for Leadership in the Entertainment Industry that evening. Lucas had spearheaded a $12-million fund-raising drive a decade earlier to build five of the seven buildings in the Cinema complex, and Daley’s award presentation patted the school’s back as well as that of its illustrious alum.

“In nearly every year since 1950 at least one USC graduate has been nominated for an Academy Award,” she told the black-tied crowd at the Beverly Hilton, trotting out the school’s favorite stats. “Ten of the 12 highest-grossing films have had USC alumni in key creative and/or production positions. . . . George Lucas is one of the best measures of the efficacy of (USC’s) educational philosophy. He once said of USC that, ‘almost everything I learned, I learned there.’ ”

Daley said something else that night revealing about her deanship: “In celebrating the school, we celebrate cinema--USC and the film industry are inextricably intertwined. We intend, and have every reason to believe, that it will remain so.”

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That wasn’t always the case. Marcia Rodrigues, a film editor and former wife of Lucas who had also been active in the capital construction drive, was given no voice in the school’s direction until Daley called her six months into her tenure as dean.

“Wow,” Rodrigues thought. “It’s about time.”

They met at a San Francisco restaurant and Rodrigues jumped at the chance to rewrite her educational script for new generations.

“After the students leave with their degrees in hand, they’re just cut loose in a big cold world that couldn’t care less,” Rodrigues says. “So we had lots of discussions about what could be done to help bridge that gap.

“My second concern was that many, many, many of the film students want to work on motion pictures, and it’s really unfortunate that the school can’t provide them with that experience because of limited funding and a zillion reasons.”

Then Rodrigues put donations where her mouth was. She gives USC more than $100,000 a year to fund the office of Larry Auerbach, a veteran of the William Morris Agency who advises students on making the leap to the real world. She also donated $1 million toward the first full-length feature film ever financed by a university and intended for public distribution. That project is still in post-production and title-testing, but Rodrigues has already kicked in another million for a second feature.

Auerbach, who has observed Daley’s leadership style since he joined the school two years ago, says one of her strengths is her ability to work a room.

“She fights hard to get the money out of the university to run the school properly,” he says. “She’s tough but good. I see the company she keeps in the university, and I think that’s important. You’ve got to move around, and when you need help you know where to go, and she reaches out and gets it.”

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But Daley doesn’t just court bigwigs.

Says Bob Laws, a graduate student in production who works as an assistant in the dean’s office: “She’s very busy and she deals with very high-powered people, but she always has time to listen to me and to my comments about the curriculum.”

For Daley, running a film school is like making a movie--it’s a collaborative venture. Some observers have wondered whether it’s too collaborative, whether it stifles creativity to bring the full commercial weight of Hollywood to bear on budding careers.

“You know, I get asked questions (by other academics) like, am I embarrassed by our close relationship to Hollywood? The answer is, ‘No, not at all.’

“I think people ought to experiment. And we try to encourage people to take chances. The message you really want to get across is that trying to duplicate what Hollywood is doing this year probably is not even the best way to be successful in a commercial career. You know, Frank Price has pointed out that he didn’t make ‘Boyz N the Hood’ because it was like what was made last year. He made it because he saw a unique and original voice in (USC grad John) Singleton.

“And the message I really want to get across is not to be experimental or commercial. It’s to find your own voice.”

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Elizabeth Monk Daley

Age: 51.

Native?: No; born in Dallas, lives in Santa Monica.

Family: Married to James Hindman, deputy director of the American Film Institute. One daughter, Shannon Daley, 24, a clinical psychology graduate student at UCLA.

Passions: Movies, natch; her new getaway in Taos, N.M., and exotic travel. “My husband and I spent last summer in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. We did some lectures in Burma and visited with filmmakers, but the rest of it was truly because we love to get to know other cultures.”

On courting Hollywood for cash: “People understand that when you fund something like USC, it’s not really charity. You’re investing in the future of your industry. And this is something we need to do. If you want a next generation, you’ve got to pay for it.”

On “enlightened self-interest”: “Enlightened self-interest is a real good thing. And I mean enlightened is the operative word. If you’ve got a great script and somebody’s looking for a project, you serve each other very well. It’s a win-win situation. When we get companies in here and they give us equipment and money and they help us, it’s a win-win situation. We win; we educate our students better. They win big-time because they get product loyalty. They get good feedback on their equipment. And they’ve usually met the future filmmakers.”

On running the show: “One of the secrets of good stewardship is to be sure, when you have people who want to help you, that you find ways that are meaningful to them to let them help you, instead of trying to tell them what they should be doing.”