As their new documentary about Scala is released, Jane Giles and Ali Catterall talk about their early memories of the cult King’s Cross cinema
Like numerous pockets of contemporary London, King’s Cross today is a wholly different beast to the area of north London that writers Jane Giles and Ali Catterall encountered in the 1980s. “It was another level, the Wild West – it was not like King’s Cross is now,” says Catterall, alluding to the milieu of mid-level shops and restaurants, offices and cultural spaces that have since replaced the largely destitute local landscape of the last century. “For a sheltered 16-year-old, King’s Cross was terrifying, and then to go into the Scala cinema where people had holes in their jumpers and strange haircuts was really quite daunting, but I found my groove at Scala. It became a home from home.”
The Scala, which unlike many of its neighbours has mostly been omitted from the decades-long programme of regeneration, was the central focus of the pair’s respective pilgrimages, and is subsequently the nucleus of their new film, 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. “I first went with a group of friends in August 1981, soon after it had moved from Fitzrovia. We watched five films in a row,” recalls Giles, who later became a programmer. “To be away from home, barely 17 with the punks from school, staying up watching films and listening to Joy Division on the PA, was great. I was spellbound by it.”
Initially opening on Tottenham Street in 1978 (it transferred to King’s Cross after three years), the cinema was established by Stephen Woolley with programmer Jayne Pilling as a place to champion, share and absorb the pictures rejected by most multiplexes, from arthouse and horror to sexploitation, Kung Fu and LGBTQ+. Double features by directors like Russ Meyer, Derek Jarman and John Waters were a regular occurrence, while its all-nighters were legendary, on occasion offering respite for out-of-town bands and comedians. It was like “a country club for criminals and lunatics,” suggests Waters, one of the film’s talking heads; for the actor Paul Putner, it was “The Cramps made out of brick and mortar.” The cinema’s rich, boundary-pushing programme continued up until 1993, when their lease expired and an illegal screening of A Clockwork Orange resulted in a costly lawsuit, for which Giles took the rap.
Mirroring the timeline of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, the Scala’s punk energy and opposing politics attracted a predominantly young crowd of counterculture fans from all over the UK. “Some people were like, ‘Oh, wasn’t the Scala just a bunch of old white blokes sitting around’ and it was like ‘no – it was run by young women!’,” notes Giles, relaying the conversations that fed the pair’s research. “[Former programmer] JoAnne Seller was 19 years old when she got that job! Pulling corpses out of the building …” Initially working together on Giles’s 2018 book, Scala Cinema 1978-1993, the first-time directors decided early on that the documentary should be anchored in audience voices, many of whom, such as Christopher Nolan and Julian Isaac, Clio Bernard and Stewart Lee, went on to become significant filmmakers, musicians, artists, writers and actors.
Reaching out to 100 people, the pair ultimately filmed 50 interviews, which they spliced with archive footage and illustrations from VIZ cartoonist Davey Jones. Furthermore, inspired by Julian Temple’s The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, Spinal Tap and 24 Hour Party People by Michael Winterbottom – as well as the Scala’s own salient relationship with music, and its crucial role in many of works that screened – they collaborated with composer, founding member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and vitally, former Scala audience member, Barry Adamson for the score. “He got it immediately,” says Giles. “He said it came to him in a dream.”
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“We wanted to simultaneously capture the hilarity, the melancholy and the sadness of the Scala, but also, critically, we wanted to make a film for the people who were too young or geographically remote to have been there at the time,” she continues, relaying their broader intentions. “A film that would make people understand what it felt like, and remind them of somewhere they'd been in their lives – a cinema, a record shop, a friend’s house – anywhere where there was a multiplicity of books, records, things that you could just browse; the slightly eccentric place where you started to discover who you were and what you liked.”
The sentiment is echoed by Catterall, who describes the Scala as “like an enormous library of culture. It was incredible. You saw things and joined the dots to other things. There’s a deep sense of melancholy and loss, but looking back, co-directing this and editing Jane’s book, it hits you with shockwaves – look at what we had.” For Giles, perhaps one of the biggest revelations to come out of the project is how much this attitude was shared. “It surprised me, how consistent the love for the Scala was,” she says. “When our interview subjects walked through the door, you could literally see the hair on the back of their neck rising up and them going, ‘Oh, my God, I'm back’.”
Scala!!! is out in UK cinemas now.
