Center for a New American Security

Walter Parkes is a motion picture producer, writer and former studio head at DreamWorks Pictures, the motion picture studio that he and his wife and partner Laurie MacDonald ran from the company’s inception through 2005.

Films produced or executive produced by Mr. Parkes include Gladiator, Minority Report, the Men In Black series and Catch Me If You Can, as well as the screen adaptations of the novel The Kite Runner and of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, which won the 2009 Golden Globe award.  In total, films produced or executive produced by Parkes have earned in excess of $6billion in worldwide box office.

As a studio executive, Parkes, along with Ms. MacDonald, was responsible for the development and production of the company’s diverse slate of films, including three consecutive Best Picture Oscar winners: American Beauty, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind, the latter two produced in partnership with Universal.  Other critical and commercial successes produced during their tenure include: Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, Robert Zemeckis’ What Lies Beneath, Adam McKay’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Michael Mann’s Collateral, and Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award- and Golden Globe-winning drama Saving Private Ryan, which was the top-grossing film domestically of 1998.

In 2009, Parkes and MacDonald teamed with the Abu Dhabi Media Company to form Parkes/MacDonald Imagenation, a partnership that funds future screenplay development for the duo’s projects at DreamWorks and other studios, and provides production co-financing on selected films. 

Parkes is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Writer’s Guild of America, and the Global Business Network. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Arts & Culture Dialog Initiative of the US-Islamic World Forum for the Brookings Institute, and the boards of the Starlight Foundation and Para Los Niños Charter School, which provides services for the children of the working poor of Downtown Los Angeles.   For the last six years Parkes has served as President of the Yale’s University Council, which advises President Richard Levin on academic matters.

Parkes resides in Santa Monica, California and New York City.   He is a graduate of Yale University, and attended the School of Communications at Stanford University.   He and MacDonald have  two children:  Jane, a teacher in the Early Education program at the UCLA Laboratory School, and Graham, a second-year student in the department of Dramatic Writing at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts.