Original subtitles

Hello, this is Jane Giles. I'm the co -director of Scala and I'm here to take

you behind the scenes of some of the objects in the Scala archive.

Here's the first one.

It's the main tool of the trade for the Scala programmers.

It's a landline telephone and an index card box that's stuffed full of phone

numbers and addresses of the distribution companies and the sources

that we booked to screen as part of the Scala programme.

And here you can see the red telephones in action in the Scala office in Kings

Cross. The photograph was taken in August 1981 by David Babsky, a

great photographer and Scala enthusiast, also the executive producer of our

film. On the left, you can see Jane Pilling, programmer who specialised in

animation. And on the right, you can see Stephen Woolley, hard at work there,

having a good think about which films to show as part of the Scala programme.

Scholar office had shelves full of books, reference books about film and

just a few of the ones that you would have seen there and the programmers

endlessly flick through these books looking for new ideas and searching for

titles that they wanted to seek out and for more information about films that

were available in distribution collections but they might not have seen

known about.

Cult movies, Danny Peary really kind of broke the mould in terms of

understanding of what a certain type of psychotronic film was.

To an extent also the Medved's book, The Golden Turkey Awards.

But you can see there are also experimental film books like Films of

Art and Dwoskin's film is, these kind of movies appeared at Scala as well.

And here's an example of one of the many film catalogues, film distribution

catalogues, that were on the shelves of this Gala Programmers Office.

Contemporary Films was a company run by Charles and Kitty Cooper and, latterly,

Eric Litnitsky, and they had an incredible collection of European art

some American films.

These are the film rental control books in which the Scala programmers would

enter the details of every film shown at Scala in terms of who the distributor

was, what the terms of the booking were, what the financial terms of the booking

were. and it's organised by programme date and there you can see November

1989 I think and the very first film showing is indeed one from the

Contemporary Films catalogue, a film called Virgin which was double billed

Palace's own film Wish You Were Here.

Here's an example of this gala in the early days in Tottenham Street doing a

of market research to get an idea about what its audience wanted to see as well

as what they had seen and to get some more feedback about what they thought

about the cinema and the cafe and that sort of thing. So you can have a look at

some of the responses there.

The ideas that people put about the films that they wanted to see was a

good way for the Scala programmers to gather more thoughts and gather more

information about what to show.

Here's another example of how the Scala audience would put forward their ideas

about what they wanted to see at Scala and their own programming ideas.

On the left there's a fantastic bit of artwork that you can see someone's drawn

for us along with great big long lists, well lists of triple bills and

ideas for movies all nicely written up.

And next to it there's a flyer made by Jade Screen which eventually

became the Jackie Chan fan club in terms of the nature of its programming and

this was when the Scala started doing East Asian martial arts films and

films.

The Scala was able to show films not classified by the BBFC, the British

Film Censorship, later the British Border Film Classification, because it

registered as a club, a membership club.

The membership cost, I think, 50 pence at its most, started at 20p, ended at

50p. And what was little known about the Scala was it did actually have

membership rules and regulations.

And here you can see what some of those regulations are.

In the mid -1980s, the Scala introduced a selection box into its foyer so that

its audience members could make formalised suggestions about what they

see programmed at the Scala and there were these little slips of paper and

little crappy little pens that you could use to fill in and post your ideas into

the box and every morning the Scala programmer would have a look at these

to see if there was anything programmable and

Many good ideas came out of the suggestion box.

Also lots of rubbish too.

Once the upcoming scholar programme had been put together on paper by the

programmers, they'd take the film titles, the timings and the information

for the programme off to the programme designer, 2D Design, which was on

Cross Road.

And they would take about three days to put together the artwork that would then

become the scholar.

fold -out programme that we know and love. And this is the 2D's own copy

of the Pantone Selector book, which we would flick through

and find different colours and different combinations of colours.

And you can see that Pantone 109U is actually the

same.

Pantone colour as the bit of paper that the book is here sitting on.

In addition to creating the Scala's monthly programme, 2D would also

make special event tickets for us and I love these. This is the

Scala's 10th anniversary celebration tickets in its King's Cross building.

And one of them gives entrance to a party and a screening and the other

one, I think, just gives entrance to the party.

I don't remember which one is which.

Obviously, as you can see, they're based on the SCARLE programme.

They're very cute.

This is a photograph of the Scala's box office returns and cafe returns book, a

ledger that was kept up from day one to the end of days.

And this one is from March, April 1992, so just a few months

after the Scala's 10th anniversary in King's Cross.

um it's an interesting book for me because you can see the quite wide

between the success of films that were shown um this is like quite a

healthy um quite a healthy month you can see sort of like at the lower end um

films coming in at like there

double bill of the adams family and monsters go home 234 pounds for the

day but you can contrast that with um

A Sunday screening of Almodovar, Triple Bill, Women on the Verge of a Nervous

Breakdown and two other films, Laura's Desire, What Have I Done to Deserve

that's reaching towards £2 ,000 for the day on the box office.

We sort of broke even around about £5 ,000 a week on the box office with the

cafe sort of reflecting the attendances in the cinema.

This is a contact sheet of photographs taken on a special event day at the

Scala. This was when Brian Clements came to introduce some Avengers films.

programmes that were actually shot on film and shown at the Scala by WTVA,

Television Access, a group of enthusiasts who were keeping British

alive at the time. You can see how popular the event was by the queues

the block.

Every time a John Waters film showed at the Scala cinema it felt like a special

event and polyester certainly which came with these fabulous scratch and

sniff cards in glorious odorama that showed several times at the Scala and

blob smelt with something different. I think it was meant to be roses, new car

and all sorts of things but I think mostly they just smell like farts.

Here's another piece of 2D artwork for a popular special event that happens at

the Scala cinema.

Preview of David Cronenberg's new film, Naked Lunch, obviously based on the book

by William S. Burroughs. It was a sold out screening and it was the headline

event as part of a special season programme by myself with Damon Wise. And

was dedicated to the films of Cronenberg and films featuring William S.

Burroughs.

One of the other things we did at the Scala to try and raise a bit of extra

was to make t -shirts for sale and here you can see Scala staff modelling two of

the styles that we came up with in the early 90s. On the left is Alex Fenner

with the Scala logo t -shirt and on the right John Cranmer wearing as you'll

remember from the Scala's 10th anniversary tickets the image of the

programme.

And speaking of Scala staff, here's somebody else who was very dear to the

of the Scala in the late 80s and early 90s. It's Mary Hansen. She was an usher

at the Scala and often worked the all -nighters.

She was a wonderful musician who played in a then -emerging band called

Stereolab. She was one of our favourite people. You can see her briefly in the

end of the Scala documentary, ascending the stairs towards the party and the

end of Scala party happening on the roof with her friend Deborah Salter.

Very sadly, Mary died in a cycling accident in London several years later.

Scala was a cinema which loved music. The projectionist would play fantastic

music on the public PA system between the films in the intermissions, the 10

-minute intermissions between the films.

And there was always music playing in the Scala programming office and in the

cafe. So here's the Scala's Boogie Box.

sort of that music uh i don't know if this is the program office version or

uh cafe version i don't remember but i think it's like 80s early 90s

the scholar used to get a lot of posts obviously this is before email and uh

and so it was all done in the uh in the in the old style and here's a letter

from uh March 1993, when the Scala was battling the

imminent closure of the cinema due to the fact that its lease was running out

and there was still a notice of compulsory purchase hanging over the

underlying lease of the building, making it really hard to raise the finance to

redevelop the cinema.

Also the Scala was struggling because its parent company, Palace Pictures, had

gone under and Stephen Woolley and Nick Powell, the directors of Palace, were

also the directors of the Scala Cinema.

So all of this was swirling around in addition to the fact that the Clockwork

Orange case was kind of bubbling under, had come to a head by this point.

Alex Fenner, who's actually not a mister, he's a muse, he'd written to

Smith, who lived locally in King's Cross, asking if he could do anything to

save the Scala.

And as you can see from his response, all he could really do was wish us good

luck.

And here's one of the other contributing factors to the demise of the Scala,

namely the rise and rise of VHS and home video.

Initially, it had been very expensive to get hold of the machines.

There was the war between Betamax and VHS, and often you had to hire the

machines as well as rent the tapes, which you had to return.

But by the time that...

they became of a price that you could actually buy them and have them at home.

Cinema was really sort of struggling in repertory terms.

Home video was very new and much more desirable, particularly at a time of

recession when cinemas were a bit dilapidated.

So there we have the Evil Dead Palace's first acquisition.

10 years earlier in 1981 and of course a huge hit and Faster

Pussycat which was an American import which I bought from Balcroce's

Psychotronic video store up in Camden.

The Scala never had video projection.

If it had, it would have been able to show a much wider range of material than

it actually did. Everything that we screened was on 35mm or 16mm.

And here is a photograph of Billy Bell, who was a projection engineer.

The picture was actually taken also by David Babsky back in the summer of 1981,

when the Scala was newly opening in King's Cross.

You can see Billy servicing the machines.

He was the engineer for many cinemas in London, but certainly for the Scala

right through until the very end in June 1993.

In June 1993, the Scala directors pulled the plugs on the company and not

wanting to get into the kind of debt which Palace Pictures had incurred and

having the energy for it really by that point.

We still had an idea that we might be able to move to another premises, but in

fact that never happened. One of the reasons why we kept so many objects, the

film ledger books and the reference books and all those kind of materials,

with the idea that we might one day reopen the Scala and we might need those

contact details and all the other bits and bobs.

Here's a letter outlining, written by Alex Fenner to the Scala membership.

and audience explaining the closure of the Scala.

Thirty years after the Scala closed in June 1993, we had the world premiere

of Scala, the film that hopefully you've been watching on this disc.

And here's the clapperboard that we used.

The DOP was Sarah Appleton, who filmed the interviews

that Ali Cashroll and myself directed with our cast of 50

interviewees inside the Scala which is now a music venue in Kings Cross and the

current management have kept the building beautifully and they allowed us

Covid

access to the building which was still closed as a music venue in the months

following the pandemic but we were able to gain

access to record our interviews and

The interviewees, they really responded to being back in the building for the

first time in decades and you could literally feel the hairs rising on their

arms and their back of the necks as the trapdoors of the memories reopened.