“The Scala had magic,” says John Waters, the pope of trash. “It was like joining a club, 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. Which is a good way to see movies.”
The cult director is speaking in the tremendously fun documentary 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, which chronicles the changing circumstances (and geography) of London’s most riotous, postpunk, LGBTQ-friendly film venue.
Jane Giles, who directed the film with Ali Catterall, was a regular at the Scala before she became its programmer, the renowned curator behind such double bills as Santa Sangre and Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
“Ali and I had published a book of programmes of the Scala from 1978 to 1993,” says Giles. “I had written it and he had edited. In the book we had a lot of cultural history mediated through the lens of the Scala. But around the time of publication we realised that two things were missing from the book. One was the voice of the audience talking about what it felt like to be there. And, also, what they went on to become after the doors closed in 1993.”
As well as Waters, that audience included his fellow film-makers Derek Jarman, Mary Harron, Ben Wheatley and Peter Strickland, who says that “the Scala was perverse in every sense of the word. It made sleaze romantic. That cinema was a refuge from suburbia. It made me feel as if I wasn’t the only misfit in the world.” Christopher Nolan still carries his Scala membership card in his wallet.
“We decided to round up 50 people who went on to be filmmakers, musicians, artists, writers, activists, and actors,” says Giles. “We started with a long list of names that we whittled down to people,” – Boy George, Jah Wobble and Adam Buxton among them – “who were prepared to be interviewed for this strange, kaleidoscopic expressionistic film about a corner of history which turns out to be something quite universal.”
The Scala was founded by Stephen Woolley, the Crying Game producer, in 1979, originally at a venue on Tottenham Street in London, and then, in 1981, when Channel 4 moved in, at a contemporaneously colourful King’s Cross address.
The cinema, inspired by the midnight-movie circuit, would help build the reputation of such films as Erasurehead, Pink Flamingos and Thundercrack. It proved pivotal in the reappraisal of the work of the sexploitation auteur Russ Meyer. Legend has it that the last remaining print of Thundercrack, Curt McDowell’s infamously explicit 1975 movie, screened at the cinema until it fell apart.
The programme encompassed a broad church: these titles nestled alongside classics from Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour to Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru.
“We say that it was everything,” says Giles. “From Hollywood classics to European art house to cult movies. There was horror, LGBT-plus, sexploitation and musicals. At the beginning of the film you can see text on screen explaining the range of the programme. That range was really important to the Scala, because it used that template of the fold-out calendar programme like a sort of advent calendar.
“Every day had a different type of film, but every film was of the same import. What the Scala was saying was that high art and low art were of equal value. And that value was in the eye of the beholder. As Ralph Brown, our wonderful usher and safe worker, who went on to play Danny the Dealer in Withnail and I, says, the Scala did it all.”
Many of the Scala fans assembled for the documentary fondly recall the sticky floors and hard flip-up seats. Giles notes that the grand 1920s art deco facade became tricky to maintain; the boiler no longer worked, there was no air conditioning; and plenty of “unusual bits of rubbish” were left lying around.
“People often talk about the sticky floors,” says Catterall. “But I remember going to multiplexes at that time, and they were pretty moth-eaten as well. Some were risible. The Scala was different because it was a Ray Bradbury house of curiosity. The billings made it different from the cookie-cutter multiplexes. Which were pretty crap themselves.”
By the early 1990s the Scala had helped shape budding filmmakers and provided an unofficial refuge for an LGBTQ community, including many staff members, who were weathering the twin threats of the Aids crisis and of Margaret Thatcher’s section 28 regulations banning the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities.
In 1992 the cinema made international headlines when Warner Bros was tipped off about a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange, which it had withdrawn from distribution in the United Kingdom in 1974, after the director became alarmed by a series of rapes and murders that tabloid newspapers claimed were inspired by Anthony Burgess’s dystopian story.
Giles appeared in court in 1993 when a case was brought by the Federation Against Copyright Theft on behalf of Warner Bros. A common account has it that A Clockwork Orange caused the cinema’s demise. Scala!!! clarifies what happened.
“It was painful reliving it in the editing process, to rewind 30 years,” Giles says. “I was actually in the process of leaving the Scala to work in film distribution when the [sic] Clockwork Orange hit the fan. I stayed. I took responsibility.
“What happened was, I was given the opportunity to screen a collector’s print of the film... Somebody reported it to Warner Bros, who reported it to the Film Distributors’ Association, who reported it to the Federation Against Copyright Theft, an organisation that was set up by the industry to fight against VHS piracy.
“It was pretty unpleasant. It was dragged through the courts from 1992 to 1993. I attempted to make reparations, but the federation wanted a high-profile prosecution. It was expensive in the end. We had a fundraising campaign which raised enough to pay for the costs,” Giles says.
“We were also trying to create a fighting fund for the Scala to relocate, because the lease was in the last year. But we were out of funds and out of energy by that point. For the following 30 years, and still today, people say the Scala closed because they showed A Clockwork Orange. And I have to take a deep breath and say no. But it certainly didn’t help.”
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 opens in cinemas on Friday, January 5th
