Jarecki is the founder of Moviefone and the director responsible for the award-winning doc Capturing the Friedmans.

A Connecticut native and the son of a wealthy stockbroker, Jarecki directed plays during his time at Princeton; after graduating he made a short film about kids growing up in Harlem called Swimming. In 1989, Jarecki turned his interest in movies into a business, co-founding the movie information hotline Moviefone, along with three other partners. The initially tiny operation expanded to cover thousands of cities in the '90s and Jarecki made a mint when he sold Moviefone to AOL in 1999, walking away with between $400 million and $600 million in stock.

After spending two years as an expat in Rome, Jarecki returned to the States to make a movie of his own. At first, Jarecki planned to film a documentary about New York's community of children's birthday-party clowns. But the film took an unpredicted turn when Jarecki met up with a $500-an-hour clown named David Friedman, and unearthed the story of how David's family's had imploded when his father and brother were convicted of child molestation in the '80s. The result, 2003's Capturing the Friedmans, was a critical fave and won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance. He's since directed the Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst showcase All Good Things and produced the not-so factually sound documentary Catfish. [Image via Getty]