Daisy von Scherler Mayer

The daughter of Sasha von Scherler, an actress, and soap opera writer and producer Paul Avila Mayer, von Scherler Mayer got her show business start as an assistant on the Sidney Lumet comedy "Family Business" (1989). Then she struck out on her own, directing and co-writing "Party Girl," which starred a then-unknown Posey and was made on a relatively shoestring budget. Set in a Lower East Side universe of twilight-hour revelry, the film earned critical acclaim and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. It also gave Posey a huge career boost while introducing critics to von Scherler Mayer's offbeat sensibilities. The film inspired a short-lived television series, also called "Party Girl" (Fox 1996), and was the first full-length feature to be transmitted in its entirety over the Internet, as part of the 1995 Seattle International Film Festival. Having gotten the attention of the filmmaking world, von Scherler Mayer helmed several more comedies over the next decade. While they varied widely between the urban romance-comedy "Woo" (1998), the Bollywood-Hollywood fusion-musical "The Guru" (2002), and the family friendly "Madeline" (1998), all three shared an appreciation for eccentric characters and behaviors, and in the case of the first two, featured non-traditional protagonists. In addition, all three failed to heat up the box office and received mixed notices. "Woo" was near-universally panned, while the New York Times' review of "Madeline" sounded a lot like its review of "Party Girl," the critic praising von Scherler Mayer's inventiveness, but lamenting the lack of meaty plotting. As for "The Guru," about an aspiring actor from India who becomes a New Age sexual advisor and fixture of New York's high society, it was praised in quite a few circles for the directing.After "The Guru" turned out to be only mildly profitable, von Scherler Mayer entered a period in which she worked exclusively in television as a director of made-for-TV movies and episodes of series. She worked on a number of popular and critically-acclaimed shows, including "Mad Men" (AMC 2007-15) and "Nurse Jackie" (Showtime 2009-15), and a few less-than-popular ones like the teen comedy "Aliens in America" (CW 2007-2008). Her jump back into features came with "Some Girl(s)," an adaptation of LaBute's successful stage play, which centers around a sociopath who revisits former lovers ahead of his impending nuptials. Along with preferring film to television due to the greater amount of production time, von Scherler Mayer accepted because she wanted to work with LaBute, whose credits included "In the Company of Men" (1997).