Geoff Ammer dies at 62; veteran Hollywood marketing executive
Geoff Ammer, a veteran Hollywood marketing executive whose three-decade career spanned multiple studios, died Sunday morning of a heart attack. He was 62.
Ammer collapsed at his home in Brentwood and was rushed to St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, where he died, according to his longtime friend and colleague Terry Curtin.
Ammer was president of worldwide marketing at Sony Pictures and president of marketing and distribution at the now-defunct Revolution Studios.
“Geoff was passionate, a fighter and loyal, which are all things you want in somebody you work alongside,” said producer Joe Roth, Ammer’s former boss at Revolution, Walt Disney Studios and 20th Century Fox.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, on April 6, 1950, Ammer attended the University of Florida and worked in concert promotion before starting his Hollywood career at 20th Century Fox in the early 1980s.
He worked at Fox for nearly a decade and moved to Disney, eventually reaching the rank of co-president of marketing.
In 2000 he became president of marketing and distribution at start-up Relativity, but the next year he moved to Sony, serving first as head of domestic marketing and then running worldwide marketing.
Ammer went on to serve brief stints as president of marketing at Marvel Entertainment and Relativity Media before most recently heading his own consulting company, dubbed Clarius Entertainment.
Among the many hit movies he worked were “Alien,” “Working Girl,” “The Sixth Sense,” “Black Hawk Down” and “Spider-Man.”
Ammer was thought to have been in good health. His death was a shock to many friends in Hollywood.
They include former Fox chairman and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak, who recalled a moment in 1998 when Ammer, in Florida for a media junket, escorted Sherak’s ill mother to Los Angeles.
“She had lymphoma and could hardly walk,” Sherak said. “She wanted to come out here, and Geoff went to Miami, picked her up, wheeled her on a plane and brought her home to me. She died here. That was Geoff. He didn’t do that because he worked for me, believe me. He was my friend.”
Ammer is survived by his wife, Mia; children Geoffrey and Annie; and his sisters Connie Ulmer and Bonnie Ammer.
Services will be held Friday at 11 a.m. at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills in the ballroom. A reception will follow in the garden.
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