Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s documentary “Scala!!!” is about a legendary, notorious, hugely influential and long-gone London\u00a0theater. But it’ll appeal to anyone whose formative moviegoing years were defined by eccentric, usually\u00a0urban or college-town\u00a0cinemas that programmed whatever the folks who ran the place found interesting and switched lineups every day or two. There are increasingly few such venues\u00a0left, alas, with real estate\u00a0having become usuriously priced\u00a0all over the world\u00a0and\u00a0“content” having largely replaced the notion of “entertainment,” a thing one sought outside of the home.\u00a0Witnesses to the Scala’s history include patrons, management and staff, many of whom were or became notable filmmakers or programmers, including\u00a0John Waters, Ben Wheatley, Ralph Brown, Mary Harron, Beeban Kidron, and Isaac Julien.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The thrill of transformation is a subtext. The Scala didn’t just show films, it stimulated interest in cinema, challenged and offended viewers (on purpose), and pushed the limits of what was then considered acceptable to screen in England. It championed pro-union and LGBTQ-friendly films, early works by subsequently legendary directors (including David Lynch’s “Eraserhead”), and\u00a0underground movies that blurred arthouse and grind-house categories. One of the more fascinating tales is about the durable appeal of\u00a01975’s “Thundercrack,” American filmmaker Curt McDowell’s fusion of an “old dark house” movie, a surrealist art flick,\u00a0and a hardcore porno.\u00a0“It was screened at the Scarlet constantly, probably from the day the cinema opened right to the time it closed,”\u00a0says \u00a0says Alan\u00a0Jones, co-presenter of\u00a0London’s Shock Around The Clock horror festival at the Scala, and\u00a0one of the film’s\u00a0most entertaining\u00a0interviewees.\u00a0“Legend was that there was only ever one print of Thundercrack here at the Scarlet, and it was run until eventually it fell apart.”<\/p>\n
Located in the King’s Cross neighborhood of London before it became gentrified, the Scala started out as a traditional theater, closed and reopened, and then for 15 years was essentially a film club catering to buffs of one sort or another. During the later era, the film’s focus, it\u00a0was a “ground zero” locations for the budding fan culture scene in the UK, popularizing John Waters “trash” trilogy of “Pink\u00a0Flamingos,” “Female Trouble” and “Desperate Living” and films by Russ Meyer, and\u00a0hosting the first Avengers convention, meetings of The Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society, and The Shock Around the Clock festival (described by critic Kim Newman as “Kind of like Woodstock for the bizarro generation”).\u00a0<\/p>\n
The venue always struggled to keep its doors open but eventually succumbed to a variety of adversities, including rising costs, a siphoning away of repertory and art house viewers by home video. At the end, the killing blow might’ve been a lawsuit from Warner Bros. that was filed after the theater decided to disobey Stanley Kubrick’s decision to pull the film from UK distribution after what appeared to be copycat killings; after the Scala Film\u00a0Club lost the case, it went into receivership, and while it reopened in 1999 and added two floors, it focused on live entertainment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jane Giles and Ali Catterall’s documentary “Scala!!!” is about a legendary, notorious, hugely influential and long-gone London\u00a0theater. But it’ll appeal to anyone whose formative moviegoing years were defined by eccentric, usually\u00a0urban or college-town\u00a0cinemas that programmed whatever the folks who ran the place found interesting and switched lineups every day or two. There are increasingly few …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-1447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}