For 15 years, London’s Scala Cinema Club was the most influential and notorious repertory cinema in the UK. It was a place that stuck two fingers up at the self-selective pretentiousness of ‘arthouse’ screens in the capital by showing everything from Hollywood greats to wilful obscurities to the extremes of grotesque – and often on the same bill. It provided this service every day of the week with an attitude of friendly non-conformity, underpinned by disarmingly affordable entry prices and excellent egg salad sandwiches, if memory serves.
Its legendary weekend all-nighters (All Night Cronenberg! All Night Zombies! All Night Psycho Killers! et al) were a hugely popular and essential means to binge-watch many of the cult movies this magazine was writing about at the time but were otherwise impossible to see on the big screen or were cut to shreds on VHS. Audiences at the Scala could catch up not only with everything on their ‘must-see’ lists, but discover all manner of ‘never-knew’ movies along the way, courtesy of the venues suck-it-and-see approach to programming. We didn’t know it then, but it was a golden age of sorts. 25 years since it closed its doors, a victim of lease-hike scouring and redevelopment of Kings Cross, Jane Giles’ book celebrates the alchemical Scala in the best possible manner: excessively.
Coffee table books often need their own separate lecterns to do justice to their papery pomp. This one is a case to point – it’s bloody enormous and so comprehensive it’s only missing its own set of telescopic legs. But, just for once, there’s a very valid reason for the heft: all 178 of the Scala’s iconic fold-out photo montage programmes have been lovingly re-presented here, vividly bringing the story to life alongside a host of photos, posters and ephemera. The written history is structured month-by-month by Giles, who became the Scala’s penultimate programmer in 1988 and found herself up before the beak in 1993 for screening a copy of A Clockwork Orange, back when Stanley Kubrick – the wily old showman – was still mischievously stoking his own reputation by continuing to suppress his 22-year-old movie from the suggestable masses.
This and many more of the Scala’s often hilarious, frequently eye-watering tales are recorded, Giles’ personal investment making for an engaging, witty and ultimately elegiac read. Her words are interwoven with copious testimonies from staff, filmmakers, and best of all from many members of the audience who endured the often-chilly auditorium and the ghostly rumblings of the tube line running directly beneath to get their fix of cult celluloid in company well-met.
You had to be there, of course, but here’s the next best thing.
SCALA CINEMA 1978-1993 / AUTHOR: JANE GILES / PUBLISHER: FAB PRESS / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
