Howard W. Koch Jr. Takes Flight as Hawk

Let’s cut to the chase. His name is Hawk.

For most of his life, he was known in Hollywood as Howard W. Koch Jr., working his way up the career ladder on such notable films as “The Way We Were,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Chinatown,” “Barefoot in the Park” and “Heaven Can Wait,” then co-producing films like “Gorky Park,” “The Pope of Greenwich Village” and “The Keep.”

But as the son and namesake of veteran filmmaker and onetime Paramount Pictures studio chief Howard W. Koch, he often felt overshadowed by his much-beloved father, a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences who received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the academy in 1989.

Today, reborn with a new name, Hawk Koch believes he has finally emerged from that shadow. The producer currently has not one but two high-profile films in release throughout North America.

One is “Frequency,” a sci-fi thriller from New Line Cinema directed by Gregory Hoblit (“Primal Fear”), about a man who communicates with his dead father and tries to prevent his death; it opened Friday. The other is the recently opened “Keeping the Faith,” Touchstone Pictures’ romantic comedy about a rabbi, a priest and a girl in love, directed by Edward Norton.

“I know it sounds hooey-wooey,” Koch said recently over lunch at Citrus, “but I don’t think Howard Koch Jr. could have produced two movies at the same time because I don’t think I could have handled it.”

At a recent industry screening at the academy for “Frequency,” Koch stood before hundreds of friends and acquaintances, his 84-year-old dad seated among them. Before the movie started, Koch read a short speech acknowledging his father and saying that “nothing could bring me greater joy than to share this evening with him.”

How appropriate, it seemed, that Hawk Koch should make a film about a father and son separated by years, yet finally united.

“Somebody once said to me, ‘I hope you are able to have some sort of communication with your father before he dies,’ ” Koch told an interviewer. “I think making this movie about fathers and sons and what it means was something I had to do.”

Koch, 54, said that he didn’t set out to make two movies simultaneously, it just worked out that way.

“We were supposed to make ‘Frequency’ eight months before we did, but something happened and the picture fell apart,” he recalled. “Over Thanksgiving ‘98, ‘Keeping the Faith’ went into turnaround. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not going to have any movie.’ ”

But on the day after Thanksgiving, New Line gave Koch the green light to make “Frequency” and then, with Ben Stiller agreeing to star, Spyglass Entertainment picked up “Keeping the Faith.” Suddenly, Koch had two movies on the front burner.

“The first two weeks of shooting ‘Frequency’ up in Toronto, I wasn’t able to be there as much as I would have liked,” Koch said. “I was kind of flying back and forth between Toronto and New York,” where “Keeping the Faith” was shot.

“But then ‘Frequency’ eventually showed up in New York, so we were literally shooting both movies in the same town,” he added. “I would go from location to location. One was shooting day and one was shooting night.”

“Keeping the Faith” has taken in about $20 million so far, while “Frequency” took in $9.1 million in its first weekend.

“I try to keep my expectations down because I have been there before with movies that I thought would do well and didn’t,” Koch said. “All I can do is make movies that we as a filmmaking team want to make. If that happens, then I’m happy. I can’t second-guess the audience.”

A Lifetime Spent on Movie Sets

To know Hawk Koch, a little Hollywood history is required.

As a child, he once accompanied his mother and sister to Durango, Colo., where his father was busy making a western. A man on horseback rode up, asked the tyke if he knew how to ride, then lifted him up on the saddle. Koch Sr. later told his wife: “Guess who gave Howie his first horseback ride today?” “Who?” she inquired. “Clark Gable.” The film was “Across the Wide Missouri.”

From the age of 5 to 15, the boy would spend every vacation and summer on movie sets with his father.

“I think if you psychoanalyze it, the only way I could be with my dad was to be good at the movie business,” Koch said. “The truth is, I loved it. I got to have fantasies. While everybody was playing cowboys and Indians in their backyards, I was actually playing cowboys and Indians with cowboys and Indians.”

After a stint as road manager for such singing sensations as the Ronettes, Lesley Gore and the Dave Clark Five, Koch went to his father and said he wanted to get into the movie business.

“My first job was PA [production assistant] on two of the greatest movies ever made--’Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter’ and ‘Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula,’ ” Koch recalled. “They each took five days to make. They weren’t B movies, they were D movies!”

He then worked as a PA on the 1966 film “This Property Is Condemned,” starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford and directed by Sydney Pollack.

When the first assistant director got hurt, Koch got a shot at filling in for the second assistant director and never looked back.

If you scratch his memory, Koch can recite hilarious stories about what it was like working with some of the biggest stars and directors in Hollywood.

Listen to this one involving Jack Nicholson and director Roman Polanski on the set of “Chinatown,” on which Koch served as first assistant director.

One day, Nicholson was holed up in his dressing room watching a Los Angeles Lakers basketball playoff game on a portable black-and-white TV Koch had given him for the series. Polanski called the actor to the set, but with a minute to go in a tense game, Nicholson didn’t come out. With Polanski getting steamed and the crew eager to go home, the game went into overtime, then double overtime.

Koch picks up the story:

“Roman says, ‘Damn it, Jack! [Don’t] watch any more basketball while I am directing the movie!’ Jack says, ‘Oh, yeah?’ and he starts taking off his tie, then his jacket, then his vest, then his shirt and he’s throwing them at Roman. He’s calling Roman every name in the book. Roman then starts taking off his clothes and starts throwing his clothes at Jack until they are both basically naked.

“Then they run out to each other’s car and drive away from Paramount studios. As they told me later, they stopped up here at Sunset and Gower and they were both naked and they both look at each other and start to laugh hysterically at what they had done.”

Over the years, Koch has served in a variety of positions, like president of Rastar Productions, supervising production of such films as “Peggy Sue Got Married” and “The Secret of My Success.” At Paramount, he executive-produced the blockbuster comedy “Wayne’s World” and its sequel, as well as films like “Primal Fear” and “Virtuosity.”

“He learned from the best,” said longtime friend and fellow producer Gary Lucchesi, who produced both “Primal Fear” and “Virtuosity.” “He comes from being a first assistant director to being a line producer to producing his own movies, so he has tremendous knowledge and skills that few people in Hollywood actually have.”

A Spiritual Renewal Leads to a New Name

But nearing 50, Koch had an epiphany. He was seated at lunch with Lucchesi at the Beverly Hills restaurant Maple Drive, expressing fears that he might one day wake up and realize he had let his work dominate his life. Lucchesi suggested that his friend have a bar mitzvah on his 50th birthday.

“I told him he needed to find some spirituality in his life,” Lucchesi recalled. “Coming from a non-Jewish person, that was probably a very interesting thing to say, but I think having some spirituality in people’s lives is a very positive thing.”

Koch said he never really had a religious upbringing, but “a tiny light went off.”

“I met with a rabbi, Jonathan Omer-Man, who was in a very little room over on Wilshire Boulevard. He asked me a question, ‘Who are you?’ I just kind of said, ‘I’m a father and I’m a son.’ Then he said, ‘No, who are you?’ ‘Well, I’m a producer and I’ve been married several times and I’ve got three kids.’ ‘No, but who are you?’ Then I said something about being Jewish and he said, ‘Oh, are you Jewish?’

“I looked at him and the hair on the back of my head curled up and I said, ‘Oh . . . I’m a Jewish man.’ ”

With the ceremony approaching, Koch began casting about for a new name to go with his new life. He remembered that growing up he had been called Hawk because of his initials, HWK, but the nickname never stuck.

A friend reminded him that besides being a bird of prey, a hawk can see from horizon to horizon and also pick out a snake or a mouse from half a mile away.

“I said, ‘Wow, to be able to see the panorama and the detail of my life at the same time. What an amazing kind of thing to kind of go for,’ ” Koch recalled. “Then I said, ‘Don’t you think Hawk or Eagle or something like that would be pretentious?’ And he said, ‘Only if you allow it to be.’ ”

But changing his name was hard on his father at first.

“It hurt him deeply, and I think a lot of people were angry that I did this to my father,” Koch said. “I tried to say, ‘I didn’t do this to my father, I did this for myself. I needed to do it.’ He has now gotten over it. In fact, my mother’s pet name for me now is Hawk. She introduces me to people as her son, Hawk, which is really very poignant to me.”