Michael Moore
Moore is the generously-proportioned, baseball-capped documentarian who's a thorn in the side of big business, the Bush White House, and liberals who don't agree with him. Love him or hate him, you probably know his name, which is all he's really after in the end.
The son of an assembly-line worker at GM, Moore dropped out of the University
of Michigan at Flint to start up an alternative weekly paper, The Flint Voice. In 1986, he closed down the paper to join the magazine Mother Jones. He was soon sacked, but after picking up $58,000 in a wrongful termination suit, Moore had the money he needed to fund his first film, 1989's Roger & Me, a documentary about the flailing auto industry. After a few non-successes in the '90s Moore rebounded in a big way with his 2002 takedown of the National Rifle Association, Bowling For Columbine, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary. Moore followed up with 2004's Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11, which remains one of the highest-grossing docs of all-time, an investigation into national healthcare with 2007's Sicko, and 2009's Capitalism: A Love Story, and a few books to boot.
Even before it was released, Fahrenheit 9/11 had created the sort of publicity- generating controversy that Moore so shamelessly craves: Conservative groups agitated to stop its release, and political pressure led Disney's Michael Eisner to try and block its distribution through the Disney-owned studio Miramax. Fahrenheit 9/11 became one of the most talked-about pictures of the year, winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and raking in more than $200 million around the world. [Image via Getty]