Latest / MUBI Podcast / London's Scala Cinema becomes "A country club for lunatics" (feat. Mary Harron and Peter Strickland)
Transcript
- 0:03Heads up, this episode contains adult language descriptions of sex and violence.
- 0:08And best of all, I don't think there are any spoilers this time.
- 0:15In 1981, a teenager named Jane Giles was living and working a night job in a small city an hour south of London.
- 0:23Called Crawley, which is about as glamorous as it sounds.
- 0:27It's right by Gatwick Airport, and I got a job at night cleaning airplanes.
- 0:34It was when you could still smoke on the airplanes.
- 0:36So one of my jobs was like scraping nicotine out of the air vents at the back of the airplane.
- 0:43And, you know, wherever this stuff would end up.
- 0:46The gig was a far cry from her dream, which was to go to art school.
- 0:49But it did give her a superpower.
- 0:51Yeah, I was part of the night time economy as a night cleaner and found it quite easy to stay up all night.
- 0:59So what happened next makes sense.
- 1:03Jane's boyfriend, who was a musician, by the way.
- 1:05He was the lead guitarist in a band called the Split Beavers.
- 1:09Seriously...
- 1:10He asked if Jane wanted to join the band on a train trip up to London's King's Cross neighborhood, to attend an all night horror movie marathon.
- 1:19My parents were quite conservative, so I don't know why they thought it was a good idea to let me go to an all-nighter King's Cross which was known for vice, drugs, prostitution, with the split beavers.
- 1:32I guess that they thought that actually you couldn't get up so much harm in a cinema.
- 1:39Of course, upon arrival, it's what was outside the cinema that seemed worrisome.
- 1:43I arrived in King's Cross at,
- 1:46I don't know, kind of 10: 00 at night.
- 1:48I don't know, kind of 10: King's Cross was like the Wild West then.
- 1:51I don't know, kind of 10: It was all sorts of like mad, sad, and desperate people swarming around late at night.
- 1:57I don't know, kind of 10: But I looked up at the cinema, and to me, it looked like, you know, at the beginning of the...
- 2:04I don't know, kind of 10: Disney films, you see this sort of, you know, kind of Disney palace with little twinkle above it.
- 2:11I don't know, kind of 10: Sleeping Beauty's castle?
- 2:12I don't know, kind of 10: Yes, it looked like Sleeping Beauty's castle to me.
- 2:17I don't know, kind of 10: The theater was called The Scala.
- 2:20I don't know, kind of 10: And yeah, if you squinted, the 1920 era building could look like a castle by way of Jules Verne, with a tall kind of turret facade and two rows of big round porthole windows.
- 2:30I don't know, kind of 10: And inside...
- 2:32I don't know, kind of 10: There were also like, there were chandeliers.
- 2:34I don't know, kind of 10: The lights in the auditorium on the ceiling, which was very high barreled, was sort of they looked like goat's eyes, you know, like the devil's eyes.
- 2:42I don't know, kind of 10: But they looked good.
- 2:44I don't know, kind of 10: And the floor, the stairs of which there were many, were marble mosaic.
- 2:50I don't know, kind of 10: I'd never seen anything like this before, and I was so impressed by it.
- 2:55I don't know, kind of 10: Despite the strange damp smells and the sticky theater floor and the occasional deep rumble as tube trains roared by beneath the building.
- 3:04I don't know, kind of 10: Despite a lot of stuff.
- 3:06I don't know, kind of 10: People say the Scala was very uncomfortable, I think, because they probably weren't used to kind of like sitting in a cinema, like wooden cinema chair, all night.
- 3:14I don't know, kind of 10: But I was used to crawling around on my hands and knees and cleaning airplanes, so I thought it was fine.
- 3:20I don't know, kind of 10: Plus, during intermission, they played this amazing tune by a band Jane had never heard of called Joy Division.
- 3:26I don't know, kind of 10: And so hearing, like, sitting at 2:00 in the morning in this beautiful auditorium, out all night, 17 years old, listening to Love Will Tear Us Apart was fantastic, actually.
- 3:42I don't know, kind of 10: So, yeah, it didn't last with the Split Beaver, but the guys introduced me to a really amazing cinema experience.
- 3:49I don't know, kind of 10: And I couldn't get into art school.
- 3:51I don't know, kind of 10: Wasn't good enough to get into art school, but at that time it was really easy get into film school.
- 3:58I don't know, kind of 10: You find lots of Scala regulars with this kind of story, people who stumbled in from gray Thatcher era England and discovered a cool ass Technicolor world of movies and music.
- 4:07I don't know, kind of 10: Jane Giles went on to program films at The Scala.
- 4:10I don't know, kind of 10: Others became some of the most important film-makers, in the world.
- 4:26I don't know, kind of 10: I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI podcast.
- 4:29I don't know, kind of 10: MUBI is the best way outside a theater to see beautiful, hand-picked cinema.
- 4:33I don't know, kind of 10: On this show, we tell you the stories behind beautiful cinemas.
- 4:36I don't know, kind of 10: This is season two.
- 4:38I don't know, kind of 10: We're calling it only in theaters.
- 4:40I don't know, kind of 10: Every week we tell you the story of a single cinema that made history and the Scala did that, one mind bending all nighter at a time.
- 4:47I don't know, kind of 10: You know, two or three in the morning, you'd fall asleep for a while and then you'd wake up and there'd be something on screen and you wouldn't know what was your dream and what was on screen.
- 4:56I don't know, kind of 10: That's Mary Harron, director of indie classics like American Psycho, and she's one of many Scala devotees and insiders I talked to about the beautiful, seedy, and finally poignant history of maybe the punkest movie theater ever.
- 5:10I don't know, kind of 10: So ticket, please...
- 5:12I don't know, kind of 10: enjoy the show.
- 5:17I don't know, kind of 10: The Scala Cinema began as sort of the physical projection into the world of the mind and experiences of one guy.
- 5:24I don't know, kind of 10: His name was Stephen Woolley.
- 5:27I don't know, kind of 10: How would you how would you describe Stephen?
- 5:28I don't know, kind of 10: I mean, Stephen is, I think, in the very, very best sense of the word, I hope he wouldn't take offense, at this I mean, Stephen's a hustler, you know, Stephen always has something going on.
- 5:39I don't know, kind of 10: Danny Leigh is the chief film critic of the Financial Times in London.
- 5:43I don't know, kind of 10: And Stephen's, you know, whenever I run into him, is always excited.
- 5:47I don't know, kind of 10: You know, he always has something.
- 5:48I don't know, kind of 10: And it's often, you know, it might be a film, it might be a book, you know, might be a song he's heard.
- 5:51I don't know, kind of 10: I mean, Stephen's always into something, and this is knowing Stephen much later in life.
- 5:56I don't know, kind of 10: So, you know, I imagine that the young Stephen Woolley in the early eighties, I mean, that Stephen would have been like this just complete ball of energy.
- 6:03I don't know, kind of 10: I mean, that would have been just the kinetic, you know, waves which would have come off him would have been extraordinary.
- 6:09I don't know, kind of 10: My name is Stephen Woolley.
- 6:09I don't know, kind of 10: I'm a producer, filmmaker, I've also occasionally directed and I originated the Scala in 1979.
- 6:18I don't know, kind of 10: I know it doesn't sound like a ball of energy right off the bat.
- 6:20I don't know, kind of 10: Just give him a minute.
- 6:22I don't know, kind of 10: But Stephen, well, his childhood definitely wasn't action packed.
- 6:26I don't know, kind of 10: I came from a family, I like to say are working class, but probably bordering on criminal class, I often think.
- 6:32I don't know, kind of 10: We didn't have a lot of money.
- 6:34I don't know, kind of 10: There were five of us sleeping in one room and I think my escape was through literature.
- 6:39I don't know, kind of 10: I used to sit in the corner of the room on the floor with a book and people would come and stare at me because it would be unusual to see this child with his head in the book all day.
- 6:49I don't know, kind of 10: Until one day when he deigned to tilt his head up to watch a movie adaptation of a book being shown on TV.
- 6:56I don't know, kind of 10: Director David Lean's take on Dickens' Great Expectations.
- 7:00I don't know, kind of 10: Come nearer.Let me look at you. That was a big turning point for me, this kind of visualization of the word, Miss Havisham, for instance, and the introduction of Pip into the household.
- 7:14I don't know, kind of 10: Look at me.You're not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sunsince you were born?No. And it's the mist on the moors and the beautiful depiction of Magwitch.
- 7:27I don't know, kind of 10: These were things that I could only imagine in my head.
- 7:30I don't know, kind of 10: And I suddenly had these images which were sensational.
- 7:34I don't know, kind of 10: Plus, it didn't hurt that Lean had brought to life a story that meant a lot to Stephen.
- 7:38I don't know, kind of 10: I always saw the story of Pip and Great Expectations as something that somehow I felt I was landed in the wrong place, that I was also like Pip expecting something.
- 7:50I don't know, kind of 10: I had expectations of... of this world bursting at the seams and that another world would open up to me.
- 7:58I don't know, kind of 10: And eventually it did.
- 8:00I don't know, kind of 10: Out of movie screens and out of the pages of a periodical.
- 8:05I don't know, kind of 10: There was a magazine called Time Out magazine, which was an essential magazine for anyone who liked movies. That was published around 1969-1970.
- 8:13I don't know, kind of 10: So I would have been 14 at that time.
- 8:16I don't know, kind of 10: I used to collect Time Out every week and they had a big, fat section on cinema.
- 8:20I don't know, kind of 10: And Time Out sort of became my Bible.
- 8:23I don't know, kind of 10: And I would read about Andy Warhol movies and I would travel to see them across London.
- 8:28I don't know, kind of 10: Not just to see Warhol flicks, but every single movie in the magazine, starting with a crash course in serious cinema.
- 8:36I don't know, kind of 10: What Danny Leigh remembers was a serious place.
- 8:39I don't know, kind of 10: The cinema scene outside of the mainstream chains would have been dominated by the National Film Theater, which is what is now called BFI Southbank, and then, as now, was run by the British Film Institute.
- 8:51I don't know, kind of 10: And I think at that point the National Film Theater had this very kind of canonical mission, you know, they programmed Bergman and then they'd programme Bresson.
- 9:00I don't know, kind of 10: It was this very rigorous and unchanging approach to cinema as high art.
- 9:06I don't know, kind of 10: Yeah, it was like the NFT as it was known then.
- 9:09I don't know, kind of 10: It was daunting.
- 9:11I don't know, kind of 10: I remember once going with a friend to see a Buñuel film and they were laughing and someone told them to be quiet.
- 9:18I don't know, kind of 10: And I thought, well if you can't laugh in a Buñuel film, well, why are you here?
- 9:21I don't know, kind of 10: It was a very oppressive atmosphere.
- 9:24I don't know, kind of 10: Luckily in the mid-seventies, there were more spots for Stephen to choose from.
- 9:27I don't know, kind of 10: You then had a whole Smörgåsbord of kind of smaller rep cinemas, some of which were playing kind of music films a lot of the time, and kind of doubling up as gig venues, some of which were towards the horror scene.
- 9:39I don't know, kind of 10: But it was very fractured.
- 9:40I don't know, kind of 10: Yeah, each of these joints had their own little niche.
- 9:43I don't know, kind of 10: London filmmakers co-op specialized in avant-garde and experimental film.
- 9:47I don't know, kind of 10: The Electric Cinema played Sam Fuller style auteur noirs.
- 9:50I don't know, kind of 10: The Classic in Notting Hill was known for its horror marathons.
- 9:53I don't know, kind of 10: When I was 17, I would go to these all night shows that would take place in Notting Hill.
- 9:58I don't know, kind of 10: So I would supplement this kind of odd diet, of seeing art-house movies with horror movies like The Hammer movies.
- 10:05I don't know, kind of 10: And after a few years racing around London, checking off films in Time Out the germ of an idea started to form in Stephen Woolley's head.
- 10:13I don't know, kind of 10: Wouldn't it be cool if one place showed it all?
- 10:20I don't know, kind of 10: You can probably guess where this is going, but we got to make a pit stop for one more pivotal moment in this guy's life.
- 10:26I don't know, kind of 10: August 29th, 1976.
- 10:30I don't know, kind of 10: That night, Stephen was working as an usher at his favorite theater known for hip, sometimes outrageous double features.
- 10:35I don't know, kind of 10: It was called the Screen on the Green.
- 10:37I don't know, kind of 10: His first cinema job.
- 10:39I don't know, kind of 10: And within a few months of actually working at The Screen on the Green when I was 19, a band called the Sex Pistols played there, supported by the Buzzcocks and The Clash.
- 10:50I don't know, kind of 10: Now, those three bands were unknown bands.
- 10:52I don't know, kind of 10: Buzzcocks had never played London before, and The Clash and the Sex Pistols, maybe half a dozen gigs.
- 10:58I don't know, kind of 10: So this whole punk thing suddenly arrived at my cinema.
- 11:02I don't know, kind of 10: First up, a screening of The T.A.M.I. Show a cool rock and R&B concert film from 64, and then...
- 11:11I don't know, kind of 10: Came the live music.
- 11:12I don't know, kind of 10: They made a makeshift stage, a tiny stage at Screen on the Green.
- 11:15I don't know, kind of 10: It was very, very small.
- 11:17I don't know, kind of 10: I mean these bands kind of came on stage...
- 11:19I don't know, kind of 10: Lights please! And I have to admit by then I was a bit of a snobby jazz fan.
- 11:28I don't know, kind of 10: And suddenly everything went wrong.
- 11:31I don't know, kind of 10: I just thought, this is it.
- 11:33I don't know, kind of 10: This scene, this music is everything.
- 11:43I don't know, kind of 10: Johnny Rotten's instantly hypnotic.
- 11:45I don't know, kind of 10: It was a sort of, oh, my God, he really doesn't care.
- 11:48I don't know, kind of 10: I'd never seen anything like it before in my life.
- 11:50I don't know, kind of 10: They really didn't care about the audience.
- 11:51I don't know, kind of 10: They really didn't care about themselves.
- 11:53I don't know, kind of 10: And it was absolutely addictive.
- 11:57I don't know, kind of 10: So you got Woolley's broad taste in every kind of movie, from total art to total trash and this new wave of music, musicians and their fans who did not care what you or say the shushing squares of the NFT thought of them.
- 12:12I don't know, kind of 10: It seemed clear it could all go together, and he spent the next few years figuring out how.
- 12:20I don't know, kind of 10: First, Woolley took a gig at a place called the Other Cinema in London's Tottenham Street.
- 12:25I don't know, kind of 10: The place was known for running great but super serious left wing political movies and for not making much money.
- 12:31I don't know, kind of 10: So I started helping out on the programming side, and I was putting films on like Jimi Hendrix the Movie.
- 12:36I don't know, kind of 10: And they were packed because everybody that was a member of the Other Cinema was basically an old hippie.
- 12:41I don't know, kind of 10: So there's nothing they wanted better than to see Janis Joplin or to discover new music, like The Rock and Roll Swindle, which I put on in these first early form.
- 12:49I don't know, kind of 10: That would be, yes, the Sex Pistols movie.
- 12:51I don't know, kind of 10: And soon, yes, Woolley brought in live punk and new wave acts.
- 12:55I don't know, kind of 10: The Slits, Sham 69, Squeeze.
- 12:58I don't know, kind of 10: The pioneering queer rocker Tom Robinson.
- 13:00I don't know, kind of 10: And Aswad were a reggae band.
- 13:03I don't know, kind of 10: I would program movies around them.
- 13:05I don't know, kind of 10: Then we had discussions about music in the club room, which was huge and was packed full of people. It was great.
- 13:11I don't know, kind of 10: And suddenly they were seeing all these people coming into cinema and realizing alternative programming wasn't so bad.
- 13:18I don't know, kind of 10: Eventually, Woolley and a crew of folks at the Other Cinema re-branded themselves in the same location.
- 13:24I don't know, kind of 10: Taking the name of an old theater that once stood at the same address, The Scala.
- 13:29I don't know, kind of 10: Woolley kept the political films and slowly sprinkled in more noirs, more camp and horror, more experimental films, more concert films until it all felt totally punk, or by that point, post-punk and totally not the NFT.
- 13:43I don't know, kind of 10: No, no snobbery.
- 13:45I don't know, kind of 10: Just this is... we're going to show everything and we're going to have events, animation days, and we're going to have all-nighters.
- 13:52I don't know, kind of 10: We're going to have performers.
- 13:52I don't know, kind of 10: We're going to have...
- 13:53I don't know, kind of 10: You get to be I mean I guess the feeling that that engender's in the audience is that it's like I am everything.
- 13:59I don't know, kind of 10: Yes, I am an intellectual and a child that gets to watch cartoons.
- 14:03I don't know, kind of 10: And I get to be a punk that is just kicking against the pricks.
- 14:07I don't know, kind of 10: Exactly.
- 14:08I don't know, kind of 10: And one day in 1981, just as London school kids were really getting into it, the Scala's Tottenham Street building...
- 14:16I don't know, kind of 10: It was sold to Channel Four, which was a new venture that time.
- 14:21I don't know, kind of 10: And from that sale they kindly paid me a lump sum, which I used all of in order to move the cinema from Tottenham Street and this lovely plush cinema to this place in the King's Cross of London.
- 14:36I don't know, kind of 10: Which is where the Scala legend really took hold.
- 14:39I don't know, kind of 10: A 1920 era theater in a building with a tall castle like turret facade, two rows of big round porthole windows and a perfectly gonzo recent history.
- 14:49I don't know, kind of 10: It had for the last year or so been something called the Primatarium.
- 14:54I don't know, kind of 10: It was set up by a guy called Cyril Rosen, and he was actually a dentist.
- 14:59I don't know, kind of 10: You remember Jane Giles from the top of this episode?
- 15:01I don't know, kind of 10: She literally wrote the book on The Scala and she's co-directing a doc about it.
- 15:05I don't know, kind of 10: That'll be out next year.
- 15:06I don't know, kind of 10: Anyway, so Cyril Rosen was also a huge fan of primates, he had a little monkey.
- 15:11I don't know, kind of 10: It had its own credit card, had its own American Express card, which was in the name of Mr. S Monk.
- 15:19I don't know, kind of 10: All of a sudden, American Express doesn't seem quite so exclusive, just like some random dude's monkey could have it.
- 15:25I don't know, kind of 10: Well, you know, and Cyril was determined to make people care more about conservation and the threat to species.
- 15:35I don't know, kind of 10: So he knew that the...
- 15:36I don't know, kind of 10: the best way of doing this was through setting up an experience.
- 15:39I don't know, kind of 10: They'd taken all the seats out and they'd covered it with false grass.
- 15:44I don't know, kind of 10: And audiences were asked to come sit on the grass and listen to this voice over, with seventeen slide projections showing you the history of man, from monkey to man.
- 15:53I don't know, kind of 10: It was crazy. It was completely bonkers.
- 15:55I don't know, kind of 10: It was all decked out like a forest, a rain forest.
- 15:58I don't know, kind of 10: There was a waterfall running through the middle of the building, a 40 foot waterfall.
- 16:03I don't know, kind of 10: And it was an abject failure.
- 16:03I don't know, kind of 10: Nobody came.
- 16:06I don't know, kind of 10: So in 1981, the Scala moved in, cleaned up the place a bit.
- 16:10I don't know, kind of 10: Although patrons would later insist the leftover mildew smell from the waterfall was actually monkey urine.
- 16:16I don't know, kind of 10: And the first film they screened...
- 16:24I don't know, kind of 10: King Kong, of course.
- 16:27I don't know, kind of 10: And Danny Leigh says in this new space, the Scala soon became the 800 pound gorilla of England's repertory theater scene.
- 16:36I don't know, kind of 10: The whole thing was just kind of exploding.
- 16:38I don't know, kind of 10: You get people coming from all across London to the King's Cross Scala.
- 16:42I don't know, kind of 10: And in fact, maybe, possibly it doesn't hurt that it's by a kind of major railway hub.
- 16:47I don't know, kind of 10: People start coming from across the country as well.
- 16:48I don't know, kind of 10: I mean, the Scala, I think starts to get quite a national reputation quite quickly.
- 16:52I don't know, kind of 10: But how'd the whole country hear about the Scala in the first place?
- 16:56I don't know, kind of 10: Back then there was no internet, but there was the UK music press.
- 17:02I don't know, kind of 10: When I became aware of the Scala in the eighties, it was also because I was heavily into music like a lot of teenage boys would have been at that point.
- 17:09I don't know, kind of 10: I read The NME, the Scala was often mentioned.
- 17:13I don't know, kind of 10: There was a big, porous cultural overlap between film of all stripes and the energy of music as well.
- 17:21I don't know, kind of 10: And that was all tied up with the new Scala, you know, the King's Cross Scala, the fabled Scala.
- 17:30I don't know, kind of 10: You know, the Scala was a very rock and roll kind of venue, I think.
- 17:34I don't know, kind of 10: Mary Harron would know.
- 17:35I don't know, kind of 10: In the early eighties she wasn't making movies yet.
- 17:38I don't know, kind of 10: She was living in London writing for the music mag Melody Maker.
- 17:41I don't know, kind of 10: In fact the first time I went to the Scala that everyone knows, which is the big old movie palace in Kings Cross, was to see a Factory Records night, that was a kind of all nighter.
- 17:52I don't know, kind of 10: Where they had a lot of bands from Factory and they, the bands were playing and then suddenly they showed a Russ Meyer movie, which I'd never seen as well.
- 17:59I don't know, kind of 10: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Kill!You're trying to say something?I never try anything.I just do it.
- 18:04I don't know, kind of 10: Like I don't beat clocks.Just people. Want to try me? So they would show things that seemed kind of like porn or but were kind of like auteur, you know, auteur trash, in the case of Russ Meyer.
- 18:18I don't know, kind of 10: And one of the things that would happen at the all nighters is that you'd fall asleep two or three in the morning, you'd fall asleep for a while, and then you'd wake up from some dream, and then there'd be something on screen and you wouldn't know what was your dream and what was on screen.
- 18:31I don't know, kind of 10: I imagine, if it's somebody who has never seen a Russ Meyer film, just waking from a dream, and then suddenly it's just a screen full of breasts.
- 18:39I don't know, kind of 10: Yes, exactly.
- 18:40I don't know, kind of 10: It was, it was fun because it was like a new thing.
- 18:44I don't know, kind of 10: And that was the first time I'd seen a combination of film and music in that way in a movie theater.
- 18:51I don't know, kind of 10: And it turned out to be catnip for aspiring musicians and filmmakers alike.
- 18:56I don't know, kind of 10: The auditorium was full of musicians or young people who would go on to become musicians like the Jesus Mary Chain, great bands.
- 19:04I don't know, kind of 10: They were like sitting all lined up, wearing their dark glasses in the auditorium, watching whatever it was they were watching, but also film-makers.
- 19:13I don't know, kind of 10: And at that point, they were students.
- 19:15I don't know, kind of 10: Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Martin McDonagh.
- 19:18I don't know, kind of 10: Add to this the LGBTQ+ crowd, some of whom wandered in from the gay bar down the street, drawn by that campy auteur of trash.
- 19:25I don't know, kind of 10: And for the generous helping of queer movies Woolley held over from the days of the Other Cinema.
- 19:30I don't know, kind of 10: And then there were just nerds.
- 19:33I don't know, kind of 10: like Danny Leigh, and had I been there, me.
- 19:36I don't know, kind of 10: I was 14, going on 15, and I went to the Scala for the first time.
- 19:41I don't know, kind of 10: This won't do my cinephile credentials much good, but I went to see Steve Martin's The Man with Two Brains.
- 19:48I don't know, kind of 10: Oh, that's a great film.
- 19:49I don't know, kind of 10: It is a great film. Right.
- 19:49I don't know, kind of 10: Thank you for saying that.
- 19:51I don't know, kind of 10: But you know, it's not Tarkovsky.
- 19:55I don't know, kind of 10: You know, that was the atmosphere of the Scala is a kind of melting pot of people who loved movies for totally different reasons.
- 20:03I don't know, kind of 10: These audiences were all separate from different universes, but the combination of all of them into one program was something exciting that made people sit up.
- 20:13I don't know, kind of 10: The cinema was exciting again.
- 20:15I don't know, kind of 10: Trash auteur John Waters visited and pronounced the place, quote,"A country club for lunatics." And as if all that wasn't enough, the Scala was about to become even hipper, with a little help from the government.
- 20:28I don't know, kind of 10: The moral panic that kicked everything up a notch.
- 20:31I don't know, kind of 10: Coming up in just a minute.
- 20:32I don't know, kind of 10: Stay with us.
- 20:41I don't know, kind of 10: MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe, all of them handpicked by real people who really know movies.
- 20:49I don't know, kind of 10: And with a new film debuting on the platform every single day, there's always something new to discover.
- 20:55I don't know, kind of 10: So as you may have noticed on this season of the podcast, we are talking about history making experiences that were only possible in movie theaters.
- 21:03I don't know, kind of 10: Hopefully it inspires you to love and support your local cinema that much more.
- 21:07I don't know, kind of 10: And we've got a new thing going that can help you do exactly that.
- 21:11I don't know, kind of 10: It's called MUBI Go.
- 21:13I don't know, kind of 10: And when you sign up, you get a free movie ticket every week to see a hand-selected film in theaters.
- 21:19I don't know, kind of 10: Previous picks include award winning films like Drive My Car, The Lost Daughter, Cha-Cha Real Smooth and the Power of the Dog.
- 21:25I don't know, kind of 10: MUBI Go is now available in the UK, New York and Los Angeles, and it is coming to more U.S. cities soon.
- 21:32I don't know, kind of 10: To learn more, check out MUBI.com/go And finally, after you finish listening to me, you can stream some of the films that we have featured on this podcast.
- 21:42I don't know, kind of 10: All you got to do is subscribe to MUBI at MUBI.com and look for the collection called Featured on the MUBI Podcast, that's on the Now Showing page.
- 21:49I don't know, kind of 10: As always, you can find all the links you need in the show notes of this episode.
- 21:54I don't know, kind of 10: Speaking of which, let's get back to it.
- 22:01I don't know, kind of 10: All right, so it's the early 1980s.
- 22:03I don't know, kind of 10: The Scala cinema in Kings Cross is bringing in crowds from around the country and right in the middle of this, Stephen Woolley does something odd.
- 22:13I don't know, kind of 10: He and a business partner start releasing movies on video.
- 22:17I don't know, kind of 10: Some of the best movies on television aren't on television.They're on SelectaVision.A four hour video cassette recorder from RCA. Now, this was just as VHS cassette players were becoming affordable.
- 22:28I don't know, kind of 10: And most people running cinemas worried home video was going to kill their business.
- 22:32I don't know, kind of 10: With SelectaVision, you can go to the movies at your house! But not Stephen.
- 22:37I don't know, kind of 10: - Because interestingly...
- 22:37I don't know, kind of 10: - I wasn't running a cinema.
- 22:39I don't know, kind of 10: I was running the Scala, which was not really a cinema because it was such a complete bonkers mix of events and films and things that were obscure and not possibly completely legal in some cases.
- 22:54I don't know, kind of 10: So to have a video label that was showing things like Lenny Bruce, which was not available theatrically at that time, the early Lenny Bruce documentary was complementary to the kind of films that we showed at the Scala rather than in opposition.
- 23:08I don't know, kind of 10: The label was called Palace Video.
- 23:10I don't know, kind of 10: And small problem, its first few releases tanked.
- 23:14I don't know, kind of 10: But then at an L.A. film festival, Stephen got a glimpse of a horror movie by a newbie filmmaker named Sam Raimi.
- 23:21I don't know, kind of 10: Called The Evil Dead.
- 23:23I don't know, kind of 10: I fear that the only way to stop those possessedby the spirits of the book is through the act of bodily dismemberment. I saw it by mistake.
- 23:34I don't know, kind of 10: I just went into the last 15 minutes of this movie and saw the last shot.
- 23:37I don't know, kind of 10: Thought, what on earth was that?
- 23:39I don't know, kind of 10: And then I immediately went see the whole film again.
- 23:41I don't know, kind of 10: Palace put it out on video and simultaneously screened it at the Scala.
- 23:45I don't know, kind of 10: And it was an incredible success for us.
- 23:49I don't know, kind of 10: I mean, it was made for the Scala because it's funny, sophisticated.
- 23:53I don't know, kind of 10: It was edited by these editors called the Coen Brothers.
- 23:56I don't know, kind of 10: Nobody had ever heard of them.
- 23:58I don't know, kind of 10: It was made totally tongue in cheek by Sam Raimi.
- 24:01I don't know, kind of 10: It will scare the life out of you.
- 24:02I don't know, kind of 10: And it'll make you giggle and it's the perfect Scala cult movie.
- 24:09I don't know, kind of 10: All fine for cinemas, but for home video?
- 24:12I don't know, kind of 10: Powerful forces in government and media were aligning over the idea that gory horror films like this sophisticated or not, were less than perfect.
- 24:21I don't know, kind of 10: These are the cassettes Driller Killer and Death Trap,the first two of the so-called Video Nasties to be withdrawn from distribution. They came to be called the Video Nasties.
- 24:32I don't know, kind of 10: And the outcry over them was about to put the Scala smack in the middle of the cultural conversation.
- 24:37I don't know, kind of 10: So the Video Nasties were a list of 72 banned films.
- 24:42I don't know, kind of 10: They were banned in the UK in the early eighties.
- 24:45I don't know, kind of 10: Prano Bailey-Bond is a Welsh filmmaker.
- 24:47I don't know, kind of 10: Last year she put out an amazing horror flick called Censor.
- 24:50I don't know, kind of 10: Set in eighties London during this crackdown on horror videos, movies which often were allowed to be shown in theaters in some form but on cassette, were suddenly deemed a threat to society, including the Evil Dead.
- 25:03I don't know, kind of 10: Essentially, this happened off the back of the birth of VHS.
- 25:07I don't know, kind of 10: The fear really was that because these films were available on VHS, that they could actually go direct to the home and children could get their hands on these videos.
- 25:18I don't know, kind of 10: And there was quite a big moral panic around what these films were going to do to people.
- 25:24I don't know, kind of 10: In court, a solicitor for the Director of Public Prosecutionscalled the material an extravaganza of gory violence, capableof depraving and corrupting those who watched it. Fans, horror fans were having their houses raided.
- 25:38I don't know, kind of 10: They were having their video collections confiscated by the police.
- 25:42I don't know, kind of 10: They were having their VHS players confiscated by the police.
- 25:46I don't know, kind of 10: And then, of course, video stores were being raided as well.
- 25:50I don't know, kind of 10: I thought that one was banned.Um, I don't know what you mean? There's a scene in Censor where the hero tries to convince a video store owner to rent her a Video Nasty.
- 26:01I don't know, kind of 10: It plays out like a back alley drug deal.
- 26:03I don't know, kind of 10: Maybe you can help me.
- 26:03I don't know, kind of 10: I was looking for some of the more unusual...Frederick North films.I've seen, erm...Don't Go in the Church.Perhaps, maybe you will have something elseof his under the counter? I was inspired for that character by a real interview that I saw with a video shop owner who was being interviewed for the news.
- 26:29I don't know, kind of 10: And he looked so scared, he looked so sketchy, and he was clearly terrified of saying the wrong thing.
- 26:35I don't know, kind of 10: And he may or may not have had any dodgy Video Nasties in his shop, but you could kind of see the panic in his eyes.
- 26:43I don't know, kind of 10: In other words, movies suddenly felt legitimately dangerous.
- 26:47I don't know, kind of 10: And Danny Leigh thinks that for young people, especially, that made movies incredibly cool.
- 26:53I don't know, kind of 10: The sense that film had become criminalized in a way that, you know, punk rock maybe had been a few years before.
- 26:59I don't know, kind of 10: Film was now seen as a threat to the established order.
- 27:03I don't know, kind of 10: That was really exciting.
- 27:05I don't know, kind of 10: It felt like there was something weird and scary and edgy happening culturally, and it was happening in film and it was happening at the Scala.
- 27:15I don't know, kind of 10: The Scala was the absolute epicenter of that.
- 27:17I don't know, kind of 10: It's where you went for edgy film of all stripes, and now definitely for horror.
- 27:25I don't know, kind of 10: In fact, by then the Scala was being program by a horror fiend named JoAnne Sellar.
- 27:29I don't know, kind of 10: She made it her mission to show plenty of Video Nasties, and she did it by any means necessary.
- 27:35I don't know, kind of 10: Jane Giles remembers the subterfuge around a movie from director Abel Ferrara.
- 27:39I don't know, kind of 10: Scala wanted to put on Driller Killer.
- 27:41I don't know, kind of 10: Now Driller Killer was one of the so-called Video Nasties.
- 27:45I don't know, kind of 10: So Abel Ferrara had sent a print of Driller Killer, and it had been seized by customs because they'd just gone,"Oh, what's this Driller Killer?
- 27:52I don't know, kind of 10: Oh, that's not coming into the country?" The new guy in the office was quickly conscripted into service.
- 27:58I don't know, kind of 10: Mark Valen, who'd just started work at Scala.
- 28:01I don't know, kind of 10: Was sent to New York to pick up another print of Driller Killer, put it in his suitcase and come back next day.
- 28:09I don't know, kind of 10: He had an American passport, of he went, met Ferrara, who stuck a kind of false label on the film can.
- 28:17I don't know, kind of 10: Sometimes Mark says the label was"Mary Has a Little Lamb." Nothing sexier than watching a movie that's been literally smuggled into the country.
- 28:25I don't know, kind of 10: At one point, JoAnne Sellar grouped a bunch of Nasties into one Scala program and named it after Graham Bright, a Tory politician who once claimed horror films were bad for Britain's pets.
- 28:35I don't know, kind of 10: Research is taking place, and it will show that these filmsnot only affect young people,but I believe they affect dogs as well. Sellar called that marathon of Nasties"Sliver, Bright's Liver." And though Danny Leigh was no fan of Video Nasties, he says it's pretty clear the Scala was the perfect setting to watch them.
- 28:53I don't know, kind of 10: It felt, although it's actually on ground level, it felt subterranean.
- 28:56I don't know, kind of 10: It was just a vast space.
- 28:58I don't know, kind of 10: I mean, the back rows of the Scala, took me quite a while to venture into the back rows of the Scala, even when the place was empty because it was like you genuinely didn't quite know what you would find.
- 29:08I don't know, kind of 10: It was really dark back there, you know, and it had a kind of"here-be-monsters" vibe to it.
- 29:13I don't know, kind of 10: I mean, for me, it was it was all just beyond mind blowing.
- 29:22I don't know, kind of 10: Right, so now we're going up the steps into the magic heart of the cinema.
- 29:28I don't know, kind of 10: What would have been the auditorium, which was the auditorium.
- 29:32I don't know, kind of 10: Last fall in London, Jane Giles gave me a tour of what was once the Scala cinema.
- 29:37I don't know, kind of 10: It's now a nightclub also called Scala.
- 29:39I don't know, kind of 10: And in the light of day, the back of the auditorium doesn't seem so creepy.
- 29:43I don't know, kind of 10: Though I guess that's in the eye of the beholder.
- 29:45I don't know, kind of 10: I never heard of problems, extreme problems that happens to I mean, occasionally, like the young woman who was the usher would go round to sort of check on the audience and finds an orgy going on in the back row.
- 29:59I don't know, kind of 10: And she'd sort of like run away for protection and things like that, but that was about it.
- 30:03I don't know, kind of 10: Later, out in the lounge area, Jane points out the spot where what has to be the peak of the Scala's horror era took place.
- 30:10I don't know, kind of 10: Just in the corner of the room, over there you can see a small, slightly sinister looking door.
- 30:15I don't know, kind of 10: Yeah, it's like you're about three and a half feet tall.
- 30:18I don't know, kind of 10: Yeah, it's the door to the boiler room.
- 30:21I don't know, kind of 10: And one time we were doing a preview of a horror film called 976-EVIL, directed by Robert Englund, the guy that played Freddy Krueger.
- 30:30I don't know, kind of 10: Oh, yeah.
- 30:31I don't know, kind of 10: And it's characterized by having tarantulas in the film.
- 30:34I don't know, kind of 10: So the distribution company thought that they would bring tarantulas to the Scala, so they decided to store them overnight in the boiler cupboard because they know the creatures don't like to get too cold.
- 30:49I don't know, kind of 10: But what actually happened was nobody thought to tell the front of house manager.
- 30:54I don't know, kind of 10: So we went in there one December morning to turn on the boiler and was greeted with this tank of tarantulas who had been fighting overnight.
- 31:03I don't know, kind of 10: Because, I don't know, they've been too hot or too cold or something like that.
- 31:07I don't know, kind of 10: And they were just like dead tarantulas everywhere.
- 31:10I don't know, kind of 10: So that wasn't great.
- 31:12I don't know, kind of 10: But I thought you were going to tell me the tarantulas that boiled to death.
- 31:15I don't know, kind of 10: But they just killed each other.
- 31:16I don't know, kind of 10: They'd killed each other.
- 31:18I don't know, kind of 10: Yeah, unfortunately.
- 31:18I don't know, kind of 10: Don't tell the RSPCA.
- 31:21I don't know, kind of 10: That was 1988, the year Jane became the final programmer of the Scala.
- 31:26I don't know, kind of 10: And as scary as the boiler room incident was, it was nothing compared to the stuff she was about to deal with.
- 31:31I don't know, kind of 10: On my first day at the Scala back in 1988, I received a letter from British Rail who own the Scala building and land, that we might have to vacate the building because King's Cross was going to be subject to redevelopment.
- 31:49I don't know, kind of 10: So this was my first day at the Scala.
- 31:51I don't know, kind of 10: That threat would hang over her whole tenure at the theater, and it was just the beginning.
- 31:58I don't know, kind of 10: Where to?King's Cross. That's actor Bob Hoskins in a scene from the movie Mona Lisa, directed by Neil Jordan, produced by Stephen Woolley, and shot in a familiar location.
- 32:10I don't know, kind of 10: Mona Lisa was set around the Scala Cinema in the King's Cross area, and that was part and parcel of how it was born.
- 32:16I don't know, kind of 10: Was the Bob Hoskins character cruising around the back of the Scala.
- 32:20I don't know, kind of 10: From the character's car window.
- 32:21I don't know, kind of 10: We get glimpses of a definitely seedy world.
- 32:25I don't know, kind of 10: Laughing sex workers trolling for johns on a dark street strewn with trash.
- 32:30I don't know, kind of 10: - Down market, ain't it?
- 32:30I don't know, kind of 10: - Shut up. But this was shot in 86.
- 32:34I don't know, kind of 10: As the late eighties rolled into the nineties, King's Cross turned even darker.
- 32:39I don't know, kind of 10: Crack hit the streets and the scene was awful.
- 32:43I don't know, kind of 10: It had gone from a sort of relatively good natured, you know, kind of prostitutes on the streets to being really nasty, really unpleasant, you know, crack dealers fighting each other with knives, falling through the front doors of the cinema.
- 32:56I don't know, kind of 10: I remember going to the Scala for the last time, actually, and this has always stayed with me.
- 33:00I don't know, kind of 10: It was the triple bill of Anthony Perkins films, because he just died.
- 33:05I don't know, kind of 10: And I realized that like half the people who were there were you know, kind of homeless guys who'd come in off the street, you felt like the walls had become weirdly porous with like the outside of King's Cross.
- 33:18I don't know, kind of 10: It was like King's Cross had come into the cinema.
- 33:20I don't know, kind of 10: Obviously, that kept a lot of people away.
- 33:21I don't know, kind of 10: And Danny Leigh says so did something else.
- 33:24I don't know, kind of 10: The flip-side really of the Scala as this space, which kind of sometimes could feel like a kind of gig venue and a music space as well.
- 33:32I don't know, kind of 10: The negative of that is that actually when things like rave happened at the end of the eighties, you know, people start migrating to clubs.
- 33:38I don't know, kind of 10: It's like if you want to go out all night, you're not necessarily going to go and see a Fassbinder all-nighter.
- 33:43I don't know, kind of 10: Clubs like Heaven were going on till three or four in the morning and London seemed to be more alive.
- 33:48I don't know, kind of 10: There was just much more going on.
- 33:50I don't know, kind of 10: People had much more choice of things to do, and suddenly the Scala was losing its gloss.
- 33:56I don't know, kind of 10: And its money until the final blow landed.
- 34:02I don't know, kind of 10: In a form no one seemed to expect.
- 34:05I don't know, kind of 10: One of the other ways in which the Scala was programmed was through a box called the Scala Selection Box, and there were slips of paper and little pens, and you could write that three films that you most wanted to see at Scala.
- 34:18I don't know, kind of 10: And one of the most requested films was A Clockwork Orange.
- 34:23I don't know, kind of 10: Can you spare some cutter, me brothers? The reason director Stanley Kubrick had had it pulled out of distribution in the UK.
- 34:31I don't know, kind of 10: Reportedly because after the ultra violent flick hit British cinemas, he and his family, who lived in London, got death threats.
- 34:41I don't know, kind of 10: You could maybe see the film on a video bootleg in Britain.
- 34:44I don't know, kind of 10: But you couldn't see a beautiful 35mm print of A Clockwork Orange unless you were tuned into the Scala program.
- 34:53I don't know, kind of 10: Because back in JoAnne Sellar's day as a film programmer, she'd managed to get hold of a collector's print.
- 35:03I don't know, kind of 10: And so we stuck it in every now and again.
- 35:07I don't know, kind of 10: The occasional screening we didn't announce on the program.
- 35:10I don't know, kind of 10: They put some clues on the program.
- 35:12I don't know, kind of 10: We'd have a clockwork surprise or an orange surprise or give an indication.
- 35:17I don't know, kind of 10: So when Jane was there we had this screening of A Clockwork Orange and we got prosecuted for showing the film, and I just imagined that they wouldn't go through it, that they would give us a slap on the wrist and say, "Don't do it." They got more than a slap on the wrist.
- 35:34I don't know, kind of 10: The case dragged on for months.
- 35:35I don't know, kind of 10: The Scala was fined, and though it definitely wasn't the only straw...
- 35:40I don't know, kind of 10: it seems like it was kind of the last one.
- 35:43I don't know, kind of 10: Yeah. So it was a very, very, very, very difficult time for the Scala that last year of its life.
- 35:50I don't know, kind of 10: In a room at the Scala nightclub, Jane tells me about the end.
- 35:54I don't know, kind of 10: So at almost the same time as the lease ran out, the Scala folded and closed its doors.
- 36:03I don't know, kind of 10: And the last film that we showed at a party to mourn the demise of the Scala in June 1993 was King Kong.
- 36:13I don't know, kind of 10: It feels like that would be poetic beyond just the kind of bookend nature of it.
- 36:19I don't know, kind of 10: Just the idea of Kong, this giant falling from a height to the ground.
- 36:24I don't know, kind of 10: What's the last line?
- 36:25I don't know, kind of 10: "It was beauty killed the beast." Don't...
- 36:28I don't know, kind of 10: Don't, don't...
- 36:34I don't know, kind of 10: I'm sorry.
- 36:41I don't know, kind of 10: This many years later, it still breaks you up.
- 36:47I don't know, kind of 10: The Scala was the most important thing for me because it kind of...
- 36:50I don't know, kind of 10: Everything that I became grew out of the Scala.
- 37:00I don't know, kind of 10: And it's difficult for Jane, I think, because it's like talking about somebody that you know and love and...
- 37:08I don't know, kind of 10: You wake up one morning and think,"Oh, I really love that about certain things." Because you see something that reminds you about them.
- 37:16I don't know, kind of 10: You're suddenly reminded about why you liked them or what it was that you felt so important about them.
- 37:23I don't know, kind of 10: And the thing is, if you pay attention to British filmmakers and it's hard not to, since they're some of the greatest alive, there are constant reminders of what was important about the Scala.
- 37:33I don't know, kind of 10: Another Scala patron was Steve McQueen and that the trashy culty kind of cinema that Scala is most frequently and most lazily associated with.
- 37:43I don't know, kind of 10: You don't necessarily see that in Steve McQueen's work, but what you do see is this very kaleidoscopic, post-modern approach to the kinds of films that he would make.
- 37:51I don't know, kind of 10: You know, Steve McQueen is quite difficult to box in, and Steve McQueen has made, you know, American Hollywood thrillers, you know, and bounced about, you know, genres and forms and has tried a lot of stuff on.
- 38:02I don't know, kind of 10: And as an artist, you know, Steve McQueen would always talk about the fact that cinema became this this palette where lots and lots and lots of things were possible.
- 38:09I don't know, kind of 10: And again, that's the Scala.
- 38:11I don't know, kind of 10: The Scala made lots and lots and lots of things possible.
- 38:14I don't know, kind of 10: It was all just there in front of you to play with.
- 38:16I don't know, kind of 10: And for some filmmakers, it's not just the Scala's programming that resonates, it's the experience of the theater itself.
- 38:26I don't know, kind of 10: Going there felt as much about going to that specific place as much as it was about seeing the films.
- 38:32I don't know, kind of 10: Peter Strickland is one of the UK's most celebrated filmmakers.
- 38:35I don't know, kind of 10: Back in 1990, aged 16, he saw an ad for David Lynch's Eraserhead in, yes, Time Out magazine.
- 38:42I don't know, kind of 10: It was playing at a theater he'd never attended in King's Cross.
- 38:45I don't know, kind of 10: Very cavernous. It's just a very cavernous space, very dark.
- 38:50I don't know, kind of 10: It had this kind of pungent aroma of beer and maybe other smells that I wasn't so familiar with, kind of illicit smells.
- 38:59I don't know, kind of 10: And that the Northern Line was running underneath it.
- 39:03I don't know, kind of 10: I think anyone will tell you this, that was a very notable part of the Scala, but it really accentuated that specific film, you know, Alan Splet's sound work.
- 39:13I don't know, kind of 10: Are you Henry?Yes.A girl named Mary called on the payphonesaid, she said her parents, and you're invited to dinner. Who's is this low end rumble?
- 39:28I don't know, kind of 10: Initially, I thought it was part of the the world of Eraserhead as if the... As if the Northern Line was on cue, waiting for the right moment to pass through.
- 39:40I don't know, kind of 10: And that space, it felt like an extension of the film I was watching.
- 39:45I don't know, kind of 10: It felt like it belonged in that cinema.
- 39:48I don't know, kind of 10: Thank you very much. But I, yeah, I think it took me years to shake off that experience, but it's something I really wanted to convey on film myself.
- 40:04I don't know, kind of 10: Peter Strickland's breakthrough movie, Berberian Sound Studio, was a psychological horror film about a sound man.
- 40:11I don't know, kind of 10: Next time you watch his work or his contemporaries listen close...
- 40:15I don't know, kind of 10: sometimes you can almost hear the Scala, rumbling beneath them.
- 40:30I don't know, kind of 10: And that's the MUBI podcast for this week.
- 40:32I don't know, kind of 10: Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat for more deep dives into great cinemas. Next week, the story of the theater that tries to connect audiences with the past and who has taken some heat for trying.
- 40:42I don't know, kind of 10: A colleague and friend of mine, who is a wonderful film archivist.
- 40:46I don't know, kind of 10: He told me once that we're like spoiled millionaires who eat extinct animals.
- 40:52I don't know, kind of 10: The fiery tale of the Dryden Theater and its Nitrate Picture Show.
- 40:57I don't know, kind of 10: Follow us so you don't miss it.
- 40:58I don't know, kind of 10: Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and sound design by me, Rico Gagliano. Beth Schiff is our booking producer.
- 41:04I don't know, kind of 10: Stephen Colón mastered and engineered.
- 41:06I don't know, kind of 10: Martin Austwick composed our original music.
- 41:09I don't know, kind of 10: Thanks this week to Samuel Robinson, Yasmeen Omran and everyone at the Scala nightclub.
- 41:13I don't know, kind of 10: The show is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Cakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca, for MUBI.
- 41:20I don't know, kind of 10: If you love the show, please tell the world by leaving a five star review, wherever you listen, it helps others find and love us too.
- 41:27I don't know, kind of 10: Also, if you've got questions, comments, or if you went to Scala and want to give us the dirt about what you did in the back row, email us at podcast@mubi.com And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast.
- 41:41I don't know, kind of 10: Just head over to MUBI.com to start watching.
- 41:45I don't know, kind of 10: Till next week.
- 41:46I don't know, kind of 10: Actually, I don't need anything in concessions I smuggled in my own candy.