Publisher Amy Scholder discovered Woronov, and Gary Indiana has raved about her work, but even if she’s now able to call herself a “great writer,” she can also be hilariously blunt. The results have included one memoir (1995’s Swimming Underground), one short-story collection (2004’s Blind Love), and two novels (2000’s Snake and 2002’s Niagara, which sports this great first sentence: “I started drinking in the day, and by the time I got to the supermarket I was so loaded I need a cart to stand up”). “My brain started working and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I started writing,” she says. What it is, though, is the latest outgrowth of a creative birth that took place when Woronov, facing the idea of death (“I got an illness that was merely an infection, but they told me it was cancer”), kicked drugs at the age of 50. “People can be told that their pensions will be taken away but the head of the corporation will increase his own pension two million dollars - and they don’t do anything! They don’t riot! They just go, ‘OK.’ What happened to us?”Ī big question, but Woronov’s next novel, What Really Happened, might answer some of it - even if she makes a point of saying the book isn’t political. “The media has completely lulled us into nothingness,” she continues.

And I’ve been living here under the illusion that we’re democratic.” We’ve conducted the most wars since World War II.

“As a country, we’re out of our minds! We’re the greatest polluter, we have the most corrupt government, and we have the biggest weapons of mass destruction. “It is,” Woronov agrees by phone from Los Angeles. And Death Race 2000? We’re now six years past the date targeted by Paul Bartel’s 1975 movie, yet its nightmare vision of fascist TV remains hideously funny - right on time, if not ahead of it. Woronov isn’t your average actor - she’s a painter, great writer, and performer whose roots in the Playhouse of the Ridiculous are often unjustly obscured by her Warhol-era exploits, both of which predate her Roger Corman–produced bouts with Hollywood. ACTRESS AND AUTHOR If you love to watch cult movies and pay tribute to the stars that make them great (and in San Francisco, who doesn’t?), Peaches Christ’s Midnight Mass screening of Death Race 2000, featuring a live appearance by Mary Woronov, is something special.

Swimming underground by mary woronov