By Eric Ortiz (@EricOrtizG)
The documentary Scala!!! (2023) – aka 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 – takes us through the history of a cinema that could very well be the London equivalent of a sleazy American grindhouse. Part of the essence of the Scala included: uncomfortable seats, old film prints that could burn, strange smells, cats roaming around, all-night movie marathons, and various subcultures coming together.
From 1978 to 1993, in two different locations, the Scala cinema programmed a wide variety of films: classics of the midnight circuit such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and John Waters’ Pink Flamingos (1972), exponents of sexploitation, queer cinema, entire festivals of the horror and martial arts genres, popular movies like Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), and even Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) when you still couldn’t show it in the UK.
Over the course of 15 years, the Scala cinema had several backdrops, including the post-punk and the New Romantic eras, Margaret Thatcher and the video nasty. In addition, some of its patrons are today notable in their respective fields, like Ben Wheatley and Mary Harron, who are part of the documentary.
After its presentation at Fantastic Fest, I interviewed for the Fantastic Pavilion the documentary’s directors, Jane Giles and Ali Catterall. Giles, by the way, was also a Scala programmer and wrote the book Scala Cinema 1978-1993.
Eric Ortiz (EO): I know you (Jane Giles) worked as a programmer at the Scala. But how did your connection to the theater start?
Jane Giles (JG): As a cinemagoer started in August 1981, when I was 16 or 17. When I became a film professional I was still quite young, 20 something, and the job was advertised for programmer and I got it. Partly the reason was that I’d done some training in cinema management but also I really understood the Scala as a cinemagoer.
EO: Could you talk about the structure of the documentary?
Ali Catterall (AC): The first chapter is the birth of the Scala. In the canon of the Scala, it begins and ends with Stephen Woolley. But it began a very long time ago, back in the Georgian era of England, with a grand theater called the Scala, with an amazing staircase (scala means staircase in Italian), which is then knocked down. In its place there was a cinema called The Other Cinema, which was run by hippies and showed left-wing, socialist-minded kinds of films. That was losing money, because no one wants to see a 12-hour documentary about Chinese mountains…
JG: It’s not quite fair, he’s describing the film How Yukong Moved the Mountains (1976) by Joris Ivens, fantastic piece of documentary cinema, but not enough people in London to justify showing it for weeks.
AC: Stephen Woolley, who worked as an usher, realized that these films weren’t making much money. Having previously been an usher at a cinema called The Screen on the Green, which had hosted gigs by the Sex Pistols and The Clash, Woolley realized he wanted to inject The Other Cinema’s program with more punky fare, more youth and music oriented fare. He was very young himself so he understood that mentality.
When The Other Cinema folded, the Scala grew up in its place. So the first act of the film is the first iteration of the Scala, a very rock ‘n’ roll cinema, born out of that post-punk ethos and energy. It’s attracting various subcultures and musical tribes, from the New Romantics in particular. That’s why we have Spandau Ballet or Princess Julia in the film.
The second act really starts when the old cinema is closed down and the Scala goes to King’s Cross. That’s when the legend of the Scala really takes off, it was there from 1981. That’s what we call the party.
There is a turning point at the end of act two, manifested in our film by the suicide of a member of the Scala audience. The third act is the hangover, when things start to go very wrong. It’s a classic three act structure: the birth, the party, and the hangover.
EO: Eraserhead (1978) was shown at the first location. Could you explain how it was back then to experience films like this one?
AC: Back then it’s almost like you’re talking about the modern birth of what we’d call a cult movie.
JG: Eraserhead emerged from the midnight circuit of the US, famously there was a very small audience for Eraserhead at midnight in America but then the word-of-mouth spreaded. This is partly because the critics didn’t have a language for Eraserhead, they found it very hard to express what the film was.
What’s interesting is that when the Scala first showed Eraserhead in March 1979, they programmed a whole season of films around it called “cinema of the bizarre” and included films by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Roman Polanski’s early films like Repulsion (1965), Freaks (1932) by Tod Browning, these kind of films that were antilogical, cinema of the imagination, of dreams and nightmares. The Scala knew that Eraserhead had to be put into context. That was how it found a language where film critics didn’t have the language.
What’s different now is that Eraserhead is seen and understood by critics and so the new critics, if they watch a new film they could say “it’s like Eraserhead. It’s like David Lynch.”
Stephen Woolley was a big fan of music, you see him in the documentary talking about his knowledge of punk. He knew that if he put a short film with Eraserhead that had a music band in it that the post-punk kids wanted to see, they’d take a chance on Eraserhead because they wanted to see Devo. It was very much about the music scene at the time, bands like Joy Division.
AC: Eraserhead has a very industrial look. You could have bands like Joy Division, particularly their first album Unknown Pleasures, you could imagine the landscape of that, a rural depiction of Manchester back then, was very much like Eraserhead.
JG: In London the music press gave thousands of words for the journalists to write about cinema, and the bands that got interviewed talked about their favorite films. So there was a real meeting of visual language, music and style.
EO: How could you describe the vibe of the Scala?
JG: John Waters says that it was like a clubhouse, a country club for all these crazy people who went there. It was a building that all the different tribes came to, kung fu people, the horror fans, the sexploitation, they all thought they owed it. Sometimes all of those people came at the same time for some things and then they’d mix together, they were sort of looking at each other thinking “why is this old woman here?” or “why is this kung fu guy here?”
AC: When you get that kind of diversity, that’s when real creativity and magic happens.
EO: The film Thundercrack! (1975) was shown often at the Scala. Tell more about it.
JG: The film is 2 hours 40 minutes long, black and white. We had a 16mm print, so you can imagine the sound quality on a 16mm print, it’s very bad, also because of the sound recording on the film. It was an amateurish mixture of melodrama and hardcore pornography. It’s very difficult to classify.
When the Scala first started to show this film, it was because they discovered it at the Roxy in San Francisco, which was the same kind of American repertory house. It was one print, it was in terrible condition because it was shown so often, it was very hard to understand what it was all about.
The Scala did the same thing as Eraserhead, it programmed different films around it, everything from the Marx Brothers to Bruce Conner’s experimental film Marilyn Times Five (1973), to try and explain what Thundercrack! was.
Thundercrack! became a kind of initiation test of the audience of the Scala.
EO: What are the most memorable screenings you attended at the Scala?
AC: A preview of Santa Sangre (1989). I was just seduced by the imagery on the program, then I saw it, it was quite something. Latin American cinema generally is very different, it’s very unique.
JG: There’s lots of films to think about.
As a programmer, it could be very difficult to track down prints, also we didn’t have much money to import prints from other countries.
We’ve been shown Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). It came out of one of the horror film festivals and we negotiated with the producer to keep the print and build an audience for it by showing it with different types of films, like Peeping Tom (1960).
And that producer told me about another film in America, which I thought sounded interesting: Twister (1989), the first film of Michael Almereyda, with Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton and Willian S. Borroughs. It’s a The Wizard of Oz (1939) type thing, about a family caught up in a hurricane. For me it was a significant example of going to a very big effort to get hold of a copy. This is something that’s very different now that we have DCPs, you just flick a switch almost, and they fly all over the world, which is good but it can be overwhelming.
EO: We all know about censorship in the UK, but what exactly happened with A Clockwork Orange and the Scala?
JG: By 1973 A Clockwork Orange was withdrawn from distribution in the UK, so it could be shown in countries all over the world apart from the UK, where Stanley Kubrick lived.
We had a suggestion box with little slips of paper and the Scala audience would write the three films they wanted most to see at the Scala, like Salò (1975), Café Flesh (1982), and A Clockwork Orange. You could find a crappy VHS copy in the black market but people wanted to see Kubrick’s film on the big screen.
So we were young and reckless, we made decisions and one decision I made was to show a collector’s copy of A Clockwork Orange. This was reported to Warner Brothers, they reported it to the film distributors association, they reported it to the federation of copyright theft, they took it to the police, who persuaded me for a criminal prosecution for copyright infringement.
The court case lasted for a year, from 1992 to 1993, and then I was found guilty. That was the story of A Clockwork Orange. Apparently Kubrick wasn’t interested in the case. We tried very hard to apologize, to offer financial reparation, but nobody could stop the federation going to copyright theft. They had a high profile and sexy case. They were very happy with the whole process, but I wasn’t very happy because it was horrible.
Then Kubrick died (in 1999) and I think within 12 weeks or less Warner Brothers re-released A Clockwork Orange in the UK and the film went on to make a huge amount of money.
After the screening of Scala!!!, somebody asked me if I regret doing it and I said I regretted having to go to court for a year. But they’re like “yeah, but John Waters said that’s a good thing to have on your CV.” At least, 30 years later, I have John Waters on my side.