I first discovered the Scala cinema in August 1981. I’d just turned 17 and had spent the summer holidays working night shifts cleaning planes at Gatwick Airport. It was dirty and hard but magical to stay up all night and see the lights, and also to be part of a crew of oddballs who were knowledgeable about movies. My school mates were a bunch of punks who regularly escaped the constraints of our conservative town by getting the train up to London to explore the clothes shops on the King’s Road and in Kensington Market, go to gigs and to the Scala, a vibrant repertory cinema just off the Tottenham Court Road. Alongside daily changing double-bills of arthouse independents and cool Hollywood classics, the Scala put on all-nighters of bands with movies showing between the likes of Throbbing Gristle, 23 Skidoo and others whose names are now lost in the mists of music history.
The Tottenham Street Scala came to an abrupt end in April 1981 when the building was redeveloped as the offices of Channel 4. But within three months its programmer Stephen Woolley had managed to move the whole operation up to an abandoned ‘Primatarium’ above a snooker club in a majestic 1920s electric picture palace near King’s Cross station. My friends grumbled that the ‘new’ Scala wasn’t as good as the old one, but we had a bank holiday weekend to kill and decided to go to an all-night show. For me, it felt like entering a fairytale castle with endless marble mosaic staircases and a jungle mural that eventually led to a deep, dark auditorium where my mind was blown by the extraordinary images endlessly appearing on the silver screen. It was glorious and wild, particularly for a kid ravenous for more films than their local cinema could provide. And they played Joy Division on the PA between the films. At 7am the next morning I staggered out of there freezing and physically exhausted, but a different person. Enlightened and with a sense of purpose.
Fast forward to 1988 when a tiny advert appeared in Monday’s media pages of The Guardian newspaper: Scala programmer wanted, £12k p/a. I applied for the job and was interviewed by Woolley, who had a stuffed wolf in a glass box in this office, a prop from the first film he produced in 1984. I told him about all the times I’d been to the Scala, from that first all-nighter, though my college years coming to see not only repeat showings of Blade Runner, The Evil Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Ms. 45 Angel of Vengeance, and all the stylish horror and sci-fi movies I loved, but also experimental films such as Scorpio Rising — and being the only woman in the audience for gay arthouse films Querelle, Taxi Zum Klo and Un Chant d’Amour. Luckily for me, Woolley was inclined to hire young people who weren’t wedded to old ways of working. JoAnne Sellar was just 19 when she got the job in 1982 and soon found herself using the Scala’s monthly fold-out programme to campaign against the legal restrictions being imposed on home entertainment, the so-called ‘video nasty’ farrago. She also had to help shift a dead body found in the cinema after a screening of Looking for Mr Goodbar; relating the story years later, Sellar seems remarkably untraumatised by the experience. She went on to become the producer of Boogie Nights and several other films by the director Paul Thomas Anderson.
The best-attended all-nighters were horror, when Mexican waves of panic and fear would break out during The Exorcist
By the end of 1988 I’d moved into a tiny flat up the Caledonian Road, five minutes’ walk from the cinema I was now programming with a remit to break even by showing a mixture of old favourites and new films true to the spirit of the Scala. The best-attended all-nighters were horror, when Mexican waves of panic and fear would break out during The Exorcist as unsuspecting audiences were terrified by the sudden appearances of the Scala’s resident tabby cats, Huston and Roy, looking for a lap to sit on. Huston was boldest, once miaowing loudly at me across the auditorium during a scene in Prick Up Your Ears, as Alfred Molina’s character Kenneth Halliwell mimes strangling a cat. Roy was more timid, but occasionally seen dangling by his claws from the drapes either side of the screen, for no apparent reason.
Comedy all-nighters were also popular, particularly those dedicated to the films of Steve Martin and Monty Python. The audiences were fuelled by endless cans of beer from the Scala’s café bar, which also made a mint during club nights such as the Mix (which showed camp movies but also had a DJ and dancefloor with live acts onstage including the likes of Lily Savage and Julian Clary with Fanny the Wonder Dog). The Scala audiences also frequented The Bell pub just 50 yards away, a central HQ for LGBTQ+ alternative types, along with Gay’s the Word bookshop, the recipient of a benefit screening put on by the Scala when its stock was raided by customs in 1984. The Scala programme was known for its fundraisers and support of causes ranging from the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard — which then operated across the road above Housmans bookshop — to the Terrence Higgins Trust for victims of the Aids epidemic, CND and the Miners’ Strike. By the early 1990s things had changed. Home video had become affordable with a plentiful supply of titles, while cinemas got tattier through lack of investment. The recession bit hard as banks tough ended up, and King’s Cross was in the throes of a redevelopment plan which threatened to wipe out scores of local businesses. The Scala’s 12-year lease ran out in June 1993 and sadly the cinema closed, this time unable to raise the funds to relocate in a London which had become a very different place, populated by rough sleepers and bedevilled by crack.
The loss of the Scala cinema was deeply personal, but through co-directing the documentary Scala!!!, I realised that I was far from alone in this feeling. Casting around for the interviewees we filmed at the Scala, a music venue since 1999, we discovered that many of the Scala audience went on to become film-makers, writers, musicians, artists, actors and activists. They came from not only all over London but throughout the UK, and inter nationally, as we’ve recently discovered from previewing our documentary at film festivals in the US, Australia, India and Europe. You can always tell a Scala person by the way their eyes light up and they laugh at the memories. But alongside them is a new audience, young people gripped by the very idea of a rock ’n’ roll cinema that was a pirate ship on the stormy seas of Thatcher’s Britain and taking that inspiration forward into their own lives.
