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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Film Censor Has Seen It All In 87 Years

Carl Schoettler The Baltimore Sun

Mary Avara, 87 years old and still frank, feisty and furious at John Waters, stands ready to start all over again.

For two decades she reigned as Maryland’s, and America’s, last, loudest and best-known movie censor, snipping away at “dirty pictures” like the priest in “Cinema Paradiso.”

She helped slash scenes in films from Ingmar Bergman’s “Monika,” to “Promises! Promises!” which featured a half-clothed Jayne Mansfield, to that raunch classic, “Deep Throat.”

“If they appointed me, I’d go back tomorrow,” she says. “I don’t think I’d see anything worse than I’ve seen.”

“Multiple Maniacs,” a 1970 film by her Baltimore bete noire, John Waters, might not have been the worst. But it’s the one she remembers the best.

“When you make a picture about Blessed Mother … ,” she gasps, still aghast and momentarily speechless, “I wanted to throw him out the window.”

Waters remembers Avara well, too. “Multiple Maniacs” didn’t show in a commercial theater in Baltimore for more than 10 years.

Avara would have excommunicated “Maniacs.” The film had a parody of the crucifixion, lesbian nuns making love in a church and the ineffable Divine, Waters’ 300-pound drag queen superheroine, being raped by a giant lobster.

“Maniacs” finally played at midnight at the Charles Theatre on a weekend in January 1981, just six months before the Maryland Board of Censors closed forever.

Waters, of course, went on to commercial success with “Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray” and “Serial Mom.”

Avara got $2,000 a year to watch all the films she could stomach. Which she did. She was tough.