Stanley Jaffe Named Paramount President : Entertainment: The veteran producer may help boost the firm’s sagging film operation.

Paramount Communications Inc., in a surprise move, named veteran film producer Stanley R. Jaffe to the newly created post of president and chief operating officer.

Jaffe, 50, was president of the company’s Paramount Pictures unit in the early 1970s and more recently produced some of its biggest film hits--including “Fatal Attraction” and “The Accused”--during an eight-year partnership with Sherry Lansing.

The appointment may help to strengthen Paramount’s sagging film operation, which has been plagued by overspending and a disappointing performance in the past two years. Jaffe will also join Paramount Communications’ board and its executive committee.

The step is expected to let Martin S. Davis, 63, chairman and chief executive of the New York-based entertainment and publishing company, become more aggressive in pursuing corporate deals. Paramount has been stalking for media-related acquisitions since it raised more than $3 billion in a giant asset sale nearly two years ago.

Paramount has not had a president since David N. (Jim) Judelson, a longtime associate of company co-founder Charles Bluhdorn, resigned the post shortly after Davis assumed the chief executive’s office after Bluhdorn’s death in 1983. The company, then known as Gulf & Western Industries Inc., was a widely diversified conglomerate, but Davis quickly launched a series of divestitures that culminated with the sale of its Associates First Capital Corp. consumer finance unit to Ford Motor Co. in 1989.

In a statement announcing Jaffe’s appointment Monday, Davis said the move “strengthens our management team as we continue to expand our businesses in entertainment and publishing through internal growth and acquisitions.” Jaffe will continue to be based in New York.

During a brief telephone interview, Davis said he didn’t expect the appointment to alter Paramount’s policy of allowing its operating heads--Richard E. Snyder, chairman of the Simon & Schuster publishing unit, and Frank G. Mancuso, chairman of the Paramount entertainment group--wide latitude in managing their operations.

“This should be an enhancement,” Davis said of the operating chiefs’ role under Jaffe. He said the Paramount board had considered a number of candidates for the presidency during the past several months, but he declined to discuss whether Mancuso and Snyder were among them.

Jaffe, a low-key individual who has largely avoided the public eye, did not return a call to his New York office. People close to the executive said he and Davis flew to Los Angeles on Monday to discuss the appointment with Paramount employees.

The son of 91-year-old Columbia Pictures Chairman Emeritus Leo Jaffe, the Paramount president belongs to a family with deep roots in Hollywood. His sister, Andrea, owns a film publicity firm in Los Angeles, while one brother is a screenwriter and another owns a music publishing company.

In 1968, Jaffe produced “Goodbye, Columbus” for Paramount, then moved into the executive ranks in a series of jobs. In the mid-1970s, he served briefly as executive vice president in charge of worldwide production at Columbia, then returned to Paramount, where he produced or co-produced “Bad News Bears,” “Firstborn,” “Black Rain” and other films.

Jaffe directed “Without a Trace” and was set to direct “School Ties” for Paramount this spring.

Lansing, who will continue producing at Paramount, said that film, about anti-Semitism at an elite private boys’ school, will now be shot with another director next summer.