Yakkin’ About ‘Party Girl’
by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd and Jennie Rose Halperin
In the 1995 film Party Girl, director Daisy Von Scherler Mayer tells a colorful fable about Mary (Parker Posey), an irresponsible young woman who, after encountering the New York Public Library (and a handsome Lebanese falafel cart guy), realizes that her life of loft raves, party drugs, and wigged-out high fashion may be somewhat bereft of meaning.
This was the dawn of the internet, long before streaming. But Party Girl was the first U.S. feature to premiere online, in black-and-white, super low-fidelity form, broadcast from Glenn Fleishman’s POPCO offices to the Seattle International Film Festival.
The movie was made on a slender budget of just $150,000, so the producers got friends who were deeply involved in New York’s nightclub scene to help out, dragooning stars like the green-haired It Twins and Lady Bunny in to play themselves. Other friends worked in fashion, helping create a vivid pastiche of real and vintage and fake for Mary and her friends; they borrowed a Chanel jacket through Hamish Bowles, and an iconic leopard shrug from Todd Oldham, along with a pair of Vivienne Westwood sequined shorts. In short, the people who made Party Girl were broke but having a ball and achieving their vision in a community, and the fun is as fresh and real now as it was 30 years ago. This stands in stark contrast to today’s film production world, in which everything is corporatized and dried out and ground up and marketed to within an inch of its life and it all seems to be owned by people like David Zaslav, or worse yet Marc Andreessen, who evidently thinks that any minute now you’ll just talk to a computer and a movie will pop out.
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