“It was like joining a club,” says the director John Waters. “A very secret club, like a biker gang or something. It’s like they were a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high.”
As celebrated by Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s new documentary, Scala!!! Or, The Incredibly Strange Rise of the World’s Wildest Cinema and How it Influenced a Mixed-Up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits, London’s Scala cinema was all this and more. An early taste of the building’s capacity to embed itself in potent pop-cultural moments came in one single week in 1972 when Mick Rock’s live shots of Iggy Pop and then Lou Reed became the cover images of their Raw Power and Transformer albums. Both photographs were taken at the Scala in its first incarnation as a concert venue. But the place really came into its own in 1981 when, after a brief interlude as an indoor forest for primates, it became a cinema. It opened with a screening of King Kong, as a semi-conscious tribute to its former occupants. Welcome to the monkey house, indeed.
Located in the then rough and ready area of King’s Cross, the Scala was, to put it mildly, no multiplex. Instead, it became a debauched countercultural haven regularly attended by luminaries including director Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Boy George, Mary Harron, Stewart Lee, Ben Wheatley and many more. The programming was a mixture of the sacred and the profane: arthouse epics from the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Werner Herzog rubbed shoulders with sexploitation romps such as Curt McDowell’s infamous semi-porn comedy horror Thundercrack! and the gloriously outre oeuvre of the aforementioned Waters (one of the documentary’s talking heads).
The venue itself was famously cold and uncomfortable. In the film, employee JoAnne Sellar describes clearing the cinema the morning after one of its legendary all-nighters and finding a dead body (“He was still warm, but very stiff”). And yet it’s clear that over the course of a decade, something happened at the Scala that is worth both learning from and celebrating. As well as being as funny, entertaining and irreverent as the films the cinema typically screened, Scala!!! is a testimony to the value of physical cultural spaces. It’s a film about audiences and how they can become productive creative communities.
Early on, Mark Moore of the 80s dance act S’Express vividly describes his broken domestic environment at the time he discovered the Scala. His father had essentially turfed him out into B&B accommodation so he could move in with a new partner. The young Moore spent his dinner money on nights at the cinema watching radical films such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead. In the process, he found a refuge of like-minded conspirators. Catterall, whose own domestic situation at the time was every bit as troubled (he was being emotionally and physically abused by his stepfather, a practising warlock), describes the Scala as “a massive paradox. It was the ultimate outsider cinema but it was incredibly welcoming and inclusive at the same time.”
What emerges is a story not just about a particular corner of the counterculture but about the counterculture as a concept. The film begins with a clip of Margaret Thatcher taking office in 1979. She doesn’t feature again but the cinema’s sense of opposition is assumed. The Scala became an LGBTQ+ hub at a time when those communities were embattled and under-represented. As Giles puts it: “It was a time when people wore badges. The political allegiances were part of the identity of both the cinema and the audience.”
“The thing about King’s Cross is it’s a major terminus,” says Giles, who, in addition to co-directing Scala!!!, wrote a book about the cinema and even programmed its films for a while. “So there was a sense of loads of things and places converging. We had a monthly mailing list and I could see from stuffing the envelopes that we had addresses from all around the country. It wasn’t just a London crowd. It was UK-wide. We even found out that young Italian and French people would make journeys to the cinema.” Former Jesus and Mary Chain bassist Douglas Hart recalls up-and-coming bands using the Scala’s all-nighters as a place to crash before journeys back to northern England, the Midlands or Scotland.
However, London’s bleaker realities were always beating at the Scala’s door. Wheatley describes the surrounding area in the 1980s as “medieval” and getting to the cinema in one piece could be a challenge. But the times were changing and as rundown as it may have been, developers had their eyes on the location. “There’s a crowd scene in the film and you can literally see a red cross on the wall,” says Giles. “It wasn’t graffiti, it was something to do with the redevelopment of the area.”
But the Scala’s demise (it closed as a cinema in 1993) was hastened by something more fitting: a desire to push the envelope when its decision to screen, illegally, Stanley Kubrick’s then-banned A Clockwork Orange attracted the attention of the Federation Against Copyright Theft. A legal case ensued, which Giles, who had left the Scala by this time, returned to fight. “They’d never had a theatrical case before and it was quite sexy for them,” she recalls. “But it wasn’t at all sexy for me.” The Scala lost the court case and went into receivership.
However, Giles is at pains to point out that the end for the Scala was actually more prosaic. Quite simply, the lease ran out and, with gentrification looming, another was not forthcoming. Eventually, residents were able to fight the proposed developments in the area and the Scala remains a 1,000-capacity gig and clubbing venue to this day. But the cinema was finished. As a result, the film has a melancholy quality; a sense of summoning ghosts. That was no coincidence.
“We had Chris Watson, [co-founder of post-punk greats Cabaret Voltaire and David Attenborough’s soundman of choice] place contact mics all around the building,” says Catterall. “We then fed the recordings into the film at a subsonic sort of level. It’s the one part of the film that does at least graze the occult.”
Thus, the Scala’s “rumble” (a phenomenon referenced by almost all the film’s contributors and caused by trains beneath the building running into King’s Cross Thameslink station and myriad underground platforms) is captured for posterity. It’s a neat metaphor for something underground and slightly unnerving, briefly making its presence felt.
The loss is more profound and wide-reaching than simply that of a cult cinema. In many ways, an institution as wayward and reckless as the Scala feels like a relic of a different era, at least in terms of existing in the centre of a major UK city. “For all the laughter in the film, there is a real, deep, suffused sense of melancholy,” says Catterall.
Yet the Scala, it’s clear, is not really dead. Throughout the documentary, there are visual flourishes courtesy of Quentin Tarantino’s animator Osbert Parker. Cartoons are drawn for the film by Viz comic’s Davey Jones. It’s clear that a whole generation of artists and film-makers – some present in the film, others not – have sustained an aesthetic derived from the culture they experienced at the Scala. Films, music and art clearly inspired by its sensibility have become canonical.
“When you think about other cultural spaces, there were barriers,” says Giles. “Intellectual barriers, sometimes behavioural barriers, sometimes age barriers. People who were not feeling at home in their skin, in their life, found in the Scala a peer group, an audience and a programme that had an appeal to them.”
Outside the virtual realm, the economics of modern urban life make such quixotic ventures almost impossible nowadays. But abandoning them means the risk of abandoning something important. As Rory Perkins, one of the Scala’s regular DJs puts it: “The Scala became us. And we became it.”
Scala!!! is in cinemas from 5 January. A season celebrating the films of the Scala begins on the same date at BFI Southbank, London.
