Original subtitles

Hi, my name's Jane Giles and I'm the co -director of Scala.

Hello, my name's Ali Cadrell. I'm the co -director of Scala! With three

exclamation marks.

Very long subtitle. And we're here to take you behind the scenes of the film.

That's the Scala auditorium in King's Cross. The photograph was taken in 1990

a staff member named Maya Payne and you'll see her work throughout the film.

This is a quote from City Limits Reader's Poll Cinema of the Year when

was voted in about 1989.

It's beautiful graphics by our graphics guy, Luke Insect.

Barry Adamson.

The great Barry Adamson.

Visage, magazine, bad seed.

Who are these people?

Look at the scratch mark.

More to the point. Boo!

When we showed this at the Prince Charles, you knew it was the Prince

audience, because I went, fuck off!

The minute they saw Margaret Thatcher on screen.

The poll touch riot.

And there we are again in the Scala audience, back in 1990.

Gentlemen of the press, get ready, as you are about to witness the biggest

event of the year.

Miss Point 45.

The hard way to come.

Scarface. Sansan Grey.

Apocalypse Now.

Mad Max 2.

Tarkadron.

Cleopatra Jones.

Orpheus.

Orpheus. Orphelia, good.

Wings of Desire.

Man of Culture.

Midnight Cowboy.

Mystery Train.

The Killer.

Blade Runner.

I'm someone very familiar with that. There you go. It was like joining a

very secret club, like a biker gang or something.

It's like they were a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that

were high, which is a good way to see movies.

That cushion was needle -pointed by his mother, and it depicts the riot in the

aftermath of the Harvey Milk assassination.

This is the Scala Theatre in Fitzrovia.

Scala means staircase in Italian.

The other cinema was built on the site of the old Scala. It was a socialist

collective.

Nobody went.

They would show amazing things like Battle of Algiers, didn't they?

And punk gigs.

That's the Schlitz gig. That's when the pistols went to see the Schlitz play at

the other cinema.

Here we go.

This guy intrigues me. This guy's standing stock still on the doorway.

I think he's wearing one leather glove as well. It's quite bizarre.

When I discovered the Scala, it must have been 1979.

I think I was...

So this interview was filmed in King's Cross.

But Mark Moore's obviously talking about Fitzrovia, the early days of this gala.

We love this photo booth picture of him and his mate.

He looks exactly the same.

And I would spend the money on going to the movies.

That's March 1979 gala programme, one of the early editions.

before the format changed into the monthly program that we know and love.

In heaven, everything is fine.

In heaven,

everything is fine.

Oh, here's trouble.

Yeah, on the third show, we'll crash through the doors just as we're

interviewing Caroline Katz.

It was a great entrance.

Beginning of February, I just sort of raised my head. Right now it's on at

place called The Scala.

Where it was made zero difference to me.

I came in completely... We call it the Edward Hopper bar because of the look of

it. I think it's beautiful.

Of course, we know Peter directed Barbarian Sound Studio in the fabric.

Flux Gourmet.

We thought the kind of look of this bar, where he's sitting, was very Peter

Strickland as well.

Place where I thought... And Lynchian.

Thank you, Brickian. It was just another world.

So a lot of the punters who went to the Scala, especially the punters who went

to the original Tottenham Street Scala, were quite nihilistic, you know, as we

all were, and they liked the dark side of things.

And the Razorhead was certainly dark and kind of ghastly.

You are sick.

It was like a real nightmare kind of world. The chicken, you know, that was

still moving after it was cooked and everything, you know.

Getting rid of the cheeks and all that, and all those uncomfortable... I love

this bit.

A friend took me to see Eraserhead, and I was completely... So, yeah, we always

thought Mary was American, but she's not. She's Canadian. She grew up in

She used to write for the music papers, didn't she?

She did, and worked with Chandler X, best known for the notorious Becky Page

American Psycho.

Who shot Andy Warhol?

And who shot Andy Warhol.

Sitting there in the Scala, watching David Lynch's Eraserhead was just mind

-blowing. It just set the blueprint for the kind of films that I wanted to see.

Certain cinemas go to certain types of films.

So, yeah, Ralph Brown worked in the cafe of the other cinema and the Scala in

Tottenham Street in Fitzrovia.

You'll hear more about that later.

He's better known as Danny the Dealer in With Mel and I.

OK, so there's Stephen Woolley and Jane Pelling standing outside the early days

Scala. The photograph is by Robert Workman, courtesy of the Bishopsgate

Collection.

What else does the Bishopsgate Collection specialise in, Jane?

LGBTQ+. Bishopsgate is opposite Liverpool Street Station. It's a great

great library.

Yeah, they were very, very good to us. They have an incredible collection.

So Stephen Woolley is the founder and owner of the Scala, and that's his

collection of stuff.

Note the wolf behind him from... Yeah, that was the wolf from the Company of

Wolves, the actual wolf, stuffed in a box.

Wasn't that behind him when you were being interviewed by Stephen Woolley?

he interviewed me for the job in front of that wolf. It was quite

And that doll said from Company Wolves as well, isn't it? That one behind him.

Yeah, from the Angela Carter adaptation.

Yeah.

This is one of Mark Moore's photographs.

And the woman lying on the floor apparently is a best -selling author.

Joy Division, a bit of rock and roll.

There was a sort of like... Oh, there's Barry and his cat.

That was sort of all about the, you know, the idea of being subversive and

a subterranean scene, which people would talk more and more about the Scala. You

should go to the Scala.

Scala's like, what's really going on there?

So these photographs were done at one of the gig nights by a photographer called

Philip Gray, who took some really amazing live music photography shots.

Throughout that decade and into the 90s, and he very graciously allowed us to

use his pictures.

He was front of house at the screen on the hill, as well as a photographer.

It became another place, really, to sort of see yourself through the community.

I always think of that Hall Schrader script, Taxi Driver.

The many faces of Ralph Brown. All the animals come out at night, whores.

Dopers, queens, pussies, junkies, phenols, scum.

I was like, yeah, that was us.

You know, plus rent boys and wannabe pop stars and just people who

didn't want to go to bed on Saturday night, you know.

This is a handiwork of Davy Jones, one of the best -known cartoonists from Biz

magazine, who you can see his hand of fate there, drawing away the sketch.

There were certain...

passages where we couldn't find archive form, so we used Davies to illustrate

them. This is one of his.

I'd sort of intuited quite early on that there was a big crossover between the

Scala audience and the Viz audience.

I mean, I was certainly one who loved both, so I thought, I can't be the only

one. And something about Viz, particularly something about Davy Jones'

really is very Scala -y. You know, it has that kind of very sort of surreal

aspect to it.

And then he was in.

So the snake was from a sort of cinema commercial to look after your

property, a warning to thieves are about.

And I needed to find a visual reference for Davy to draw, so I went out on

Facebook and asked who could help.

A very helpful man called Jan Mancy came back with an image of the snake. So we

gave that to Davey and he copied it on the spot.

About ten minutes later, I can hear him singing.

Didn't we have a lovely time the day we went to Bangor?

He sang the whole song in the coffee bar.

He's like a proper weirdo.

About three months later, I'm looking at Top of the Pops and there he is at

number one with Culture Club.

singing, do you really want to hurt me?

He was a regular down there.

I didn't know who he was.

And I never saw him looking like that again.

We did try to get Boy George into the film because he was a regular, as Ralph

says, but he turned us down three times because he was doing the voice of

Australia. But we did get that post -craft by then. We did get that. At

got him in somehow.

Age 14, you normally got turned away. At the Scarlet, they didn't care how old

you were.

They let you in.

Mark Moore was amazing. We could have used him.

Well, we have, clearly. Used him quite a lot.

I mean, he could have spoke the entire film on his own. He was incredible.

He's one of the people who actually remembered the films as well. A lot of

people we...

We drafted him, could only remember the kind of atmospheres, if you like, or the

infrastructure, the vibe of the Scala, or who they went with, or the tribes, or

anything connected with the Scala, apart from the actual films themselves.

But Mark was fantastic, he remembered all of it.

He's also one of those famous people who's incredibly lovely, as in he'll ask

you about yourself, you know, what are you reading, what films are you

you know, that kind of thing.

and also clearly one of the best -dressed men on the planet. You know, I

caught loads of times.

I would be, like, physically evicted.

So we did have to put a little patch over the gaping shirt.

If you look closely, you can see that we've covered up Mark Moore's tummy with

bit of CGI there.

There were quite a few specifically male shirts up there which you had to patch

up like that.

Jordan.

Where

is

God?

It's got death.

And now we watch it and we love those bits.

But I think at the time all the punks hated those bits.

Yeah, quite a tectonic charm. There's another

photograph by Robert Workman there from Bishop's Gate.

which I'd never seen such a homoerotic film.

And that was a great thing to see at that age, you know, when you're sort of

discovering your way and just about to start going to gay clubs and things like

that. So that was fantastic. What would we have done without the BFI's Blu -ray

collection? Oh, look, there's Derek Jarman by Gordon Rainsford being

1980.

It was a period of change in fashion.

Punk was on the way out. New Romantic was beginning.

I remember seeing people dressed as pirates, seeing people with knee

This is a really great archive film, a programme made by Janet Street Porter

Danny Baker from 1980, and it's the story of the new romantics in London.

It's called 20th Century Boxers. 20th Century Boxers, yeah.

They wanted to do a showcase. They'd done a whole body of work, and the

venue was...

The Scala.

And it was quite an occasion.

We think that's Marilyn.

And that's Stevie Strange, obviously.

Walking into... Or Stephen Strange, the actual names.

This is a great example of Martin Pavey's sound work, where he designed

sound to make it sound as if you were coming into a gig venue and hearing the

sound from behind closed doors.

It's very clever.

We're also pretty sure you can see, we think that's Martin Pavey behind those

two in a hat.

And standing halfway up the aisle as well.

Long shot.

He doesn't think it is, but he was definitely there at the gig. And it

like him, to be honest. Which actually, you know, carried on throughout the 80s.

So it was a landmark gig.

I went to loads of gigs at Colin Totten Street.

I think the first one I probably saw was Sobbing Gristle, Leather Nun, Monty

Kazaza.

And there was this rumour going around that Genesis Purage and Co had got this

positive ion generator, which was the opposite of the usual negative ion

generator. We had one of those in my hippie household.

This actually makes you feel bad.

It was like a big radiator or something. It was a portable heater or something.

It was quite weird.

That's Cozy Funny Tootie singing this.

I remember going to see the Mr. Rons with 23 Skidoo playing, and

I think it was the lead singer of the Mr. Rons, he grabbed hold of the mic

and he just froze.

And no -one knew what was going on. He was actually being electrocuted live on

stage. Drummer got up, kicked the mic stand away, and then he went to another

mic and he went, oh, that was a shocking experience, and then collapsed on the

floor. They're almost just, like, open -mouthed, like, yep, we're at the Scala.

That's the sort of thing that happened.

It's another of Philip Gray's photographs.

Oh, no, Channel 4.

So here's where the timeline slightly converges, because we're talking about a

different building altogether.

We're talking about the new Scala, King's Cross.

There is the Monty Python pan pointing at the Scala there, the lady killer.

The King Sound was the nightclub that was operative for about a year and a

in the King's Cross cinema at weekends.

It's all to do with Bowie and the rise of Bowie and the fact that Bowie's

management was a guy called Tony DeVries.

That's Tony DeVries standing behind Iggy in a photograph by Mick Rock.

the great music photographer.

And that's the great old man of the mountain of music journalism, Nick Kent.

Nick Kent talked fantastically about this. He

talked in real time pretty much about the gig that happened in real time.

I mean, you know, he talked about half an hour non -stop.

Almost every second recollection of that gig, it was quite spectacular.

Yeah, he couldn't remember what he was doing yesterday, but he can remember

1972, like, at the back of his hands.

It's another Mick Rock photograph.

Taken out of Gala, or the King's Cross Cinema, as it was known.

If Fellini had made a film in the late 60s and there'd been this completely...

love this guy with the... Yeah, who is that man? We'd love to find him.

And the kind of... Shout out to the guy in the T -shirt.

There was nothing like that music.

But what was outstanding was even...

He'd worked out these special moves that he could do with the mic stand, where

he could, like, throw the mic stand forward and dive on the stand and do a

somersault while the stand was in midair and then land in the audience and

then crawl around on his belly like an iguana.

He literally defied the law. His photographs are so great.

Mick Rock's pictures of that gig are just something else. They were

That guy is about 10 years old.

But to me, it changed my life.

I was 20 at the time. This was a really hard photograph to license.

Thank you, Joe Stevens.

Throw yourself at the world.

You just throw yourself at the fucking world.

We brought David Attenborough in at great expense to do a voiceover here.

It's about 95 % of the budget. Thank you, David.

This is an original animation by Osbert Parker taken from an original

primatarium leaflet from 1980.

It's beautiful work. Osbert Parker is eventually Quentin Tarantino's animator,

isn't he? He was.

That sounds ominous.

Oh, he's such a good actor.

From Tottenham Street up to King's Cross, they were in a building called...

our executive producer, David Babsky, took that picture. That's Alan Gregory,

Jane Pilling and Stephen Woolley on the right.

First film they showed at the Monkey House.

Was King Kong.

Who's that familiar face? Who's that?

Yeah, who is that?

Yeah, that's me. And that's Heath and the cat.

Having a good sniff.

Ben Wheatley, wasn't he cute?

Shall we talk about that film? The archive footage is called Satanic

Wheels and it was shot by an Australian student in London in the mid -80s, a New

Zealand student.

She went back to New Zealand, she took the footage with her and put it into the

New Zealand Film Archive, as you do, where we tracked it down.

This is another student film, but shot in 92,

by Ali Peck and Victor de Jesus.

They made a three -minute -long film shot in this garden. This is another bit

amateur archive shot by Rick Myling.

I love this shot so much.

Yeah, this is by Josh Higgins, a really talented cinematographer.

And that's a bit of Michael Clifford's archive film, blending seamlessly with

Josh's.

It's already a little bit brightening. It was a hot day.

I'd overdressed.

So this is summer 1985, I think.

I'm wearing skinny black jeans, big black boots, probably a big long coat

that was way too hot.

So I met Joe.

We go in.

He's talking about Joe Cornish, his childhood friend.

So we're trying to give a tour of the cinema.

It's these marble floors and it's a quite grand building that looks a bit

like... Blending it in with archive footage from 1990, 1992.

This was the Scala mural, Stairway mural.

You know, look around King's Cross in 1985, that's a little bit what it seemed

like. Didn't it originally have cartoons of monkeys?

Yeah, when it was the primatarium. Yeah.

The star's still there on the floor of the Scala.

Let's set up a cinema in the old abandoned embassy from before time.

And the survivors and the mutants and the others can all gather together

to watch entertainment from the old world.

Yeah, that mural was done in 1986 by a couple of street artists.

He also did the limelight in New York and Hyper Hyper in Kensington Market.

I love this

photo so much. Amazing.

That photograph is by John Stoddard, a celebrity photographer.

And that's the Jesus and Mary chain, hooray.

And that guy in the middle is right here.

And that's Douglas now.

We specifically asked people what they wanted to be credited as, because we

some people can have their noses really put out of joint if you miscredit them

in the captions. And Douglas, he is a filmmaker, so he wants to be called a

filmmaker, not a musician.

Although he was with the chain.

through their kind of pomp years, if you like, you know.

That was Douglas back then.

There's a bit of an in -joke here about the song Loaded and about the Jesus Mary

chain. We don't want to labour it, particularly.

Scarlet, where kind of outsiders and freaks belonged and you felt welcomed.

We'd walk down Pentonville Road and get up... Lena's one of Smoking Dogs,

formerly known as Black Audio Film Collective, along with Donna Comfra and

Lawson. There they are. There's Black Audio.

They were big friends of the Scala back in the day.

It was a very difficult shoot, this one on the roof, because...

The studio is directly above a gym.

And throughout the entire shot, you could hear this boom,

boom, of weight kind of dropping on the floor.

So we had to sort of navigate that and the fact it was raining and windy at the

same time. So we're glad we got that in the camera. And we celebrated that

difference. We like to look like that. And we met people who look similar to us

there. And that's what was really exciting, you know, for us.

The thing about this gala was you had to be a member.

There we go.

I've still got it.

It's like a toffee club.

I never quite understood how it worked, but Joe explained it to me as being a

kind of loophole, which enabled them to show stuff that they really shouldn't be

showing.

Welcome to Cafe Blast.

So, yeah, these were all the films that were not classified by the BBFC when

they were first shown at the Scala.

And the programmers, myself included, we had to write to Camden Council every

month and ask permission to show all this kind of stuff.

This is the activist Lisa Power, who's co -founder of Stonewall.

The fold -out poster which would be up on the wall with everything circled that

you wanted to go and see.

Everyone I knew had one of these in their kitchen. I always had one in my

kitchen. It was very exciting to see what the next one was going to be.

So elsewhere on this disc you'll find a gallery of Scala programmes that you can

look at.

So Mike Leeson's company, 2D Design, were the people behind the Scala program

right from the early, the first one, 1978 through to 93.

The concept of the program was based on the American repertory programs of the

New Art and the Roxy in San Francisco, New Art in Los Angeles.

Mike, explaining how he had to kind of like unlearn his...

girls.

He now works at the Dogwoof studios in Ironmonger Row.

Yeah, we're looking at the Dogwoof HQ now and we're looking at some of his

handiwork behind him.

That's what you do as a graphic designer 99 % of the time.

You don't, you know, get high on acid and start doing this.

Yeah, so that's Steve Martin's face, obviously, in the middle of the

I never know if people register that or not. It just gradually went out.

No matter how hard you tried, there was always something, when you got it back,

that was slightly off -register and out.

So I think over time we just said, we'll just go for it, you know.

And then once, it was almost like once you opened the stable door, everyone

went, wah!

They were great.

You could pour over them. You could look at them, the ads.

I always pause there. Whenever you see bookshelves behind people in interviews,

don't you pause it and try and find out what the books are?

Particularly if you've written a book yourself, you think, is my book there?

Vainly? Somehow?

Could it be? What is the title of your book, Ali? Do tell us.

My co -written book in 2001.

It's called Your Faith Here, British cult movie since the 60s. Oh, look,

a resurrection... Sorry to bite him, but there is a resurrection Joe, also known

as Lee Williams, and his good mate Ian Crosdale.

These posters and this text is from a sort of prelapsarian, before

-the -fall kind of time, whereby... We're shooting throughout in the

They were lovely enough.

let us use the entire building to shoot in which was very convenient for us it

was locked down at the time so we had um we had kind of the run of the place um

except for the builders they were very annoyed with i think they uh probably

quite rightly because we were getting under their feet but we did uh somehow

survive it so there's trisha and trisha is the person that designed the cover of

the um blu -ray that you're looking at now it's a very naughty one And the

was very naughty.

Oh, my God, I wish the Scala existed, though. I mean, honestly, I could do

almost every day. I'm not sure I could do a whole week of the Lonesome Cowboys,

but, you know.

Oh, I love this bit of footage. So there we go, we're in the Scala auditorium.

That's really what it looked like and felt like.

And I don't remember there being any usherettes and torches or anything like

that. It was like, off you go, good luck.

And the other weird thing that I recall was that there was never a point at

which the lights were up. It seemed as if there was always something showing.

And either you were coming in at the end of the... At this point, our producer,

Andy Stark, always says, look, there's Piers Morgan.

It was never like, well, that's the end of the last house.

And, OK, staff, let's tidy everything up and get ready for the next performance.

It smelled weird and it was cold.

It smelled weird? It smelled weird?

Oh, yeah.

Well, it smells all right.

Maybe my standards are low on wheels.

Yeah, it had a very kind of mucky, dairy, burny. Am I allowed to say that?

They were not comfortable feet.

They felt, I would say, wood.

I love the fact that the...

filmmakers who are organising this documentary have managed to get one of

original Scala chairs, which is as uncomfortable as I remember it from...

or it isn't? It is.

It is as uncomfortable.

I think he says it isn't.

Well, why would that... How would that make sense?

I just want his shirt.

I want everyone's shirt.

What's happening?

Something's happening.

It's a great picture of the auditorium light, which is still there.

And if you look at those Mick Rock photographs, you can see the same light.

Is that cool?

Or is that just bad?

Kathy, her most recent book is The Book of Goth, I think it's called.

Season of the Witch.

Yeah, it's about the history of Goth.

Whenever we see her, we always marvel at the fact that our film and her book are

extremely similar, even down to the chronologies and timelines and things.

As in, she starts with Thatcher and we start with Thatcher and sort of go on

from there. But they are very, very similar things.

Do get it if you're listening. By Susan the Witch, by Kathleen Onsworth. It's

amazing. It's a work.

You would feel like, gosh, I could actually be part of this world. I could

something from this world. I could take into... She's wearing Westwood there, I

think, isn't she? She's incredible.

You know, you've got various members of Everything But The Girl, that round.

Everything, but the girl did sit round.

They literally did. Tracy Thorne, we've just got in touch with. They come to

our, kind of a screening.

I tried to get in touch with her via, I don't know, Facebook Messenger or

something back in the day.

Recently sort of hooked up with her on Twitter and said, I sent you a message

saying come and be, and I thought, no, I never look at those.

We always have to start with the Scarlet Cat, who I was very fond of. Or

Houston, more than Roy. Look, Scarlet Cat.

Houston and Roy.

So Vic Roberts was one of our favourite staff members. She was an usher who left

to be a bus driver, believe it or not.

So I had got up, I think, maybe just to go get myself another coffee.

So Houston got up and went for a walk.

There he is.

He had this funny tail that just curled backwards. It's meant to be a sign of

dominance in cats.

But, yeah, he had a very curly tail.

And startling every single fucker in the row, which then set off this Mexican

wave of panic and fear along the row, which then spilled back and forth.

were screaming simply because other people were screaming.

Hey, where's the door? They heard the cat.

Oh, Mrs Reeve, this is from the Michael Clifford film, Scarlet, shot in 1990.

Mrs Reeve used to come with her son, Melvin, and they always came to the

films, and they were lovely.

They used to give the cats Christmas presents, like little ping -pong balls

treats, and she was very generous.

towards the end of the life of this gala in the campaign to save the building.

She was born in 1914, before the First World War broke out, and she was 102

she died, while we were doing the editing. And we're in touch with her

Melvin.

Up in the air, you know, flying sort of thing.

We like all that. I don't see there's any harm in it at all.

I mean, I don't go out of here wanting to chainsaw somebody.

The Scala program was very diverse.

It's the first time co -directing. It's really impressed upon me how difficult

it is to shoot against light and how light changes because those windows were

fucker to shoot against because the light kept changing.

So to actually sort of edit that sequence, it's very, very hard.

It's very...

It involved technical stuff, I'm revealing here.

Place in the sun and from here to eternity.

Just that face.

And the quality of his acting, but also to know that he was one of us.

There were several films I saw here that changed my life. I first saw Jeunet's

short film Chantemort here, and that, again, that became a hugely important

for me. I was obsessed with that film.

The scene where he's blowing the smoke through the wall into the other

prisoner's mouth is one of the most erotic things I've ever seen to this

It's more sexy than any gay porn I've ever watched.

And I did write a book about Enchantement, I should say.

Did I mention my book, Your Fate Here? It

doesn't have Stuart Lee in it, but it has a big paragraph about the gala in

Ever since Jane and I...

Sort of left the Scala, her in her professional capacity and me as a

We were both writing continuously about the Scala for a good sort of 20 years, I

suppose. One way or the other, through magazines and articles and what have

books.

And it never left us. It's a big, huge form. It's part of our DNA.

...why we were there and what was wrong with us. And yet he would then sit down

and continue watching it.

You know, you don't get that in a multiplex.

Paul Putner, he's in Little Britain.

He's also the Curious Orange.

I remember the Lee and Herring's Curious Orange. And there's David Jones' Magnum

Opus. Magnum Ice Cream.

Magnum. Get back to the screen and see something just as enjoyable because of

all the eccentrics and the freaks and the cats and all the mayhem that would

sometimes happen in there.

This place just felt really wrong.

It felt sort of like anything could happen. But you knew that someone

in the process really cared about what they put on, right? And so it's almost

like the building itself had recommended these films to you.

This is from the Satanic Dollies on Wheels, New Zealand student film that I

mentioned before.

That was when the lightbox worked.

Mostly the lightbox didn't work.

On Mondays, which were a slow day at the Scala, me and my co -programmer... So

Joanne Seller was just 19 years old when she got the job of programming and

running the Scala, 1982.

Just imagine it. And particularly when she talks about some of the stories that

you'll hear later.

Just remember that's a 19 -year -old girl fighting the video nurses and

corpses out of the cinema.

And she went on to become Paul Thomas Anderson's producer, so she produced

things like Boogie Nights and They'll Be Blood and what have you.

One

of

the things that I found the most perverse was being asked to put on an

tray and carry the ice cream tray into the...

Double bill of a rough mayor or a double bill of some sexploitation and sell ice

cream to the punkers. That was bizarre.

And having felt myself to be a radical... Loathly with the makeup ice

we sold.

Loathly. And I enjoyed how perverse that was. Seemed very glamorous back in that

day.

There's the hand of Davey again.

We were showing Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

There's a spelling mistake.

Good God.

So

this

is a story that seems to appear

in Sam Mendes' Empire of Light, doesn't it?

Someone finding a... Yeah, funny that.

This interview was shot in the New Beverly cinema in Los Angeles, which is

Quentin Tarantino's 35mm only cinema.

I said, I think I have a dead body in my office.

So the ambulance came and everything.

I was thinking the policeman was exactly like the one he said, get in the back

of the van, and with Nan and I.

I'm sure that's who he's based it on.

There was a huge, huge, we had a huge billboard from Evil Dead up in the

It's Graham's artwork for Evil Dead. It was massive. And they were like, oh,

showing one of those video nasties.

Was that the reason?

Because the Scala showed all of the video nasties. Well, not all of them,

most of them. Cinemas could show video nasties. It was home entertainment that

was restricted.

It's impossible to discuss the history of the Scala.

Oh, here he comes.

Wonderful David McGillivray, who's, um... Julian Terry's scriptwriter.

Incredibly arch, gentlemen.

I remember him saying to our sound editor once, Do you like Decadent?

Everyone loves Decadent, don't you?

The sound editor sort of looking at him non -plussed, saying, um, yeah, I think

so. There you go.

Decadent. And talking of decadence, here's the reason we've got an 18

certificate. There it is. There it is.

The film's been invited to the Mumbai Film Festival, and I did give them

permission to cut that bit out, but I think they're quite happy with it. This

too much.

I shouldn't really be watching this.

It was screaming... I love the fact you're through the gorilla's wristwatch

this point. Perfect.

So Ali not only sold, Ali Kelly not only sold ice creams to porno punters, but

also was...

Did some projecting as well. I have always maintained that the Scala was

to show any length of celluloid that had half a dozen intact sprocket holes. So

because of that, the films tended to break.

Occasionally, you'd get the thing where the film would get stuck. It was a bit

drossy, wasn't it, the Scala projection box?

Through the little window, you'd see, oh, my God, the film, the image is

The screen would go white and we had to wait for the projectionist to repair it.

But even worse, even more terrifying, was when the film jammed in the gate and

then the lamp would burn through the celluloid and then we would see it on

screen. It was catching fire. You know, that...

Opening. Ah, that was absolutely petrifying.

Oh, it gives off an orange cloud of light that just flows right out of the

And your projectionist, the projectionist for Scala, who put reels

wrong way because you're on acid one day. Yeah, and they sometimes got shown

upside down, the reels, and back front, and sometimes they were completely

missing.

Back in Fitzrovia, this is the queue to see The Avengers.

Scarlet was also the venue that had things like the meeting of the Laurel

Hardy Appreciation Society.

The Laurel and Hardy Sundays were always completely sold out, packed out.

They were fantastic.

They were run by a guy called Dave Wyatt, who worked at ITV, I think, or at

Thames TV.

He was a real specialist and a collector of prints and he used to put on great,

great shows.

Why don't you do something to help me?

You might have caught Paul's impersonation of Oliver Hardy in one of

Serafinowicz's shows as well.

I'm standing outside the Scala Cinema, which is a... This reminds me of Mariana

Freck's job.

Little Big Picnic, though, wasn't it? Yeah, the little picture show. The

picture show. I don't think Kim's changed much. No, not at all. In the

year since that was shot. From a Freeman's catalogue, where Lulu

on an advert saying, if you want to frock around the clock, do Freeman's

catalogue. And I thought...

Shock around the clock. So there you go, folks.

The truth behind shock around the clock. That's where the idea came from. I

mean, when I look back, I think it was really funny that the two people who

looked sort of like the nastiest people in London put this festival on.

And Stefan was a miserable old man. I had a terrible reputation as being one

the rudest people ever.

I mean, you know, that was my punk ethic anyway, but I really was quite nasty to

people. I didn't suffer fools gladly at all.

Hey, hey, Bill.

I mean, I did notice that Stefan used to sort of actually step over the line

often with people. He used to get quite threatening.

People had suggested that it may turn out badly.

Photographed by David Hyman, a passed -out punter.

I had the chain from the scholars' doors over my leather jacket

for self -defence.

We've built up here a situation of the crowd.

The Jackie Chan Kung Fu events were also, like the Laurel and Hardy events,

completely packed out. It was a really successful, very profitable event for

everyone.

A lot of the people who came were... In some of the outtakes of this, we've got

Ricky's collaborator, actually, Toby Russell.

He talks about the fact that his father, Ken Russell, as in the director Ken

Russell, was fascinated by kung fu and wanted to make his own kung fu movie,

he never came to pass the vote. But he was fascinated by dance and

and he said that what these guys are doing is so far beyond anything that I

could come up with, you know.

Yeah, a bit more psychability.

The Return of the Living Dead was premiered here at the Scala Cinema, and

Kramps were on hand.

That's Joanne Seller talking to Lux Interior.

She was an enormous Kramps fan. That was like her dream country was to put on

this show with the Kramps in attendance.

The Kramps made out of brick and mortar, isn't it?

Tell me about Bell, Jane. What was his story?

Well, Bell was a musician in a band called The Stingrays, and he also had

shop in Camden called Psychotronic that sold under - and over -the -counter

VHSs and magazines and memorabilia.

And he carried on being great.

show person even after he was no longer in the stingray he had a band called the

ills of suave percepto which is you perceive something and what you perceive

in the in the film vincent price surprisingly is a mad scientist and he

out that when you get that crawling sensation in your stomach when you're

nervous it's actually an organism called the team that also had a video label

called mondo movies and they were the first ones to release fast the cat

and things like that in the UK.

It's kind of Ray Dennis' Declan movies.

And Psychotronic, the name comes from the book by Michael Weldon, sort

of a kind of proto -history of cult movies of a certain type.

influenced a mixed -up generation of weirdos and mythos, which is pure

There's the terrifying tingler.

And you would have set up buzzers under

the chairs, and then you press this buzzer, and all these people would go,

my God, and everyone's jumping up. Well, that's the idea. We had these bell

buzzers and about six car batteries, and we could only get a slight...

And I remember after the first screening, we were like, right, we need

battery. We need to up the voltage.

And me and Mark were down in reception. He's talking about his business partner,

Mark Eystead, who's a great friend of the Scala and a real Soho character.

And sadly, he just passed away.

He was grabbing their hand and going, that's what it felt like.

Rubbish. And I was just like, result, another fantastic Mondo movie, a

psychotronic, big hitter.

Hooray, there's the bell.

Blessed by a rainbow.

We were conveniently located next to a very popular gay pub called The Bells.

was a dance club also.

The Bells immortalized in the film Pride about the lesbian and gay support

minors.

I think there was even a gay bookshop. It's not named as such. I don't think

it's The Bell, but it's absolutely 100 % The Bell.

You can also see glimpses of it in Rebel Dykes as well.

Yeah, it was one of my haunts along with the Scala when I was going to Kingsway

College around the corner, which is how I originally discovered the Scala.

That's Isaac, filmmaker of Young Soul Rebels, looking for Langston.

I mean, everybody really involved in the kind of pop sort of alternative scene.

And in a way, that kind of queer group...

also would also come to the Scarlet Cinema.

You know, there was a certain oppositional counterculture which

in the audiences which attended the Scarlet Cinema, and I think we saw them

really as being part of our cultural sort of identity.

Both the Scala and the Bell facilitated that because they were both places where

different tribes all mixed together.

It was what we now call, what the younger kids would call queer in the

broader... Again, astonishing shirt. I just... Where can I get this? I

should have asked him.

Also looking very Hunt Red Tea, isn't he? Terry Gilliam here and loathing

You didn't call yourselves that in those days, but you were. You were

alternative to the mainstream.

This was the way we let our friends from the Berlin.

We'd go downstairs, we'd unlock the fire escape, and they'd come up this way.

Also, other people broke in that way, and other people used this backpack.

Vic is amazing in this film.

The timing is just exquisite. I had to clean it out at the end of an evening.

It was always dark in here. I'd come down with my flashlight, and I'd want to

get it cleaned and checked as quickly as possible before running terrified back

into the auditorium in case I encountered something I didn't want to

I had to help Serena the cleaner.

I did.

I wasn't just the programmer, but I also used to clean up if there was a bit too

much mess, shall we say. And there's photographs from one of the ladies' only

nights.

Photos by Laurie McKellar. That's Alex Dawson, who was one of our ushers.

It was a great night.

So no photos of the fisting tent?

There was a fisting tent, yeah, in one of the offices.

Oh, Mick Rizzo, yeah, he ran the cafe.

He was a lovely guy.

He was in a band with his brother.

He used to keep a diary.

He's reading from his diary, which is a sort of poetic expression of working

at the Scala.

He had a special relationship with youth and the cat.

I also saw quite a few things at the Scala offscreen that were quite eye

-popping as well, because it was quite cruisy.

the kind of boys that i liked came here i was very into the kind of um the

tattooed rockabilly sort of boys because i was into the kind of you know the

greasy hair it's like bad boys you know um so and to me the scholar's aesthetic

was very much about that it was that you know that kind of retro 50s again it's

no exaggeration to say the scholar was london's foremost

LGBTQ cinema at that point.

And yet the LGBTQ crowd was just one of various tribes who would descend on

the Scarlet, be they Horror Tribe or the Indie Tribe or whatever.

What other tribes would you say? Well, the Mixed Tribe.

So here's Rory, who was the promoter of Mixed Club, which had come out the bell

and found a bigger space in the Scarlet to do their all night.

discos with films, essentially, and performers on stage, people like Lily

and Jane County and Julian Clary and all sorts of people. Fanny the Wonder Dog

would come and do on -stage performances as part of Rory's Club, the mix. It was

massively influential and very popular. You had Michael Clarke down there as

well, didn't you?

Yeah, we'd see Michael Clarke dancing and, yeah, it was just a real gathering

point.

I was trying to learn German at university, so I'd sit and watch taxis

clothes for endlessly. I'd picked up some choice phrases which apparently

weren't very decent.

Here he comes. Here he is, old grip -type thing. For misbehaviour, we're

the Scala, the darkest auditorium in London.

crazy films on the screen and, of course, an audience of crazies

misfits. And so all kinds of things happened in the cinema throughout the

showing, especially during the all -night screening. So in the auditorium,

the back row, of course.

It was very, very crazy.

It was pre -internet, so it was where people went to meet each other.

So, yeah, that...

The toilet used to actually be my office in the old Scala.

When the new Scala took over the building and turned it into a nightclub,

turned my office into a toilet.

Funny.

I'm glad I put that

on film.

Well, I suppose the Scala was the nearest thing to a 42nd Street

way. I mean, having sort of, like, been in them at the height of...

The 70s.

I can probably tell you that it was sort of similar. You know, people with their

legs over the front of the seats, seats slamming, the gents' toilet.

We refer to the shot as Alan Jones' torture dungeon.

And like the dark bits at the back of the auditorium, you didn't go there just

in case you might trip over somebody having a shag on the carpet.

That's part of the theatre of it all, isn't it? I mean, that's what I think.

There was a nice example of a jump cut just then. We have quite a few of those

in our film.

We talked to another filmmaker recently. He worked for the BBC back in the day.

He's like moving pictures. He said that if they found jump cuts in any of their

editing, they would get right bollocking.

So they had to disguise them all with footage and archive, which we couldn't

unless they were due all the time. So we left them in. We didn't really have

anyone to bollock us either, did we?

We just thought it was punk.

Scarlet, fuck it, you know.

Perfect audience to watch it with.

Miss Babs Johnson?

Yes, I'm Babs Johnson.

Special delivery package, ma 'am. Sign here, please.

Any time something awful happened, people would share.

Oh, my God almighty!

Someone has sent me a bowel movement!

Pink flamingos, without doubt.

The bit at the end where Divine eats dog shit.

You would hear just the math.

screams of disgust from the entire audience, except for the people who'd

before, where it'd be screams of joy.

The Scala was where you got the audiences that were the most hardcore,

mean that in the best way. I was only in the audience in The Scala of one of my

films once, and I remember being shocked.

That was for the UK preview of Passport. Midnight movie audiences everywhere.

So this was the most insane vocal...

partying, great audience I ever saw.

Can you dig it?

Can you dig it?

Going to see The Warriors was one of the best experiences I've ever had. So

there's John from Black Audio Film Collective, later known as Smoking Dog,

we saw in the archive photograph half an hour or so ago.

It was Jane's idea to shoot him on the staircase. I actually find this quite a

complete and, you know, pretentious idea that we would shoot him against one of

his own sort of installation screens, you know, so you get the kind of film

he'd made spalling out behind him, you know, which admittedly would have looked

slightly messy and confusing.

But as soon as Jane saw... This is Jane's genius, though.

When she saw the staircase outside, she said, the film's called The Scala, we

have a staircase motif running throughout the film, if you look

see. There it is again. But it perfectly suits the Warriors as well. It's

fantastic.

Can you dig? It was just an amazing Brechtian moment in the cinema where you

were engaged.

I think John was the only interviewee who used the word Brechtian in his

interview as well.

I love the fact that he...

Sort of high art, if you like, talking to low art, or apparently low art, you

know, because one of the Scarlet's big things was that there was no distinction

between low art and high art. You know, this is why the programme had all the

films together. You know, there was no... One was not bigger than the other,

know. They're all the same, all considered the same.

Basically.

So a lot of the time when I would go out at night, I would just stay around

people's flats. The, the?

Squats, stay on people's floors.

But a useful alternative appeared with the Scala

all -nighters.

Yeah, going to an all -nighter was fantastic because I lived in that period

Acton. I love this photograph of Stipley.

If you'd done a gig in East London or whatever and you were maybe not being

because you were in a try -out spot, a really great thing would be to come here

on the way back and see what was on and sit through the night.

There's another smoking dog, Black Audio Film Collective.

There's a bit of an installation.

You can see behind him.

All free, you know. I spent a lot of time at the all -nighters.

Oh, gosh, no shit.

Did you spend a lot of time at the all -nighters? Yeah, he's great. This is

Fetus, also known as Jim Thirlwell.

This was filmed at the Alamo Draft House when we filmed Ralph Brown.

It's a bit too dark to see behind him, because he's a bit of an anatomy of

probably dead Victorian children, aren't they, or something?

Yeah, he's talking about the Fitzrovian Scala.

A lot of bands that would come to London to play from out of town, we couldn't

afford to tell, it was the same tiny little pubs, and they would literally

come in all night, just to sleep, you know.

Obviously watch the films, but they try and get a better cut towards the end,

so...

I remember someone saying about sitting in the King's Cross gala, turning around

and seeing the four, the three Jesus Mary chain and Bobby G lined up all

their dark glasses watching the film.

That's another Phil Gray photograph.

The dreamlike experience of half falling asleep and then waking up and the

movies are still going on.

The movies and the dreams kind of merge.

I don't know how people made it through the entire all -nighters. The thing

about doing an all -nighter film... That's Vic Roberts sitting in the

with Blair Kutrow, her wife.

Possibly stoned, possibly tripping.

Oh, wait, yes, I do. Drug.

People would be there on speed, coming down on speed.

Some people would be there on acid. When you talk about Scholar, I would never

immediately say, oh, yeah, it was druggy, but it was definitely a place

people were on drugs watching the movie.

Don't get uptight with me, man.

Yes, Ralph Brown.

I love this sequence so much. This is Ralph talking about dealing

drugs.

Intercut with himself as a drug dealer with Nell.

There's another jump cut.

I think you should play a game on every time you jump cut. Take a swig of...

Drinking game. You should definitely have a drink every time you see a jump

You'd probably be in hospital in the coma by the end of it, frankly.

Never mind with Nell and I drinking game. Try this one.

With a larder.

I love the fact we got the word larder in our films.

Brechtian larder. 40 quid or whatever it was, I can't do the math, but it was

basically four a quid.

And I would sell them over the counter for three a quid, thus making one blue

amphetamine for each sale.

This is still valued at two quid. Two quid, you're out of your mind.

These I would eat, because I also had to stay awake.

even though I wasn't watching the film. That was with June at the London School

of Economics when he was working in the kitchen at the Scala, in the larder at

the Scala.

Within an inch of his skin. I can't do the math if he was at the LSE.

From where the blade had kind of... And he had hair that was, like, gelled and,

like, sharky.

And very deep blue eyes. And one day I said to him, so Barry, where'd you get

it? Where'd you get this stuff from, man?

Because I can just go straight to them. So yeah, Warren Street, very close to

the Tottenham Street Gala with the big squat culture full of new romantics and

various people. I remember one of my most embarrassing moments here and I

I nearly lost my job over it.

This is another bit of Osbert Parker's animation to illustrate this.

Sorry, that's Louis Benassi.

He worked at the Gala for a long time and was also known for his work at the

close -up cinema.

That's a bit of archived footage of Ali Kaley that Osbert managed to animate

very cleverly.

We love this sequence.

He went to Chinatown and bought those squids and you can see behind -the

photographs in the booklet and elsewhere on this bit.

And those are original Scala tickets which Osbert saved from his days of

to the Scala and kept them in a box and they came in handy.

So I wonder if my character Danny from Withnail would have gone to the Scala if

it was around in 1969 and I have to say I think he would.

I'm not sure if smoking huge amounts of weed is going to keep people awake all

night.

But I think he would probably attempt to sell you that, on that understanding.

It's a long time till dawn, man. It's six or seven, eight, nine hours.

He's probably sick of doing downing the dealer in person. I forced him to do

this, basically. I feel a bit ashamed.

He rose to it, obliged.

I remember an amazing New Year's... Jim Bidgood died recently, didn't he, or

quite recently?

He did.

Caroline's dress is by The Vampire's Wife. She looks lovely in it, and she's

best known for her role in Doc Martin, I believe.

But she does have this pronounced kind of indie history as well, doesn't she?

Oh, yeah, she also recently, or not so long ago, made a great film about Delia

Derbyshire, in which she played Delia Derbyshire.

Produced by her own producer? And produced by Andy Stark, our producer.

did that night actually exist?

Can anybody hear me?

We found something.

We found something.

So we originally shot these interviews with Ben Winkley on Zoom when we were

having sort of preparatory work towards this film.

And by the time we came to shoot the thing proper, he had gone jaws deep

in the Meg 2.

So unfortunately there's no time for it, so we had to...

Relying on the voiceover.

But our assistant editor, Ed Mills, did a fantastic job in matching up from...

Matching up what he said with clips from the thing.

A shout -out to Ed, who was just the most patient editor.

Yeah, broadcasting, the guys down the front, the black guy in the dark beard,

yeah. The end of this film for all of you.

And his partner screaming.

Yeah, he told us that his scream, you'll see the Curious Orange and Lee and Erin

do that very same thing, which he's got from the thing. They were difficult

sometimes to shift. I mean, I remember one morning I was clearing out, I was

walking down all the roads with my trash bag to pick up rubbish, polystyrene

cups and bits of sandwiches and all sorts of other strange things that

might have left.

And I was clearing row by row and there was a guy at the back and I shouted to

him, Oi!

wake up go home and he didn't respond he's been asleep for the entire night i

think he might i found a mink pom -pom in the scala once that was the strangest

thing that i have found i put it in the lost property box and then serena the

cleaner um had a had a screaming fit because she thought that she thought it

a mouse we had no mice in the scala we had cats

So, because we had cats, we had no mice, precisely.

We've just had a night of nightmare on Elm Street. One, two, three, four.

I don't know any of the words. It just went on and on and on.

So, he suddenly jolts upright while I'm standing there with my arm, his arm in

my hand.

Stares at me and goes, you cunt.

Grabs his prosthetic limb, which it turns out it was, and storms out of the

building, leaving me.

Slightly shocked still.

Seeing The Terminator being the last film of an all -nighter and watching it,

hearing the Brad Fidel kind of music going... I have this experience

anyway in cinemas. I have some neurological condition whereby as soon

down in a dark room and watch a movie, I fall instantly asleep.

It's not the best for a director.

You know, and then staggering out into the street in Kings Cross.

I'll be back.

I always remember, like, staggering out in the morning.

I have the op -ed. I can never sleep in this cinema. I can't sleep in public.

I think somebody's going to put a bit of old chewing gum in my mouth.

But there was nowhere else to get that intense experience.

And then coming out into King's Cross in the morning was always odd.

So this is a bit of amateur archive shot on the last night of the existence of

the Scala at the cinema.

And that's Bill Pearson in his Scala staff T -shirt. You'll see him again in

second. He was one of our front -of -house managers.

In 1990 -some time. And another bloke, people would kind of come up to you and

go, oh, nice day, isn't it? You know, about six in the morning. Yeah.

Do you want to come back to my play like some kind of stupid monster fighting

game?

Yes, Bill.

So we're coming up to one of those sort of classic pivotal moments

in a film that usually happens at the end of act two where something very

comes down.

The film now takes a... You know, you've had your party. Now here comes the

hangover, basically.

It takes a bit of a left's worth.

And things were going OK during the course of the evening until, I want to

like, three or four in the morning.

I happened to be in... Yeah, Mark's describing his first night managing an

-nighter.

just at the beginning of 85, just after he'd taken on the job of co -programmer

with Joan Salah.

I wanted something of the kind of John Freeman face -to -face

vibe here, so I asked the editor if he would glacially

close in and in and in as he's talking.

When I was a kid, I always wanted to see a film in which, at the end of the

credits, you know how at the end of films you usually get someone sort of

walking away from the camera, so they're typically sort of walking down a lane

or a road, and they're back, you know, disappearing, disappearing, until

finally a stick figure, but I wanted the opposite. I wanted someone sort of

walking towards the camera, and it was this sort of sequence that I kind of

halfway achieved something like that.

By the time you get to him, we're...

right on him.

This is amazing work by Josh Higgins.

Yeah, that's the Scarlet Kubrickian red staircase.

It wasn't Kubrickian when we were at the cinema, but it is now.

So yeah, you see the camera creeping in slowly

on Mark's face.

He's very uncomfortable telling this story. He laughs nervously.

It was his first night managing an all -nighter, and a body was found on the

cinema, outside the cinema.

Actually, when I was researching my book about Scala, on which this film was

based,

I spent a lot of time in the local archives looking at newspapers to try

find the story of the suicide, and I finally found it.

I found the name of the young man that lost his life, that committed suicide

that night.

He was 21 years old.

There's a little dedication to him in the end credits. If you get that far

through the film and freeze it on the end credits, you'll see our tribute to

Scarlet Staff and friends who didn't make it.

I felt so bad. I apologized. I said, this is a terrible thing.

I don't think there was anything to do with the event that might have caused

but I don't know. I'm really sorry. She goes, no, no, I'm calling you to tell

you.

Your cinema had nothing to do with this. In fact, he was manic depressive. It

was very sad.

And he had tried to commit suicide once before, I guess, jumping off a bridge.

So it was a real tragedy. But, I mean, the fact that she did that, it sort of

took a weight of guilt off my shoulders because I really did wonder, like, what

led to this circumstance.

You see the tension in his neck.

A bit more of Titanic dollies.

And beautiful, beautiful photographs of King's Cross in 1989 by

Alan Delaney.

It was always a bit sleazy anyway.

Not that one.

But, you know, literally, we're at a point now where you're literally...

like the bent TV shop. And puddles of blood on the pavement. And we're like

Albion Yard as well. I remember a policeman saying to me one day, the

not going to go round you.

when there'd been an incident outside.

There was a lot of drug dealing going on, prostitution, and it was pretty

pleasing. Some great sound design here by Nicky Ruck and Martin Pavey.

About there being a human turd on the footstep of... Yeah, the human turd, it

was a sort of John Waters -esque moment, but it really sort of came to symbolise

the kind of crack and homeless issues around King's Cross.

during the time the council was clearing out the area.

This is the Poltex archive footage.

We had a homeless kid called Craig who slept in the doorway and wrote to us one

day from prison.

He'd gotten himself arrested to get some respite.

I'd love to know where Craig is now.

I hope he made it.

The moment we were living in. So it was in that... John's talking about

Hansworth songs.

It's a great film. For me, a sort of refuge.

It was an extremely chaotic time with AIDS, Thatcher,

Clause 28, the miners, all of that. And I was kind of involved in that a bit. So

that picture of the miners is by Brenda Prince.

To the miners.

Again, from the Bishop's Gay Archive.

On the 10th of April 1984, HM Customs and Excise raided the Gaze the Word

bookshop. If you look very closely, you can see me reflected at the end of that

glass door, wearing my yellow jacket.

Your high -vis. My high -vis jacket, yeah.

Yeah, we took our cinematographer, Sarah Appleton, on a tour of London. She was

really unimpressed by the whole thing. She was much more at home doing the

interviews in this gala.

We had a former policeman who became our tour guide that day. Chris Foster,

yeah. Who we exhausted, I think it's fair to say. We ended up about seven

later on the roof of this gala with him also.

..with him very, very tired, having dragged him round this part of London

and then didn't use any of it at the end of the day. There's Paul Bergson on the

process. That's by Brenda Prince as well. Paul Bergson as well?

Yeah. We're all allies against the Tory government.

When you were here, you were sort of safe on some level.

You really felt like you were protecting your freedom.

Watching amazing films here or coming to fundraisers, you felt like you were

actively taking part in something that was really, it really mattered.

The Scala resided in our imagination as a community.

Beban's first film was Carrie Greenham Home.

She made it when she was just out of film school and that's a picture of

Greenham Common.

All these restrictions that were being placed on us constantly by the

were just getting more and more.

you know, intrusive, homophobic and blatantly just... They were just really

fucked up. And it did feel lawless and it felt free.

It felt like the right place to be in a climate that was really oppressive.

Yeah, it was kind of worrying because you could feel things were closing in on

the place a bit.

You can see that there's literally a mark on the side of the Scala in 1993,

I think that was shot.

Council was, like, marking out areas of redevelopment and the Scala was

one of them. I think perhaps that's what Rory is referring to.

It's slightly poetic.

Paranoid.

The wall was closing in on this girl.

I'd also like to know who that young man with the ponytail is. I think I know

who it is. I think he's a friend of mine from back in the day, but I can't be

sure. He looks exactly like him.

I'll find out one day.

So name that voice, everybody.

Mother LSE student.

And alongside it, there was a surprise film that was due to be broadcast as

well.

So the certificate comes on the screen, and it's a clockwork orient.

He's a great radio broadcaster, and when we were shooting the interviews...

I remember standing outside the Scala and seeing a bus with his face on the

of it go past.

Yeah, so James was talking about this amazing coincidence of him accidentally

seeing Clockwork Orange when he'd gone to see If. ...enthusiasm for Clockwork

Orange itself or Kubrick in general. And someone definitely shouted, about

bloody time or something like that. So there was a sense of this being quite a

culturally important moment or at least a...

at least a moment, and a proper applause and, you know, sort of proper cheering.

But, yeah, it was definitely the fellow that shouted about bloody time or words

to that effect that made me sort of do almost a double take and realise that I

don't think we're supposed to be watching this film.

I love it's cheeky going here. We stayed.

It wasn't really a big deal, but in the days and weeks... and month and year

after that screening, it became a really big deal.

A former manager of London's Scarlet Cinema was convicted of breach of

today after showing the banned film A Clockwork Orange.

There I am.

God, you must remember this day so well. Oh, it's a horrible, horrible thing.

I hated this bit of the editing.

And your defence was what? You just wanted to show the movie.

Did you plead ignorance?

But you do get John Walters cross -examining you, which was it all worth

that? Yeah. But they felt bad for you because you weren't trying to make money

for yourself or anything. You were just trying to show a movie that your

audience was dying to see.

But I'm playing prosecutor now. Could you have rented it legally?

No. You couldn't have gotten the film to show at the Scholar legally through

proper choices.

So you had to go to Pirates.

So you almost went to jail for movies. I did go to jail for movies. I got busted

making Mondo Trash and they took us to prison. Well, not prison, jail.

And then we had a trial and everything and we got off. But we were charged with

conspiracy to commit indecent... I like it when he talks about indecent exposure

and he covers up his ankle.

That's a good thing to have on your resume, I think.

If you were to pause this, you could see our animator, Rosamund Parker. Oh, you

can see Julian Petley. You can see all sorts of names. Susie and the Banshees.

Severin.

Mute Records, Compendium.

So what are we looking at here? All these people, all these companies

the day of the programme.

And this is the last day of the Scala, the closing night party. That's Linda

Carruthers -Watt. She used to work in BFI Exhibition.

Helen DeWitt with her back to the camera talking to me.

You can see Janet Gerard. You can see Paul Taylor

from the BFI.

And that future is with us, and we are benefiting from it now.

We did contact quite a few of these people who aren't in the film, just to

highlight that.

And they were all very busy making much more important films.

So, yeah, we call this section... There's Karen Alexander. We call this

The Ghost.

And that's Mary... From Stereolab. From Stereolab, yeah. She was an usher at

this gala.

Mary Hansen.

Who sadly passed away in a bicycle accident.

This is real behind -the -scenes footage. This is right up going towards

out to the roof of this gala.

Seamlessly blended into archive footage.

That's Lizzie Franke, Kim Newman, Stephen Barber, my ex -boyfriend.

There's Alex Fenner on the roof.

Dick Fiddy. Dick Fiddy, Kim.

Louis Benassi and Maya Payne. I don't know who he is.

That's Stuart Burley, my husband.

Alex Dawson.

Tony Cooper.

Great graphic designer who worked with Neville Brody.

Sadly, took his own life, been off for the Scarlet Close.

There's about five suicides in this film, I'd say, whether we...

flag them up or not.

Including one in the film role in the credit, a family friend of mine called

Paul.

I'll talk about when it comes.

That's the roof of the Scala now.

It's a cathedral -like space in the centre of London. And this is the

member of Cabaret Voltaire, Chris Watson, who went on to be a sound

for David Attenborough on the Life on Earth series.

We enticed him down from Newcastle to play contact mics all around the

And he recorded the secret sounds of the Scala, which are embedded into the

soundtrack of the film that you've been watching and listening to. It's kind of

suboptimal level by sound design, Nicky Ruck and Martin Pavey.

I love this sequence. It's my favourite sequence in the entire film, this whole

kind of five minutes after King Kong dies.

There's a real kind of sort of stone tape hauntology kind of vibe going on

It's essentially the history in essence of the Scala embedded in the walls.

For these purposes, I think this was really the only place we could have put

this in the film, really.

I love looking at the equipment that he's recording himself on. He also

Jar Wobble, Caroline Capps, the same day.

And the apex of that is within this dark, mysterious place called the

void.

It reminded me of Eraserhead, some of Alan's letter.

Fantastic sound work.

There's the rumble of the train.

The same noise that begins the film, that very telltale rumble. This is a

moment of somebody looking directly into camera.

in our film, mostly at the time. Yeah, you're not supposed to do that, breaking

the fourth wall and everything, but it was great.

Very dear friends that I spent many great times at the Scala with, you know,

sadly didn't make it. So, yeah, there are ghosts here for me.

I came here to see a film, The Man with the Golden Arm, and right from the

opening credit...

I was completely hooked and I was very much attached to the story because of my

own wayward life by that stage.

And I'd already sort of had a grounding, if you like, in terms of... Barry's

autobiography came out a couple of years ago and it's a really fascinating, a

very candid read that we both read at the time of doing the editing.

He talks about his history of drug use in parallel with his

own career.

It was

like a kind of fertilising ground

for the youth of London who were artistic in some way and who wanted...

to make a living in the arts, you know, and who were just feeding off all this

stuff that was in there and off each other.

You know, and I can't think of any other cinema that did that.

I loved going to rep cinemas, and out of all of them, the Scala was top.

It was something protean, Catholic, multicultural in

the broadest sense, not just in the ethnic sense, about the Scala.

Losing the Scala was... Seriously, a blow.

It's been part of my history for so many years now. You know, when I came here

as a young man 40 years ago, it became us, and we became it.

It was part of everybody being able to... I mean, this film is about love to

some degree, and I'm really confused with Melancholia around this time.

I find it very moving.

I think when we were filming this, this was the bit when you burst into tears,

wasn't it? I did, I did, yeah. When I came to the Scala.

And the content of the films or the staff that were working there helped

Well, I'm with Vic, you know, she's a, you know, living, breathing goddess to

me, you know, she's not a building.

To be, to struggle with my own gender and my own gender identity.

Because it was never questioned.

Whatever I was, or whatever clothes I turned up in, or whatever mood I was in,

it was okay. So it became a holding place.

And I think for a lot of queers and a lot of weirdos generally, this cinema

somewhere to go where we were with our own people.

This is our hero shot by Alan Delaney, the photographer, whose work you saw

earlier. That was Alex Fenner sitting in the box office.

And there's a broken light box.

I absolutely love this shot of the Scala cinema from 1989.

That's from The Green Door. That's Scala Day, isn't it?

Wonderful.

Eyeball peeping. Another mirroring shot there.

Behind The Green Door.

You can hear the piano tinkling and you want to get in, and in The Scala you

could get in. You could get behind The Green Door and you could spend an

night. This is how you get an audience to applaud before the film's over.

is that you set up a kind of series of fake endings.

Yeah, lots of false endings.

I wanted to sort of credit Skalarama for keeping the flame alive. There's

the Skalarama programme, also designed by Tricia at 2D.

And this was the blue plaque ceremony leading up to the blue plaque ceremony

that we had in 2022.

to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the

famous gig by there

we go Iggy Pop and Lou Reed and

Mick Rock's photograph of both gigs perform the album covers for

Transformer on the left and Raw Power on the right

that we grew up with as teenagers and not knowing that they were shot in the

Scala.

Then and now.

There's Resurrection Joe.

He's dressed us like that for fun.

He's a grandfather.

Yeah, you get school children regularly running away in terror from that.

Oh, there we go.

So we have this very, very long, we have like a six or seven minute long credit

sequence at the end, which we insist that audiences sit through.

And they do, to be fair, they do. Yeah. Give them credit.

Partly the reason why the credits are so long is that lots of people worked on

the film, obviously.

There's our producers, Tara, Jim and Alan from Channel X.

We interviewed 50 people for the film. That's most of them.

More interviewees, sort of.

I love that shot.

Camera people, Sarah, and overseas people that we work with.

So our producer, Andy, edited the film as well.

Koyana's got these shots, my favourite shot of this season.

These are beautiful, aren't they?

Yeah, it was such a lovely day.

Yeah. Imagine if it had rained.

Helpers.

Sound people.

The colourist. Yeah, he really changed the look of the film.

Those are the people that run this gala now and the other locations that we shot

in.

Our funders.

stock societies, Channel X, legal people, and people that advised on the

fair dealing.

Here we go. That took a lot of writing.

A lot of spreadsheeting, specifically.

Yeah, so we wanted to... Scala showed 4 ,000 films in its history, and we wanted

to put in many more clips than we had time to do in the body of the film

So this guy here to the right of 3PO is my family friend Paul Oliver, who is in

everything. Once you see his face, you'll see him in everything. He's in

American World, he's in London, he's in, oh God, he's in everything.

So this is a way of honouring him there as well.

Yeah, look. people helped us.

That's just some of them.

And that's the In Memoriam, you can see the names of our lost friends, including

Mrs Reeve.

well these are all the names of the uh not all of the names the kickstarters

many of them these are the people that paid i think over 25 or 50 quid or

whatever it was um the ones in pink are the people that are in the top 10 of

their categories that they came in on my family is in this list who only

discovered two years ago my biological family and then my father insisted um i

only met them when i was 51.

so it's quite surreal to see their names in this list And obviously the credits

are A to Z by first name in order to break up those family groups. There's

Wee's Big Adventure.

And here are the additional materials credits of where we took the film clips

from.

And the reason Witchfinder and Wicker Man are at the end there is because

officially those are the last two films that the Scala showed.

And there's Miss McGillivray one last time exploring the lockdown Scala that

took the occasion to do a bit of building work. There's a toilet on the

there. Yeah, there's a toilet on the stage.

My goodness, why is there a toilet on stage?

I suppose there's a reason.

Shall we go down and have a look?

And that's our copyright card, the Scala membership card.

They always had cancelled on them.