INDEPENDENT Streak

With two wildly different movies in the Oscar race, producer Christine Vachon is an iconoclast who’s become an icon

- David Canfield

IT’S TAKEN FOREVER for mainstream Hollywood to figure out what Christine Vachon could have told them decades ago if they’d hung out in the same bars: that you have to know how to pivot, that niches matter, that vision matters, that ticket buyers want to see themselves onscreen almost as much as they want to see stars. The Manhattan-born producer remembers Todd Haynes’s movie Poison bringing LGBTQ+ people in droves to the theater in 1991 simply because they hadn’t been represented anywhere near enough yet. “Half of them walked out of the theater going, ‘What the fuck was that?’ And some of those guys were like, ‘I just wanted to see some boys kiss,’ ” Vachon says. “But I realized that, if you made a movie targeted specifically to that audience, it didn’t have to cross over if you made it for the right amount of money. That was an incredibly liberating feeling— the true collision of art and commerce.”

I have no doubt that the bluntly brilliant Vachon sitting across from me in a baggy black tee is the same woman who pushed American filmmaking forward in the bygone era of Blockbuster rentals. The difference is that today, Vachon is on the cusp of a ridiculously overdue first Oscar nomination, with both Celine Song’s Past Lives and Haynes’s