SWINGING ATTITUDE

Vince Vaughn, who co-stars alongside Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Moore in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, is so money. Last year, Vaughn, a struggling actor, was a lead in the low-budget Swingers, a Gen-X comedy about latter-day lounge lizards bantering incessantly in superhip lingo--kinda like this, baby. In one scene, Vaughn's character picks up a woman in a bar while the theme from Jaws plays in the background; Steven Spielberg saw it, and the rest is show-biz history. Says Vaughn: "I do this one small movie for $250,000, and now I get this call that Spielberg wants to see me for The Lost World. So it's kind of a huge extreme from a $250,000 budget independent film to go to a $75 million sequel to the largest-grossing film of all time."

Vaughn, 27, has a sleekly handsome face and a disarming onscreen presence: he seems to be reveling in and making sport of his good looks at the same time. In Swingers he showed off a jazzy sense of comic timing, but through all the ridiculousness Vaughn has a gently ingratiating way of making us care about his character.

He's also got momentum: besides his role as a nature photographer in The Lost World, he stars in the forthcoming neo-noir drama The Locusts (opposite, coincidentally, Spielberg's wife Kate Capshaw), and is filming the comedy Clay Pigeons (with Janeane Garofalo). "The reason I've scheduled all these movies in a row is that I don't know how long this window of opportunity will last," says Vaughn. "While the opportunity is here, I want to take advantage of it." Don't sweat it, baby, the word's out: everybody knows you're money.