FORM-Idea

The age of small, intimate revue cinemas has long gone with most now closed.  It was a trend, which reached its zenith between the early eighties to the mid to late nineties long before streaming became a way of life.  These tiny picture palaces catered to audiences eager to sample unusual programmes, places where a horror film could be double billed with a European classic. Perhaps the best known (and wildest) of all the revue cinemas was London’s Scala.  The Scala helped shape the lives of an entire generation of cinemagoers.  A new documentary charting the Scala’s rise and fall has just been released and it is an absolute pleasure highlighting one of cinema’s strangest stories.

John Walters, the American cult director says of the Scala in the documentary that it “had magic. It was like joining a club for – a very secret club, like a biker gang or something.  It’s like a country club for criminals and lunatics and people who were high.  Which is a good way to see movies.”  The Scala cinema was founded as an alternative to London’s National Film Theatre, a far more reverential cinema establishment.   Originally located on London’s Scala Street the cinema quickly became the go to location for those searching for an alternative venue in which to watch movies. Formed as a cinema club where you had to take out membership in order to be admitted, the Scala found a way to evade some of the country’s more draconian censorship laws. Because of this, they were able to screen films you could see nowhere else.

Despite its initial success, the cinema’s founder, award winning producer Stephen Wooley, was forced to relocate the Scala to new premises once they had to leave their original location, to make way for the then new Channel Four.  The Scala’s new home was an old music venue in London’s notorious King’s Cross area, an area known for drugs and prostitution. And yet it was here that the Scala came into its own.

In the middle of this very dangerous district of London, the Scala somehow managed to carve out a reputation for being a home away from home for a whole generation of artists.  Former programmer Jane Giles, now head of film and video distribution for the British Film Institute stated in a Guardian interview about the experience of going there, “It was a thrilling experience, part of that thrill was that you walked out [of the station] into the Badlands of King’s Cross. You then quite quickly found your way to this palatial building, like some sort of bonkers white castle that you see on the logo of Disney.”

Those who went there were in many ways even more impressive than the building itself and they included a pre- fame Boy George only months away from his appearance on the BBC’s Top of the Pops to current Oscar nominated director, Christopher Nolan, the Scala was the place to go to see all types of movies.  From European classics, to all night gore fest and everything else in between, it became one of the most talked about cinemas in the world.

The Scala was particularly important to two communities in London at the time.  That of black filmmakers, such as Black Film Audio Collective, who in the eighties, would go on to make ground breaking work documenting black British lives, and the UK’s burgeoning gay community who at the time were reeling from the twin impacts of HIV/AIDS and Clause 28, legislation enacted to stop what was claimed at the time to be the “promotion of homosexuality.”  Legislation, which would have a devastating effect on a whole generation of queer men and women.  It was only at the Scala that they could see any positive representations of queer lives.  As a result, the cinema very quickly became a queer haven.

Duty managers, programmes and graphic designers who worked at the Scala during this period are all here to tell hilarious and in one instance, profoundly moving stories about the cinema’s many less well-known patrons.  One duty manager recounts having to remove a customer who staff initially thought was sleeping only to discover on close inspection that he had suffered a fatal heart attack.  Since it was a packed screening she hoped to remove him, alerting as few people as possible to the problem.

Another story is that of a chain reaction of hysteria, which was set off when one of the building’s cats decided to wander into the screening of a slasher movie and inadvertently brushed against the unsuspecting ankles of several audience members.

And yet another story is that of a troubled teenager and how his tragedy strangely turns into something far more hopeful and life affirming than one could have expected.  This documentary so skilfully shows how a sense of community was formed in this unlikely location and highlights how essential that sense of community is in our society today.   Now that we spend more and more time on our phones or our computers, this film illustrates how wonderful it is to just come together to collectively watch movies.

As part of the celebration of the release of the documentary Scala!!! the British Film Institute have been screening films shown there, they include The Enigmar of Kaspar Hauser, widely seen now as Werner Herzog’s masterpiece about the life of an abandoned boy in Germany along with the bizarre, erotic curiosity La Bête directed by Walerian Borowczyk, a truly odd take of the Beauty and the Beast legend.