Who

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, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Backstory

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, she landed her first job as an unpaid intern on the set of the 1983 doc Far from Poland. After assistant-directing a few long-forgotten features, 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 Kids, a shockingly frank portrait of a 17 -year-old slacker bent on infecting teenage virgins with HIV. 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.

Of note

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; and the Showtime version of Ira Glass's This American Life—Vachon's first foray into television production—has only been a middling success. Vachon will have a chance to recapture her fin de siecle glory with the comedy Motherhood starring Uma Thurman and Minnie Driver; Gigantic with Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel; Cracks with Eva Green; Cairo Time with Patricia Clarkson; and a new TV project with Isaac Mizrahi. Meanwhile, the larger, earlier Killer oeuvre remains actively treasured: In 2005, MoMA put on a retrospective called "Swoon: Ten Years of Killer Films."

In print

Vachon has written a few books about indie cinema, including 1998's Shooting to Kill with New York film critic David Edelstein, and 2006's A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond.

Personal

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 and live in the East Village.

Family ties

Christine's brother is Michael Vachon, financier George Soros's political advisor.

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