WOMAN DRIVER

Move over, Gwyneth: Hollywood has a brainy new power blonde: Laura Bickford.

Bickford, the steely force behind the Oscar-charging hit "Traffic," looks
like a starlet but works behind the cameras. She produced what some critics
are calling the best movie of the year.

"We've all seen stories about cops stopping bad guys," says Bickford, a
buxom beauty whose fourth big-screen effort - directed by former flame
Steven Soderberg - is a sweeping, three-story take on the drug trade along
the U.S.-Mexico border

"We've all seen stories about kids who take drugs. But no one had ever
connected them all together with multiple story lines and showed the system
of how drugs move. It stayed with me."

The stories, which involve the nation's drug czar, a cartel king and a
hard-working Mexican cop, came to her via British TV.

"In 1990, I was living in London, producing music videos," Bickford
recalls, "and I saw a British miniseries called 'Traffik,' about Britain
and Pakistan and the heroin trade. It was mind-blowing - like an 'Upstairs,
Downstairs' about the drug trade, from people at the top who make policy to
people on the street."

It took just three months to shoot the movie - after five years of
behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Bickford.

Bickford - a 30-ish New Yorker whose previous credits include "Citizen X"
for HBO (starring Stephen Rea and Donald Sutherland), "Playing God" with
David Duchovny and Angelina Jolie, and an independent film called
"Bongwater" that features Luke Wilson and Alicia Witt - became something of
a drug-culture scholar.

"When I came back to the States in '93, I started noticing that the
newspapers report on the business of the drug trade once a week like any
other commodity," she says. " 'The price of cocaine went up because there
were floods in Columbia.'

"So I started clipping articles about anything to do with cocaine: drug
laws, the trade aspect of drugs, the social impact of drugs."

Two years later, she optioned the remake rights to turn "Traffik" into an
American movie that would focus not on heroin, but on cocaine trafficking
between the U.S. and Mexico.

Fast-forward to 1997. "I was having a conversation with Steven [Soderbergh,
her ex-boyfriend]," says Bickford. "We were talking one day about what
films we wanted to do. I told him about 'Traffik' and all the articles I'd
clipped, and he said he'd seen the miniseries when it aired on PBS and
thought it was really great.

"He'd been interested in doing a movie in this arena for some time, and he
said he really wanted to do it.

"Then," she says, "we went looking for a writer. I called all the agencies,
and they sent over a hundred million scripts."

She homed in on screenwriter Steve Gaghan. After reading a script he'd
written called "Havoc," about teenage gang-member wannabes in Beverly
Hills, Bickford says, "we decided he was the perfect voice for our movie."
(Gaghan, a former heroin addict, also reportedly drew on his personal
experience with drugs when writing the screenplay.)

Next came the tough part. "Getting the movie financed was the hardest thing
I've ever done in my life," Bickford says. "I set up the movie five or six
different times, with five different financiers." Finally she inked a deal
with Barry Diller, Scott Greenstein and Russell Schwartz of USA Films.

Fast-forward again, to the red carpet at last week's Golden Globes, where
"Traffic" was nominated as Best Picture in the drama category, but didn't
win. Still the whole process of being swept up into Hollywood glamour left
Bickford positively giddy.

"I wanted to talk to Joan Rivers," says Bickford, who grew up on the Upper
East Side, the daughter of an attorney dad and investment-banker mom, and
attended the Spence School (Paltrow's alma mater).

"I thought that was something you have to do when you're nominated. So I
told all my friends and family to watch Joan. She has her own podium, and
you have to go up there and put your name on a list.

"They pull you over when Joan's ready for you. So I went with ['Traffic'
co-star] Benicio Del Toro, and she asked us if we were proud of the movie,
and we said yes. She was great."

Bickford was prepared for Rivers' sartorial scrutiny. She appeared
movie-star gorgeous in a sexy gown of ice-blue duchess satin by Richard Tyler.

"We had so little time between the nominations and the awards ceremony,"
she says. "I was so busy working on the release of 'Traffic,' because we
opened in New York and L.A. on Dec. 27, and went wide on Jan. 5.

"So I went to Barneys with my sister Emily. I tried on every single
designer: Vera Wang, Armani - everybody. There were three Richard Tyler
dresses that were perfect, so I went to his L.A. store, and they took very
good care of me."

"It's hard to be glamorous and a businesswoman," Bickford adds with a
laugh. "There's not enough time in the day to do beauty treatments and work
your butt off on new projects."

Those projects, she says, include writing a show for VH1 - "a Larry
Sanders-type show about a music-video company. I also wrote a script based
on a book that I don't want to talk about," she adds.

Bickford may be new to the scene, but she sounds like a veteran glamour
queen when she says, "If we get nominated for an Oscar, Narciso Rodriguez
is going to make me a dress!"