Christine Vachon
One of the biggest names in indie film production, Vachon and her company, Killer Films, have backed a long list of indie hits including Happiness, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and I'm Not There.
The daughter of Look magazine photog John Vachon, Christine grew up on the Upper West Side and studied semiotics at Brown. Relocating to New York after graduation, in 1986 she worked on her first movie to gain any real notice, Bill Sherwood's AIDS tale Parting Glances, starring Steve Buscemi. She moved into producing the following year with Apparatus Films, which was responsible for several standouts of the early '90s' so-called New Queer Cinema movement, including 1991's Poison, directed by her Brown classmate Todd Haynes; 1992's Swoon; and 1994's first-of-its-kind lesbo rom-com Go Fish, directed by Rose Troche. Vachon dissolved Apparatus after Fish and founded Killer Films with Pamela Koffler in 1995. Teaming up with Lauren Zalaznick, Killer promptly scored its first hit with Larry Clark's classic Kids. Thus commenced Killer's golden age, in which the company put out a string of indie hits, often about sexual outsiders, including Todd Solondz's Happiness, Velvet Goldmine, Boys Don't Cry (which won Hilary Swank a Best Actress Oscar), John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and Far from Heaven.
While Vachon reigned supreme at the indie box office in the late 1990s and early '00s, she has endured an uncharacteristic drought since 2002's Far From Heaven. Movies like A Home at the End of the World, Infamous, The Notorious Bettie Page, and the Todd Haynes-directed Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There have attracted neither the critical swooning nor the cult followings of earlier Killer flicks; but has since branched into television with the Showtime version of Ira Glass's This American Life and the Emmy award-winning Mildred Pierce miniseries on HBO. Nontheless, Vachon still boasts an active film-production schedule.
Don't expect much film industry glamour from Vachon—the butchy producer is notoriously frumpy. Vachon met her partner, Marlene McCarty, while working on Swoon. (McCarty, a graphic designer, created the title credits for the film.) They have an adopted daughter named Guthrie. [Image via Getty]