So many aspects of the 1995 film Party Girl have the makings of a fairytale: a wise godmother, handsome strangers from far-away lands, dazzling outfits, jubilant soirées. In her breakout role, actress Parker Posey plays a young woman who works as a librarian during the day and hits downtown Manhattan dance floors packed with glamorous drag queens at night. Even its plot feels otherworldly in its idealism and simplicity.
But so much of the Party Girl’s magic happened behind the scenes. On a miniscule $150,000 budget and with unknown actors, Party Girl established a legacy by being not just fun but meaningful, too. “[Co-writer] Harry [Birckmayer] and I said, ‘What if you made a movie where the goal at the end is not that the girl gets the guy, but that she gets a job?’” writer-director Daisy von Scherler Mayer says. “That seemed so seismically feminist at the time.”
To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Party Girl’s theatrical release, WSJ. spoke with the film’s cast and crew, who together remembered the movie’s unlikely origins, iconic moments and how, against the odds, it became the first feature-length film to ever be streamed over the internet.
The Parties Behind Party Girl
In the early 1990s, as co-writers Harry Birckmayer and Daisy von Scherler Mayer began developing the story behind Party Girl, much of the future cast and crew were living the downtown Manhattan queer scene:
Parker Posey (actress): I would go out rollerblading at The Roxy on Sundays and to [the party] Love Machine, where I first saw RuPaul. I would dance with the queens, and they would just annihilate me on the dance floor with their moves. That expression, that freedom to be authentic, coming from towns where there was prejudice and being in a city where it was like, Oh my God, I could dance with anybody here, I could talk to anybody here and that energy, which is so wonderful about New York—that was really exciting.
Harry Birckmayer (co-writer): This was happening during the plague of AIDS, Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on nightlife and the Gulf War. There was this joyful light amidst the darkness.
Michael Clancy (costume designer): I worked at a nightclub in the very early ‘80s called Area. The nightclub scenes, the party scenes [in Party Girl] were always fun because that’s what we did anyway. All that stuff was shot in clubs that we all used to go to anyway in the city.
Capturing the Real World
The writers modeled the characters of Party Girl after the types of people they knew in their own life in New York City, who often went underrepresented on the big screen—drag queens, immigrants, street vendors:
Daisy von Scherler Mayer (director and co-writer): Harry and I used to say that our movie is where all the people that have five lines in other movies get a whole movie to themselves. When people say, “Oh, the world [in Party Girl] is so diverse,” it’s like, “No, that’s the world. You don’t represent the world in your stuff. Why is your world so segregated?” I think the world is messed up and Party Girl is normal.
Guillermo Díaz (actor): I had done a couple episodes of Law & Order, but [Party Girl] was my first good, meaty role in a film. I was super green. Back then my role would have been played by a white guy. The fact that they cast me, a gay Latino, that was just great that they cast it blindly that way.
Inventing the Look
The individualistic spirit of Party Girl was embodied by the outfits worn by Posey’s character, Mary. The movie’s poster features her wearing four shirts simultaneously:
Clancy: She could have had ten t-shirts on and three hats and she would have made that work, too… she was really open to just going there.
Von Scherler Mayer: The fashion was really invented for the film. [Michael] created an aesthetic for the character and for the movie and combined that with Parker Posey’s own fashion obsession. It was made for the movie, so it doesn’t get dated in terms of time period.
Posey: Being able to collaborate with a wardrobe designer, it just made it all the more intimate. It was really fun. On the bigger jobs it’s very specific and there’s not a lot of room there to play around. I find my characters through the hair and the shoes and the props and what they’re wearing—that all influences the behavior.
Low-Budget Filmmaking
Made for a mere $150,000, Party Girl’s production relied on frugality and favors:
Von Scherler Mayer: For all the party scenes we didn’t have enough extras. Now I can look at the people in the party scenes and say, “Oh, that’s the assistant costume designer, and that’s Suki, my assistant with the red hair...”
Clancy: There was basically no budget. I had to fight to get the money to buy a pack of Polaroid film, which we used to take continuity pictures. It was like $9 a pack.
Posey: I remember [saying] to Daisy [during a montage sequence in the library], “Can I do a cartwheel over the book?” and she was like, “I don’t know if we have enough film in the mags. Could you do it in one take?” There was all that talk back then when we shot on film, like, “Are you actually prepared to do this?” There was so much focus because film was so expensive.
Streaming Success
Six months after premiering at Sundance in 1995, Party Girl became the first popular feature-length film streamed on the internet. It was cooked up as a publicity stunt by First Look, the film’s distributor, during the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), a week before the movie’s wide theatrical release. Because internet service and bandwidth was difficult to get in 1995, only a few hundred viewers tuned in to watch the low-resolution feed. Through his company, Point of Presence Company (POPCO), technology journalist Glenn Fleishman set up the feed and hosted the event:
Glenn Fleishman (then-principal of POPCO): If you knew a little bit about the internet then, people called you all the time. People would be like, “Hey, I want to see the internet”—and we were the internet. Lucy Mohl, a very well-known film critic, was working out of our office and the SIFF organizers said to Lucy, “We’ve got this film we’re bringing into Seattle, Party Girl, and the people behind it would really like to broadcast it over the internet.” Parker Posey came to our office and did a live introduction and hit the button to start streaming the movie.
Posey: I remember nothing about that... I’m such a Luddite.
Birckmayer: I’m a Luddite. Compared to me, Parker is like an M.I.T. computer engineer. I didn’t have a computer. I remember on the day it actually streamed going across the street to a friend who had just purchased an Apple desktop. Because of the technology at that point, it was like [watching] a stop-motion film.
Fleishman: The software, C-U-SeeMe, was an early video conferencing software. There’s not even an equivalent that is as bad quality now. It was black and white, maybe like ten frames a second if you were lucky, maybe slower. It was just this very herky-jerky thing… but it worked! And it was the first time a film put into a major release into American movie theaters was broadcast generally on the internet.
Von Scherler Mayer: I think it goes with a lot of the spirit around the film, which was a really positive, celebratory little-engine-that-could.
Legacy as a Cult Classic
Party Girl grossed a modest sum of $472,370 in theaters, but in recent years it’s found a new audience, resonating with younger generations:
Von Scherler Mayer: It’s amazing to me how many kids found the film long after it was gone. You know, it never did [big] business in theaters, but it really continues to find people.
Birckmayer: With Party Girl fans through the years I’ve noticed a nostalgia for a mythical ‘90s New York that I think in part is because it was before 9/11 and hyper development. There’s a nostalgia for the creativity, the nightlife, the music, the drag explosion, the ball scene and the New York indie film scene. Over the years I’ve encountered a sweet cult following, whose members often include gay people, librarians, designer/creative types and, of course, party people.
Posey: Librarians and people who work in bookstores are like, “Oh my God, thank you so much. Party Girl made me want to become a librarian.”
Von Scherler Mayer: I have [people] come up to me and basically say, “I was in the closet. I was a kid in the boondocks. I saw Party Girl and it made me feel like I could be accepted and that there was a world out there for me and your movie changed my life.” I can’t believe it because it’s thin as an envelope in terms of the story—a party girl becomes the librarian. But I guess the feelings underneath it, my feminist feelings and [Harry’s] gay feelings about the community must really be in there. There’s an undercurrent that speaks to kids looking to be accepted outside of whatever their mainstream culture is.
This oral history was assembled from separate interviews, which have been condensed and edited.
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