Howard "Hawk" Koch

Hawk Koch is a veteran movie producer, as well as the former President of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences and past President of the Producers Guild of America.

At the Producers’ Guild, Koch and his former co-president, Mark Gordon, have led the fight to preserve the producer’s credit and restore its value to working producers. In 2013, they were able to secure all the major studios and major independents to agree to uphold the Producer’s Mark which unified the industry in a way that further reinforced the significance of the real producer. Now, only the producers that do the work and get “The Producer’s Mark” are eligible for the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild Awards and the BAFTA Awards.

Koch’s tenure at the Academy included spear-heading several initiatives including launching the first ever general membership meeting, a sharpened focus on member engagement and the future of film making, as well as major fundraising for the new Academy Museum.

Koch currently serves as a Special Advisor for the Wanda Group, who has commenced the building of the Movie Metropolis and Wanda Studios in Qingdao, China and is also consulting on a Qingdao International Film Festival.

Koch has been intimately involved with the making of more than 50 major motion pictures among them such classics as Marathon Man, Chinatown, Wayne’s World, Peggy Sue Got Married, Heaven Can Wait, and Rosemary’s Baby.

His colleagues and collaborators include many of the greatest filmmakers of all-time – Sidney Pollack, Roman Polanski, John Schlesinger, Warren Beatty, and Francis Ford Coppola. In addition to his duties as a full time producer, Hawk also serves on the boards of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, AMC Theatres and the National Film Preservation Foundation.