Taking Her Cues as a Director

Melanie Mayron finds that no matter how hard she tries, she keeps getting typecast both as an actress and a director.

“I have played the best friend to some of the biggest and best movie stars,” Mayron says, laughing. “In the leads I have done, I was the best friend--the movie was about the best friend.”

And as a female director working in a still predominantly male profession, she tends to get the “softer” projects. So she’s become even more proactive as a director. “I just cut together an action reel for myself,” says Mayron, who won an Emmy 13 years ago for playing the neurotic Melissa Steadman on the ABC yuppie angst series “thirtysomething.”

“I had done three ‘Nash Bridges’ and four ‘New York Undercover’ and there were a whole lot of action sequences and stunts and shootouts and people falling down stairs. And nobody knows I had done any of that. So when somebody says, ‘She couldn’t do that,’ I’ll say, “Take a look at this tape.”

Still, Mayron has done well for herself behind the camera since making her directorial debut 12 years ago on an episode of “thirtysomething.”

Mayron, 49, has directed numerous episodes of TV series, such as “Providence,” “State of Grace,” “Ed” and “Dawson’s Creek,” and several TV movies--she received a Directors Guild of America nomination in 1997 for “The Wonderful World of Disney” family comedy “Toothless.” She made her feature debut six years ago with the family film “The Baby-Sitters Club.”

Now she’s back on the big screen with “Slap Her, She’s French.” The teen satire--sort of an “All About Eve” set in a Texas high school--that opens Sept. 20.

Set in the fictional nouveau-riche town of Splendona, “Slap Her” stars Jane McGregor as Starla Grady, the most popular girl in high school. She’s a beauty pageant winner and the head cheerleader, and is dating the school’s quarterback (Matt Czuchry). Her main goal in life is to host a national morning TV talk show. But her world is turned upside-down when her family decides to have a French foreign exchange student, Genevieve LePlouff (Piper Pearbo), live at their mansion.

Timid, shy--someone Helen Gurley Brown would refer to as a mouseburger--Genevieve arrives in Splendona complete with beret and a French accent as thick as her glasses. Although Genevieve professes an undying love and devotion to her new family, Starla soon realizes to her horror that Genevieve is intent on becoming the top girl on campus.

The script for “Slap Her,” Mayron says, says had originally been at DreamWorks and then Fox Searchlight before landing at Constantin Films, which produced it. Mayron admits that the subject was “really broad on paper.” The actors, she added, had a “tendency to go big. I really was trying to make it as real as possible. It was a fine line.”

McGregor, who makes her film debut in ‘Slap Her,” says Mayron was very helpful in helping her find the right tone for Starla. “Because she was an actor, she was understanding,” says the 19-year-old actress. “She would listen to me babble and go off when I was struggling. It was helpful.”

During a recent interview at an office near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mayron says she loves to make people laugh--but she also believes that audiences should learn something while they are laughing. The message of this film, she says, is about self-image and being comfortable in your own skin.

“My grandmother--she passed away a few years ago--was a Russian Jew. She moved in her late 20s to Philadelphia from Kiev. She was so concerned growing up about what people thought of her--you had to be a certain way and live a certain way even if it wasn’t in your heart. That’s kind of Starla’s thing. She is with this guy because that’s who she is supposed to be with. She has got these friends because they are the pretty girls.”

With just 43 shooting days, Mayron had no time to rehearse her cast. Plus, she says, the production encountered weather problems shooting last winter in and around Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. As Mayron describes it: “There was rain, ice and snow. It was all just trying to keep up with everything.”

In particular, Mayron was at her wits’ end during three all-night football game shoots.

“We ended up shooting it in mid-January. It was between 25 and 30 degrees, if not between 20 and 25 degrees,” she recalls. “They told us we would have 3,000 extras and I had a big crane and we were going to shoot some magnificent camera stuff. But we only had 300, and by 5 in the morning there were 30 people.”

She had to keep shuffling the dwindling crowd around the stands to make it look like they had 3,000 people.

“It was a fiasco,” Mayron says with a sigh. “I put my head in my hand at like 4:30 in the morning on the second night of shooting and said, “What am I doing here?’ ”

Not only did Mayron audition numerous young actors, she also had to do cow casting for several scenes that show the more rural side of Splendona. “Milky Way was our hero cow,” she says, laughing. “We would move her to different locales. They bought me pictures of cows off the Internet. I used three of them: Milky Way and two supporting cows.”

The Philadelphia-born actress has long had an interest in photography--as it happened, Melissa Steadman in “thirtysomething” was a photographer as well--and she believes that led to her interest in directing.

“When we were shooting the movie ‘Girlfriends’ that Claudia Weill directed, we were shooting at a real place--a railroad flat apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City.” Mayron was the star of the 1978 comedy-drama about a young woman who must adjust her life when her roommate-girlfriend leaves to get married.

She wanted to do a scene where the roommate was outside the bathroom door talking to me in the bathroom, and I would be sitting on the toilet. But it was so narrow in the hallway they couldn’t get all of us in the shot. I was sitting on top of the toilet rehearsing and saw that the medicine chest and sink were in front of me. I took the mirror on the medicine chest and moved it. I said, ‘Can you see me?’ They said yes, because my reflection was in the mirror. I heard Claudia say, ‘That’s the shot.’ She said, ‘You have a good eye.’ I was 22 or 23 at the time.”

Not only does Mayron have a keen visual sense, but being an actress has naturally made her sympathetic to her cast’s needs and open to their suggestions. “I have worked with wonderful directors like Herbert Ross, Paul Mazursky, Daniel Mann and Costa-Gavras,” she says. “These directors direct like other actors who are directors direct. They respect the actor. Actors are smart and they usually have great instincts and great ideas about their characters.”

McGregor found that Mayron was particularly supportive and sensitive. “Being a woman, there is a lot of scary stuff out there, and being a young female actor there is a lot of exploitation,” she says. “So having a woman director who is also an actor and knows how vulnerable you feel.... Actors are so insecure and often directors not being an actor don’t know that. Melanie has been there and she knows how to deal with that.”

Mayron hasn’t given up her acting career--she recently appeared in a cameo in the kids’ film “Clockstoppers.” But her acting slowed down after “thirtysomething” was canceled 11 years ago.

“When we were canceled, all of us had trouble getting acting jobs,” she explains. “It was a weird period because we were so known as our characters.” Much to her surprise, though, offers to direct episodic TV began to pour in.

“I said to my agent, ‘How am I getting so much work?’ He said, ‘Because you’re good.’ I said you mean being good can get you the job? That never happened to me before. If you are an actor and if you’re good, that doesn’t mean you get the job.”

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Susan King is a Times staff writer.