Not every budding career is built on trust funds, a house of credit cards, one-track fame-greed or relentless careerism. Rose McGowan, 21-year-old co-scream queen to Neve Campbell in SCREAM, is here with four roles. But despite this blush of success, she's more interested in becoming a revolutionary museum curator. The four films seem to suggest that Rose is poised to become an indie-film queen of the hill, following in the hallowed footsteps of Lili Taylor, and this year's model, Parker Posey (with her own trifecta of SUBURBIA, THE CLOCKWATCHERS and her marvelously measured mania in THE HOUSE OF YES).

McGowan's vibrant, foul-mouthed debut in one of Gregg Araki's previous Sundance entries, DOOM GENERATION marked her as a striking presence to watch for. This year, her throaty-voiced, wisecracking manner is wasted on a nothing role as an ill-lit mute femme fatale in the strenuously unfunny road caper, LEWIS AND CLARK AND GEORGE. But she scores as a lush, well-appreciated 1950s siren to Jeremy Davies in GOING ALL THE WAY, has a cameo in Gregg Araki's latest, NOWHERE, and stars in a short about a young prostitute called SEED. Rose has got the presence to perform well in each scenario: believably glamour queen, effectively snide.

She worries a little about how the press takes her funny, free-wheeling banter. "They never know whether I'm joking or not, of course, because I say things really deadpan." She credits much of her sensibility to growing up in a commune in Italy, belonging to the same tribe as River Phoenix. But, McGowan says, "I was anti-hippie all my life. I came out wanting red lipstick. My dad says that if Joan Collins came on TV, I would plaster myself up against the screen. So yes, I grew up with about 200 hippies. To this day, patchouli makes me gag."

Movies were new to her when her family moved to the States when she was 10. "Movies weren't forbidden so much as I didn't know they existed. My father, who's Italian, is a respected artist in Europe, and my mom is a writer, so I had a very artistic background. But for instance, I don't know anything about 'The Brady Bunch.' I saw it on a plane and I didn't get any of it. It's obvious that I've been in movies where there's a lot of pop culture references I might not get, but it's not REALITY BITES, which is so cheesy and trying so hard to slam you over the head with their little lunchboxes full of kitsch. You know, pardon me? Even SCREAM is different: it's organic, it's more fun, it's not like, 'Aren't we being cool because we like drinking Tang' or whatever?"

McGowan wasn't exactly found sitting at a Sunset Boulevard soda fountain, but she was discovered. "I was going to art school and I was visiting a friend in L.A. Gregg Araki was searching the coast for a specific girl and I was standing in front of a gym refusing to go in on the grounds that it was cheesy, not being one of those people who wears leotards and sweats and, y'know? We met, and Gregg bugged for me about two weeks. The script was so much like I was when I was 15 -- the physicality, the haircut. It was very strange. Same lipstick, wearing all black. Pretending she knew everything, but not sexuality. It was a fairly adventurous film! More an attitude of thinking she's putting on the iron, tough image to the world when it's really an eggshell she's wearing. Y'know, your basic really dysfunctional youth with good makeup."

After shooting DOOM, Rose left L.A. "But then I went to Sundance eight months later to support the film. I had never been in that whole scene and I hid a hallway in this one house a lot of the time. I hid there with Jeremy Davies, who was hiding at the same time! He had done SPANKING THE MONKEY the year before, so he was able to help me out and we became friends. But Sundance: I didn't understand why lawyers were giving me their cards. They either want to sleep with me, or I've done something really bad, which is it? It's neither, but I didn't know anything."

What she knows now is that she keeps getting roles she enjoys, but still has her sights set elsewhere. "Pretty much now, every time I quit and want to go back to what I was doing, I get a movie and it interrupts me. I'll leave it up to my father to actually create, but I would like to revive museums. I'd like to be a curator. It's really deathly in a lot of them right now. It's archaic. And even though I hate using the term young people, there's no open arms to young people at museums at all. If someone else gets a role, it's 'Yeah, whatever,' but this is what I care about. I'll keep making movies, but there are other things I want to change, too."

Ray Pride is associate editor and film critic for Chicago's alternative weekly, NewCity.