>Bill Paxton

THIS TIME, NO FLYING COWS

THE PARTY IS FOR HOLLYWOOD'S NEWEST auteur, but the revelers at the Driskill Hotel in Austin, Tex., aren't sipping chardonnay. Beer in hand, Bill Paxton, 41 (Apollo 13, Twister), shouts above the butt-kicking country roar of Jimmie Dale Gilmore and hundreds of guests including Sandra Bullock and Forest Whitaker. The old-fashioned Texas hootenanny is for Paxton's new low-budget drama Traveller, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film and Music Festival in Austin "Instead of cashing the big check after Twister," he yells, "I wanted to make a serious, character-driven movie."

Traveller, which hits theaters in big cities in mid-April, isn't likely to top Twister's $241 million at the box office. But after Paxton's wife, Louise, came across Jim McGlynn's script—about what the actor calls "a flimflam man who...has lost the enthusiasm for the life"—in a stack Paxton had lying around, he jumped aboard as producer and star, coaxing Julianna Margulies and Mark (don't call him Marky Mark) Wahlberg into costarring. Working almost around the clock in North Carolina, Paxton pushed the project to completion in 35 days. "He's got more energy than the whole state of Texas," says Margulies. Paxton calls Traveller "the kind of interesting, independent, Five Easy Pieces sort of movie that studios would have made in the early '70s." He's ready to go practically door-to-door selling the $5 million film to audiences. "It's grassroots, baby," he says. But if summer's coming, so is another blockbuster: Paxton costars in director James Cameron's $150 million-plus Titanic, due out July 4. For Paxton, who did a comic turn in Cameron's True Lies, it's the special effects epics that make the arty movies possible. "When Jim calls," he sighs, "it's like the Batphone ringing."