Written and Directed by Ali Catterall and Jane Giles, based on the book by Giles, Scala Cinema 1978-1993 | 96 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | On Blu-Ray (from Severin Films)
The full title of this terrific documentary is Scala!!! or, The Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits. I’m proud to say I was one of those weirdos/misfits. I spent my final three years of high school in London in the late 1980s and that’s when my love of cinema really took hold. My friends and I would stop in at the Scala Cinema periodically to enjoy a genuine experience, something beyond anything I’d seen before in my 16 or 17 years. My first time seeing the films of David Lynch, Russ Meyer, and John Waters was at this cinema, located in King’s Cross, which at the time one of the rougher neighbourhoods in the city. I never knew what I would get when the lights went down, only that it would be likely unnerving and absolutely unforgettable. I attended at least a couple of their all-night screenings on Saturday nights where groups of people hung out around in the cinema with blankets and bottles and smokes, everyone enjoying themselves in this cavernous, chilly space, the Northern Line tube beneath the building occasionally shaking the seats.
The documentary captures all of the peculiarity and physicality of that experience through the shared memories of many of the audience members, including people who went on to have careers in show biz — Waters is present and accounted for, as is Ralph Brown, Withnail & I, Impromptu, Adam Buxton, Stardust, Ben Wheatley, director of In The Earth, and Mary Harron, director of Daliland and American Psycho, amongst many others. We also hear from many who worked at the cinema, from the ushers and box office folks to the guy who designed their iconic monthly schedule posters.
What becomes clear is that a cinema like The Scala could have a huge impact in the cultural life of a city where audiences were keen for subversive, provocative fare. I can attest to that — even as a teen I noticed the hunger for those voices through the Thatcher years. The Scala building had a history as an entertainment venue going back decades, and when the original Scala cinema location at Tottenham Court Road near Goodge Street closed, The King’s Cross space became the new home to this scrappy movie house.
It crossed over a number of scenes at the time, hosting punk shows, the post-punk new romantics, and whatever came after that. It showed euro-trash, erotica, horror, exploitation, queer cinema and classic art house, shorts and features. The tragedy of The Scala is that the programmers’ courage turned out to be their downfall. Co-director Jane Giles was one of them. She screened the bête noire of British cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, which was banned at the time. Charged for it, she had to pay a fine, and the cinema struggled to recover, closing in 1993.
You can still stop by The Scala, now a music venue in an entirely cleaned-up and polished King’s Cross neighbourhood. The grimy hideout for the unusual and perverse that showed everything from Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom to Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is now very much in the past, but this documentary package does good work reminding us of its enduring gift to cinema culture in London and beyond.
And, wow, is it comprehensive. Over three discs the Blu-Ray package includes the stuff you might have expected — directors’ commentaries and the like — but also has previous docs about the cinema, extended interviews with featured guests, and a host of Scala-screened shorts including titles like Dead Cat, The Mark of Lilith, and Boobs A Lot.
