Just recently, I re-watched Party Girl, which is sort of a love hymn to ’90s New York culture. Daisy Mayer is a friend, and I used to go to parties that she threw. She was way ahead of her time, in terms of inherently open politics expressed through partying and having a great time. Watching this movie again — and I watched it with my 11-year-old — I realized I’d missed so much when I saw it the first time. It’s a really beautiful movie. It’s full of feminism and queer culture. At the time, I was like, ‘Wow, someone I know can make a movie!’ Now I’m like, ‘Wow, this movie was really beautiful and homemade.’

I love everything about this movie—the fashion is divine, and its glimpses of New York’s then-gentrifying downtown capture a moment lost in time. Apparently, the film is beloved, by those in the know, for its incredibly accurate portrayal of the library-science field. But ultimately, this is Parker Posey’s star vehicle. Her face has perfect comedic timing. I dare you to watch this scene (or this one) without letting out a snort or two.

Party Girl’s writer-director and music supervisor share production memories, praise feminist librarians and give screenwriting advice while reading your Letterboxd reviews of their 1995 indie gem. 

“It’s back again, bitches!” That’s Bill Coleman, music supervisor on Party Girl, happy to be reading Letterboxd reviews of the 1995 comedy on the occasion of its 4K restoration. He’s joined by the film’s director Daisy von Scherler Mayer—who co-wrote the script with Harry Birckvon and Sheila Gaffney—whom you may know from her television directing work: Yellowjackets, Mad Men, Halt and Catch Fire and Inventing Anna make up just a small selection of her impressive filmography.

To writer-director Daisy von Scherler Mayer, her 1995 movie Party Girl is “the gift that keeps on giving.” This, despite its meager initial returns. In a Zoom call with Jezebel this week, von Scherler Mayer explained that she sold the movie to First Look Pictures in a distribution deal for $30,000…

Now screening on the Criterion Channel—and perhaps at an arthouse cinema near you—is a new 4k restoration of Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s debut film, Party Girl (1995), starring indie queen Parker Posey. Party Girl has become a cult classic for its heroine’s wardrobe of 90s couture and its documentation of Manhattan nightlife during that liminal period between the worst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the sanitizing project of Rudy Giuliani’s mayorship.

This month, we celebrate Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s Party Girl, the quintessential centerpiece of Parker Posey’s prolific ’90s oeuvre. Originally released in June 1995, the film inspired Vanity Fair contributor Michael Musto to crown Posey “the new queen of the art house.”

Posey secured a rent-controlled apartment in the Lower East Side and put herself to work immediately. “Parker wasn’t a household name,” Party Girl’s director Daisy von Scherler Mayer told Vogue for a piece celebrating the lasting legacy of the film. “But she was well-known among casting directors because she was that crazy girl who would come in dressed in the most amazing outfits.”

The 4K restoration and re-release of the comedy Party Girl brings Parker Posey to Back To One. Shortly after the success of that movie in 1995, she went on to star in so many independent films, like The Daytrippers, Clockwatchers, The House of Yes (not to mention a bunch of Hal Hartley and Christopher Guest classics), that she was dubbed “Queen of the Indies.” On this episode, she explains why that moniker was oddly detrimental to her career. She talks about recent experiences on the sets of Beau Is Afraid and The Staircase; the connection between actors and athletes; why, for her, it all starts with “shoes and hair;” and much more!