There Was Always Something Different

Scala!!! Or The Incredibly Strange Rise And Fall Of The World's Wildest Cinema (2023).

Scala!!! Or The Incredibly Strange Rise And Fall Of The World’s Wildest Cinema is a feature-length documentary celebrating the wild and weird times of London’s Scala Cinema, a ramshackle run-down enterprise in a part of King’s Cross to which the word insalubrious does not really do justice and at a time to which the word insalubrious not doing justice does not really do justice, which literally shook whenever an underground train rattled by underfoot while cineastes and degenerates rubbed shoulders with each other and rubbed legs with the venue’s resident pet cats. The Scala was always the first to raise support, awareness and funds for the marginalised, the dispossessed and the oppressed – who were hardly in short supply at the time – and even in spite of or even perhaps because of its less than safe surroundings acted as a cultural safe haven for anyone whose interests strayed into the margins not just of cinema but of art and society in general. It was the closest that any building ever came to representing the ethos of early Channel 4 in masonry form. Most importantly of all, however, between 1978 and 1993 it ran on occasion nearly round the clock rare and in some cases lone showings of an eccentric assortment of cinematic wonders stretching all the way from cult blockbusters that had long since been retired from theatrical exhibition to subtitled symbolism, kung-fu and monster movies and soft – and not so soft; even some of the interviewees are shocked by their own memories of notorious audience favourite Thundercrack! – porn. To varying extents, it played a significant role in elevating the critical and commercial standing of directors like John Waters, David Lynch, Werner Herzhog, Abel Ferrara, Derek Jarman and Russ Meyer. Although that said, it was the fine incurred by a clandestine showing of the then very much withdrawn A Clockwork Orange that finally forced the Scala to close for good, serving as a pertinent reminder that however skilled a filmmaker Stanley Kubrick may have been, he was never on your side.

The Scala, however, was proudly and defiantly on the side of anyone who did not exactly have to go looking to find someone who wasn’t, and Stewart Lee, Adam Buxton, Caroline Catz, Paul Putner, James O’Brien, Mark Moore and a whole host of musicians, critics, artists, filmmakers, activists and more show up in Scala!!! to attest to how a youth spent desperately trying to see Desperate Living over the top of the bloke in front’s toweringly backcombed hairstyle whilst simultaneously trying to avoid catching the eye of the punter next to them forged their identities as people as much as aesthetes. There are tales from the Scala staff about mishaps with prosthetic limbs and lighting being removed by persons unknown to facilitate what can only be described as literal gay abandon, and not one anecdote in the whole riotous, hilarious and frequently alarming story is related in the time-honoured manner of dismissively suggesting that you had to be there and you can’t properly understand it if you weren’t. In fact, if anything, they all seem to wish that you could have been there, although they probably would have advised caution when it came to picking a seat.

In a sense, it felt as though I actually had been there, as Scala!!! strikes a deeply emotional chord with this particular one time simultaneously highbrow and frankly lower than lowbrow cultural misfit, once much given to frequenting a cinema with its own idiosyncratic selection of esoteric fare. I was still at school when a girl in my class came in waving a café menu-sized black and white fold-out card listing for a newly-opened arthouse cinema, promising the chance to see the much talked about in the music press but not exactly liable to hog the marquee of your local Cannon Cinema likes of Brad Pitt’s hastily forgotten sub-Twin Peaks surrealist rock’n’roll fantasy Johnny Suede, Michael Rooker’s unremittingly bleak and grubby harsh reality coin-flip to The Silence Of The Lambs‘ glossy awards-courting in Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer and Katsuhiro Otomo’s sensory onslaught of an introduction to no-holds-barred anime for Western audiences, Akira. Suitably situated directly above a similarly-named bleepy rave club that the authorities were ever so slightly unnerved by, only accessible via a winding staircase and virtually invisible to the city centre shoppers hurtling by, the 051 Cinema was literally in a world of its own and for almost the entire nineties it was where anyone whose celluloid curiosity extended past Forrest Gump and The Bodyguard could be found on an almost nightly basis.

It was the 051 where I saw Reservoir Dogs before anyone had really started to pay any real attention to it – although, credit where it is due, it was a wildly positive review from Barry Norman on Film ’93 that had me scouring those black and white handouts to see if it was on yet – and where I would see it several times again during that bizarre eighteen month interlude where it was effectively banned on home video. It was where I saw more movies than I can count or probably even remember that were not adjudged high profile, high quality or high earning enough for the mainstream cinema chains, whether they were as brilliant as true life-inspired sixties-set horror comedy The Young Poisoner’s Handbook – which I had plenty to say about my love of here – or as genuinely dreadful as Solitaire For 2, a UK-made romantic comedy that is so devoid of jokes and romance, especially once bloody Right Said Fred turn up, that it has apparently since elected to banish itself entirely from the known universe. Perhaps most significantly on a personal level, and to paraphrase a certain Alex DeLarge who we will be hearing more from – or not – in a moment, it was where I first saw many obscure and in several cases semi-banned movies that I had heard about but not seen including Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Witchfinder General, Last House On The Left, Straw Dogs, The Trip and Head. It was also where I didn’t see A Clockwork Orange, a story that is simply too bizarre to summarise even in the exceptionally lengthy sentences that I am all too well versed in, so instead you can read all about the full disorientating experience here.

Mentioning events that took place on that shakily-railinged balcony, however, is an opportune moment to emphasise that it wasn’t just about what went on inside the 051. It was a place, especially when you were stood out there waiting for the doors to open -there was literally just the screens and a railway station kiosk-sized foyer, so bad luck for anyone wanting to enjoy some pre-film wasabi graze whilst perusing a cocktail menu – where you could meet and converse with like-minded and likeable individuals while the rest of the world swirled back and forth oblivious with their George Henry Lees bags. If you just felt like going to see whatever was on, chances were you would find more than one of your friends also standing around outside, or alternately just make some valued and enduring new ones, and one of my most vivid memories is of trepidatiously traversing the stairs to meet a girl on a tentative date to see Modesty Blaise, who turned out to be leaning on the railings looking outwards and smoking and generally coming across as effortlessly cool in a coincidentally appropriate leather coat and black rollneck sweater combo, betraying not even a hint of my nervousness which she found absolutely hilarious; none of you will know her but some of you might have felt you did after reading this. Even the balcony itself held a resonance that feels like even more of one now; you could look out across the whole of the city centre, good, bad and ugly – possibly even while waiting to see The Good, The Bad And The Ugly – and feel a sense of optimism and pride that you might not normally have experienced while being hassled for twenty pence by shifty bus fare scroungers at The Gyratory. Liverpool had its own problems and challenges in the eighties and nineties – different to but also in many ways the same as those of London, and unquestionably orchestrated by the exact same shower of wanker rat bastards – but we also found our people in much the same sort of place and in much the same sort of way. Also, we got to see Love Jones into the bargain.

The 051 would close in the late nineties – overheads and tedious civic administrative issues would eventually prove too great to surmount, although the conundrum posed by magazines like Empire simultaneously doing a great deal to promote independent cinema and inadvertently doing a great deal to alert multiplexes to the financial potential of limited showings of minority interest movies did not exactly help matters – and for anyone who loved those cramped screens and risked those railings, nothing would ever quite replace it. However, just as Scala!!! is no exercise in wistful or rueful nostalgia, I absolutely do not want to give the impression that it has all been celluloid-unspoolingly downhill since then. It absolutely has not been, and to prove it, here are two relatively recent examples of almost inadvertently recapturing something approaching the breathlessly exciting rush of hurrying in to town to see The Hudsucker Proxy on very slightly uncomfortable seats. Shortly before the first lockdown, a date suggested a spur-of-the-moment trip to see Le Mans ’66 at a newly-opened arthouse cinema that was so off the radar I had actually walked past the entrance numerous times without noticing. When I stepped inside, I can only describe the sensation as being like the moment in Clerks – another movie I probably only ever saw because of the 051 – when Randall visits the awe-inspiring larger and properly run video rental store. It was like being handed the key to a secret cinematic paradise, even if we did have to sneakily pocket some posh chocolates supposedly reserved for more financially flash and exclusive patrons than us, and I honestly did not want to leave. Matters did not quite work out in the longer term – yes, this was the woman who didn’t own a CD player as famously recounted here – but she gave me that and I can never be grateful enough for it.

Meanwhile, when cinemas were briefly allowed to reopen mid-lockdown under strict social distancing conditions, with precious little else to do and with very few people I was actually allowed to see – not that it stopped the present day wanker rat bastards from failing to practice what they preached – it is not really an exaggeration to say that being able to walk to a near-deserted Odeon and back and spend a couple of hours watching whatever was available to watch on the big screen pretty much saved my sanity. What was more, while there were a fair few revived favourites including Total Recall, Black Panther and indeed Reservoir Dogs to enjoy, and the occasional brand new belter like In The Heights and Last Night In Soho, most of the listings consisted of movies that for one reason or another had failed to secure a full general release over the past couple of years, including Dream Horse, Off The Rails, Our Ladies, The Broken Hearts Gallery, Rare Beasts, The Last Letter From Your Lover and most surprisingly of all The New Mutants, which Fox had basically been coughing over anyone mentioning for almost four years by that point (and which, incidentally, you can hear more about here). None of them were exactly what you might call masterpieces, but they were not without their merits either, especially if you were going in with low to no expectations, and it actually felt very much like going to see their early nineties counterparts at the 051 had done. It brought me that crucial percentage closer back to how and why I originally fell in love with the cinema in the first place, and it is worth stressing here that throughout all of this, there was the even more sanity-preserving underpinning hope that eventually, I would be able to set foot in an actual cinema to see Black Widow – pulled from the schedules just as the pandemic began to take hold and ultimately delayed by eighteen months, with a suggestion at one point that it might just be quietly pushed out on streaming platforms instead – and if you have listened to this then you will have some sense of just how much that particular thought kept me going. Whenever anyone starts blathering on yet again to nobody in particular about ‘superhero fatigue’, I can’t help but think about that strange and confusing time and how, by accident rather than design, it started to feel a little like cinema was for everyone and not just for who the columnists had decided it was for again. A faint echo of the 051 and indeed the Scala, although it is entirely possible that even they might have stopped short of showing The New Mutants.

Cinema is indeed for everyone, whether you’re meeting a date to see a movie from 1966 or meeting a date to see a movie set in 1966, whether you’re queueing up to see a heavyweight downbeat historical drama and a knowingly ironic toy franchise comedy inadvertently released on the same day or going to see Matt Smith shouting about being the best at being vampire because your trains are cancelled for the next hour, or whether you’re going to see Anatomy Of A Fall or Fast X, and while you might have to hunt around a bit to find a showing of Scala!!!, I can guarantee you it will be well worth the effort. Unlike Solitaire For 2.

Buy A Book!

You can find much more about my love of independent cinema and those weird moviegoing days at the height of lockdown in Keep Left, Swipe Right, available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. It might require something stronger to last all the way through a Scala all-nighter, though. And a stronger stomach.

Further Listening

There’s much more about my love of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook – a movie I would probably not have seen without the 051 – in Looks Unfamiliar here., and there’s also a chat with Paul Putner about his love of William Castle movies here.