Paul Bartel is one of those clever and accomplished directors who, beginning as an independent filmmaker, managed to maintain an outrageous, black humor and marginal sensibility when he began working within the Hollywood exploitation framework. Among his pre-Hollywood independents is The Secret Cinema (1966), “a paranoid fantasy” which hovers in the zone where the cinema merges with the subconscious of its audience, telling the harrowing, hilarious tale of a woman who believes that her life is secretly being filmed and screened to scornful audiences at local movie theaters. Death Race 2000 (1974), made by Bartel for Corman's New World Pictures, features Mary Woronov, David Carradine, and Sylvester Stallone in a story set in the not-so-distant future, when the winner of the national sports competition - killing pedestrians - is the most likely candidate for President of the United States. Bartel's other features include Private Parts and Cannonball.
Mary Woronov, who visited the PFA for our January 1979 tribute to the Queens of the Bs, was a dominating figure, so to speak, in Warhol's “factory” (one of the original Chelsea Girls, she played the wicked Hanoi Hannah), and in New York's Theater of the Ridiculous. In Sugar Cookies (Ted Gershuny, 1973), made in New York, Woronov was featured in a role similar to her Warhol character (“sexually ambiguous, cruel-but-beautiful...she's perverse, she's exciting, she's utterly enchanting”--Michael Goodwin), and when she moved to Hollywood, Woronov continued in a similar vein, working on Death Race and other films (including Rock 'n' Roll High School, Disco High, and Hollywood Boulevard).
