Queen Christine

Independent film producer Christine Vachon, a sage of New York's no-budget movie scene, wears the same clothes whether running a movie set or cutting deals at Cannes: jeans and a baggy T-shirt. Her blunt cut-the-crap attitude makes her stand out against the schmoozy boys'club atmosphere of the movie business. "The only people she's going to put off are the very people she would never make movies for anyway," notes the president of Fine Line Features, Ira Deutchman.

Known as the woman behind two pillars of the new IH queer cinema—Todd Haynes's 1991 succes de scandale, Poison, and Tom Kalin's 1992 Swoon (both of which she produced and assistant-directed)—she is admired for taking care of business and letting the dreamy boy directors keep their eyes on the stars. Now, at 32, she has two new features nearing screenlight: Haynes's Safe, and Steve McLean's Postcards from America. Another film, Go Fish, "a lesbian feature" directed by Rose Troche, opened the 1994 New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and was just released. Yet the native New Yorker is not waiting for Hollywood's call. Operating out of a chaotic SoHo office, with bottles of aspirin and hot sauce on her desk, Vachon works 60to 70-hour weeks, and then trots off to film festivals for fun. But she remains unimpressed by champagne or villa-hopping. And aside from having rented a summer house on Long Island's North Fork, she shows few signs of lightening up: "Even if you are making low-budget films, you are spending the gross national product of a lot of small nations."

DUNCAN BOCK