In a spirit of full disclosure, the reviewer here notes that, for a good portion of the Scala cinema’s final years, he lived almost immediately across the road from that legendary north London venue. Every month the wonderfully garish programme would clatter through the letterbox. What would be on? Well, we knew we’d get Taxi zum Klo and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! But what else?
Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s film talks us through the cinema club’s history from the early days off Tottenham Court Road to its long stay at what, 30 years after the organisation went bust, is still the Scala in King’s Cross. Celebrity attendees such as Barry Adamson, Jah Wobble, Nick Kent and Stewart Lee, squatting by stairwells, talk us through a programme that stretched from the highest art house to the lowest exploitation. Tarkovsky one night. Thundercrack the next.
The reliably indiscreet writer David McGillivray is among those raising eyebrows at what went on in the lavatories during the all-night screenings. Ralph Brown wonders if his portrayal of Danny in Withnail and I owed something to an ill-remembered drug dealer at the venue.
Along the way, Scala!!! (the number of exclamation points varies) takes in the history of a wider culture. You could see the community under discussion as that swimming in the long wake of punk. Boy George, who made the move from punk to the new pop, is remembered singing Day Trip to Bangor in the foyer. JG Thirlwell, the Australian genius who performed under various variations of “Foetus”, is among those adding to the conversation.
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That can-do culture stretched right through the Margaret Thatcher years and up to the dawn of New Labour. Society was, by then, less at home to the creative scuff here celebrated.
Giles and Catterall (the former was programmer at the Scala in its last years) could have given us a few more lines on the wider London rep scene of which the King’s Cross picture house was a part. Some of that survives. But the sheer variety is not what it was.
What finally did for the Scala was not Thatcher or John Major or Tony Blair but the then-continuing ban on A Clockwork Orange. Sued after screening the Kubrick film, the Scala, buffeted on all sides, shut its doors in 1993. And the letterbox went silent.
