Producer Gets Flak--and Award--for ‘Happiness’

Producer Christine Vachon is contemplating the fallout from Todd Solondz’s new movie, “Happiness.” Some people aren’t happy about it. Not only was it dumped by its original distributor, October Films, at the behest of parent Universal Pictures, but at least one Hollywood talent agency refused to pass the script about child molestation to its below-the-line clients--as if working as a costume designer on a film as depraved as that would ruin a career.

“I’ve been down this road before,” Vachon says wearily.

Vachon has not only been down this road before, she paved it and put up traffic signals. Among the films she has produced are Larry Clark’s “Kids,” which inflamed the studio behind it, Disney, with its AIDS-transmitting adolescents, and Todd Haynes’ “Poison,” which drove conservatives wild because its depictions of gay couplings were funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Now, in addition to “Happiness,” due in October, Vachon is coming out in November with Haynes’ new film, “Velvet Goldmine,” which celebrates Britain’s glam-rock era and the gender-bending that accompanied it. Both films appeared at the Cannes Film Festival, with “Happiness” winning the International Critics Prize and “Velvet Goldmine” a best artistic achievement award.

Today Vachon, 36, is seated in a downtown Manhattan restaurant, wearing jean shorts, a baggy black T-shirt, black sneakers and a silver necklace with silver rings looped through it. She could easily be mistaken for a production assistant. In fact, she knows about the movie-making process from the ground up. She’s even published a book about it, written with critic David Edelstein, called “Shooting to Kill: How an Independent Producer Blasts Through the Barriers to Make Movies That Matter.”

What kind of movies matter to Vachon?

“It’s something that is unusual or different,” she says vaguely, sipping a ginger ale. “A feeling that it’s something I haven’t seen before.” Then, less vaguely: “It’s also something I can sell. Sometimes that has to do with the elements of the story itself or whoever is attached or just a feeling of, ‘Wow, this is great, because I could do this with it, I could do that with it.’ ”

And so she has, although it is never easy. Her book, which is almost a companion piece to Sidney Lumet’s directorial primer “Making Movies,” discusses in detail what to look for in a crew and how to treat actors. (You baby them.) She includes dummy call sheets and production budgets and a very real diary of her experiences with “I Shot Andy Warhol,” “Velvet Goldmine” and the inevitable film festivals.

“The thing about movies that’s kind of frustrating and exhilarating is you never know what you need to know until it happens,” she says, summing it all up (sort of). “Then you probably never need to use that information again.”

“Velvet Goldmine” was a case in point. A million dollars fell out of the budget shortly before shooting began, requiring lots of unanticipated schedule changes--and they only had star Ewan McGregor for the first four weeks of the nine-week shoot. Then, when they finally had the film in the can, a negative cutter butchered the negative. According to Haynes, had it not been pasted back together, they would have had to re-cut, remix and maybe re-shoot. “She is my hero,” Haynes says, laughing.

Haynes and Vachon go back a long way. They knew each other at Brown University, where Vachon, who was born in New York, majored in semiotics (that was a film major). After graduation, she worked in a series of production jobs and then, in 1987, joined Haynes and Barry Ellsworth to create Apparatus, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping novice filmmakers make movies with real budgets and crews.

“If you were making movies that were not quote, Hollywood films, the mentality was you were making extremely experimental films,” says Vachon.

“There wasn’t anything in between. There wasn’t a perception that you could make a movie that was challenging or provocative but also needed production and used narrative.”

Apparatus’ films were short films, not features. Haynes made one of them, called “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which dramatized the singer’s anorexia nervosa using Barbie dolls. The film’s public life was a short one because Richard Carpenter would not authorize the use of their music, but according to Haynes its artistic success prompted Vachon to tell Haynes, “I’m going to produce your first feature.”

That was “Poison.” It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and won Haynes a trip on the talk-show circuit debating the NEA (rather than the merits of the movie) with the likes of Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas). Vachon had her own run-in with Ralph Reed, at that time head of the Christian Coalition.

“He made a big point of coming up to us,” she says, reaching out with her hand. “ ‘I have no objection’--that little touch on your shoulder--’to you making your film. I just don’t want my tax dollars to pay for it.’ He was really scary.”

Reed probably wouldn’t have approved of her second feature film, Tom Kalin’s “Swoon,” which revisited the Leopold and Loeb thrill killing from a gay perspective. Released along with such films as Greg Araki’s “The Living End,” it signaled the advent of so-called queer cinema and helped earn Vachon the sobriquet “the Queen of Queer Cinema.” It’s not something she likes. Though it gives her a profile in a business where women and gays are underrepresented, she feels it puts her in a box.

“An agent called me yesterday pitching me on one of her client’s scripts,” she says. “And then at the end she says, ‘Do you . . . are you. . . . I don’t know how to ask this, but you’re not just interested in primarily gay material, are you?’ I was like, ‘no.’ It’s just limiting.”

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In fact, Vachon’s films are provocative for a lot of reasons. For example, Haynes’ second feature, “Safe,” was about a woman who is allergic to her environment. It’s an airless, oppressive concept, which made it just as difficult to finance as her sexually challenging material.

“It was due exclusively to Christine’s perseverance that the film got made,” Haynes says. “I would have given up. It’s still shocking that it was made at all, given the way that things have gone in indie filmmaking. It’s not a happy story. It doesn’t have a resolution.”

Some of the same things can be said of Vachon’s subsequent films: Clark’s “Kids,” Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol,” Cindy Sherman’s “Office Killer” (which is where she and partner Pamela Koffler got the name of their production company, Killer Films). And now, of course, “Happiness,” which, like these other films, was a struggle to make. Its most recognizable star, Patricia Arquette, dropped out because of an illness in her family, and Solondz couldn’t find an A-list actor willing to play the most problematic character, Bill, who sodomizes (off-screen) his son’s friends.

“I suppose the irony is that these sorts of taboo subjects are discussed in the media every day on talk shows and so forth,” says Solondz. “I think the fact that I don’t tell my audience rape is a bad thing and I sort of go with the assumption that my audience understands that it is a bad thing and that there’s a strange humor to this movie is just too unsettling for many people. It wasn’t meant for everyone.”

Solondz says that Universal exercised a morality clause in its contract with October to get out of releasing the film. (Neither company would comment.) Rather than try to edit the movie into mainstream acceptability--a nearly impossible task--co-producer Ted Hope says his outfit, Good Machine, bought the film back from October and will release it this fall through a specially created distributor.

Meanwhile, Vachon marches on. She’s just wrapped Bruce Wagner’s Hollywood satire “I’m Losing You.” She’s trying to set up a bio-pic of ‘50s pinup Bettie Page. She hopes to do a bio-pic of designer Halston. She also wants to produce a movie based on Brandon Teena, a girl who passed as a boy and was raped and murdered in Nebraska. It’s called “Take It Like a Man.”

“We keep getting threatening letters from Boy George’s attorneys,” Vachon says, smiling. “He apparently wrote an autobiography called ‘Take It Like a Man,’ so I don’t know if we’ll be able to keep that title. I’m filing the letters under ‘Oh, Go to Hell.’ ”

It’s a very thick file.