HAYWARD -- Cal State Hayward professor James Forsher's love affair with film began before he reached double digits.

The Southern California native's romance blossomed not simply on regular outings to the movie theater, but also through his family's close ties to many of Hollywood's top moguls.

A friendship with the infamous Hollywood manager Colonel Tom Parker led Forsher's mother, Trude, to a job as Elvis Presley's personal secretary. Oddly, Forsher said, his Austrian-born Jewish mother served as a perfect middleperson between Elvis, Parker and the entertainment world.

It is an affair that sowed the seeds of Forsher's nearly three-decades of documentary film-making, racking up a resume of high-profile television series on Hollywood personalities, American life and wartime propaganda.

If Forsher's mother served as a sort of broker in Hollywood, her son is now a liaison between the film industry and eager students at Cal State Hayward.

Blending his cinematic background with academic life, Forsher, 50, is leading the expansion of the department of communication's graduate program and has spearheaded the broadcast news program's return to the air nearly two years ago.

Forsher also brings a piece of his documentary-making past to the department with a collection of about 3,000 films on everything from footage of the Spanish American War to formerly classified Pentagon films about involvement in Vietnam.

They're a resource he makes available to students and hopes will attract new students when the department launches a master's program in documentary filmmaking.

Forsher's office is littered with relics of his filmmaking years: colorful video boxes of television series he produced, black-and-white photographs of actors he knew and even an old film canister.

They offer a window into a career that began when, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, Forsher earned $200 for his first documentary about Conrad Hilton.

At first, Forsher wasn't sure he wanted to go into the business. Growing up with Hollywood producers, he had seen how competitive filmmaking was. But he had already caught the bug and plunged in head first. Along the way, Forsher has made documentaries on the mysterious history of the film industry, including work for the Discovery Channel's "Hollywood Chronicles."

Forsher's all-time favorite is a documentary called "Cadillac Hotel," a piece he produced in 1980 after spending three years following the lives of older residents in a hotel.

But the film industry did not come without significant frustration, so, in 1997, Forsher turned back to academics. Four years later he came to Cal State Hayward.

Forsher -- filmmaker, teacher, scholar -- has been welcomed in the department.

"He brings an unusual combination of deep and rich professional experience, but also the academic qualification," said professor John Hammerback, who chaired the department when Forsher was hired. "He combines those (traits) and that's unusual."

After tackling topics like the history and culture of the Hollywood film industry and media propaganda in his documentaries, Forsher now is teaching his students about many of these issues in a class on media censorship.

"Every banned film is really the story of the society's attempt to come to a common ground and reduce the number of extremists that tend to fan the flames of censorship," Forshers said.

Forsher also has crisscrossed his scholarly background in urban planning with his passion for film to weave a social history of the role of movie theaters in American downtowns in a recently published book called "The Community of Cinema."

In it, Forsher shows how the movie theaters have been a central place of many of the social transformations of the past decades. They have brought shopping to downtowns and been centers of struggles over integration, Forsher said.

"There are lifestyles created as a byproduct of the whole entertainment culture," Forsher said.

It's a story that's still alive today. After all, Forsher said, what mall doesn't have a movie theater as an anchor?

With all the teaching and research, Forsher still hasn't stopped making films. He plans to turn sections of his book into a documentary series.

And he has a few more light-hearted features on the agenda, including a personal memoir of his childhood memories of Elvis.

Despite the glitz of life near Elvis, it wasn't all glamour for a 5-year-old Forsher. The documentary will be called "The Year I Hated Elvis."