London's Scala Cinema becomes "A country club for lunatics" (feat. Mary Harron and Peter Strickland)

In the grey Thatcher-era England of the '80s, a romantically dilapidated London movie palace called The Scala beckoned to England's subcultures — and influenced filmmakers from Christopher Nolan to Steve McQueen.

Host Rico Gagliano learns the wild, seedy, and ultimately poignant history of what John Waters called, "A country club for lunatics." Special guests include directors Mary Harron (AMERICAN PSYCHO), Peter Strickland (BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO) and Prano Bailey-Bond (CENSOR), plus film producer and Scala founder Stephen Woolley (MONA LISA, THE CRYING GAME), and Financial Times film critic Danny Leigh.

The second season of the MUBI Podcast titled “Only in Theaters” tells surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history, and in some cases, history in general.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor. A place to discover and watch beautiful, interesting, incredible films. A new hand-picked film arrives on MUBI, every single day. Cinema from across the world. From iconic directors, to emerging auteurs. All carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

And with MUBI GO, members in select countries can get a hand-picked cinema ticket every single week, to see the best new films in real cinemas. To learn more, visit mubi.com/go

Transcript

0:03

Heads up, this episode contains adult language descriptions of sex and violence. And best of all, I don't think there are any spoilers this time. In 1981, a teenager named Jane Giles was living and working a night job in a small city an hour south of London. Called Crawley, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. It's right by Gatwick Airport, and I got a job at night cleaning airplanes. It was when you could still smoke on the airplanes. So one of my jobs was like scraping nicotine out of the air vents at the back of the airplane. And, you know, wherever this stuff would end up. The gig was a far cry from her dream, which was to go to art school. But it did give her a superpower. Yeah, I was part of the night time economy as a night cleaner and found it quite easy to stay up all night. So what happened next makes sense. Jane's boyfriend, who was a musician, by the way. He was the lead guitarist in a band called the Split Beavers. Seriously... He 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. My 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. I guess that they thought that actually you couldn't get up so much harm in a cinema. Of course, upon arrival, it's what was outside the cinema that seemed worrisome. I arrived in King's Cross at,

I don't know, kind of 10: 1:46

00 at night. King's Cross was like the Wild West then. It was all sorts of like mad, sad, and desperate people swarming around late at night. But I looked up at the cinema, and to me, it looked like, you know, at the beginning of the... Disney films, you see this sort of, you know, kind of Disney palace with little twinkle above it. Sleeping Beauty's castle? Yes, it looked like Sleeping Beauty's castle to me. The theater was called The Scala. 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. And inside... There were also like, there were chandeliers. 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. But they looked good. And the floor, the stairs of which there were many, were marble mosaic. I'd never seen anything like this before, and I was so impressed by it. Despite the strange damp smells and the sticky theater floor and the occasional deep rumble as tube trains roared by beneath the building. Despite a lot of stuff. 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. But I was used to crawling around on my hands and knees and cleaning airplanes, so I thought it was fine. Plus, during intermission, they played this amazing tune by a band Jane had never heard of called Joy Division. 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. So, yeah, it didn't last with the Split Beaver, but the guys introduced me to a really amazing cinema experience. And I couldn't get into art school. Wasn't good enough to get into art school, but at that time it was really easy get into film school. 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. Jane Giles went on to program films at The Scala. Others became some of the most important film-makers, in the world. I'm Rico Gagliano, and welcome back to the MUBI podcast. MUBI is the best way outside a theater to see beautiful, hand-picked cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind beautiful cinemas. This is season two. We're calling it only in theaters. 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. 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. 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. So ticket, please... enjoy the show. The Scala Cinema began as sort of the physical projection into the world of the mind and experiences of one guy. His name was Stephen Woolley. How would you how would you describe Stephen? 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. Danny Leigh is the chief film critic of the Financial Times in London. And Stephen's, you know, whenever I run into him, is always excited. You know, he always has something. 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. I mean, Stephen's always into something, and this is knowing Stephen much later in life. 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. I mean, that would have been just the kinetic, you know, waves which would have come off him would have been extraordinary. My name is Stephen Woolley. I'm a producer, filmmaker, I've also occasionally directed and I originated the Scala in 1979. I know it doesn't sound like a ball of energy right off the bat. Just give him a minute. But Stephen, well, his childhood definitely wasn't action packed. I came from a family, I like to say are working class, but probably bordering on criminal class, I often think. We didn't have a lot of money. There were five of us sleeping in one room and I think my escape was through literature. 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. Until one day when he deigned to tilt his head up to watch a movie adaptation of a book being shown on TV. Director David Lean's take on Dickens' Great Expectations.<i>Come nearer.</i><i>Let me look at you.</i> 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.<i>Look at me.</i><i>You're not afraid of a woman who has never seen the sun</i><i>since you were born?</i><i>No.</i> And it's the mist on the moors and the beautiful depiction of Magwitch. These were things that I could only imagine in my head. And I suddenly had these images which were sensational. Plus, it didn't hurt that Lean had brought to life a story that meant a lot to Stephen. 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. I had expectations of... of this world bursting at the seams and that another world would open up to me. And eventually it did. Out of movie screens and out of the pages of a periodical. There was a magazine called Time Out magazine, which was an essential magazine for anyone who liked movies. That was published around 1969-1970. So I would have been 14 at that time. I used to collect Time Out every week and they had a big, fat section on cinema. And Time Out sort of became my Bible. And I would read about Andy Warhol movies and I would travel to see them across London. Not just to see Warhol flicks, but every single movie in the magazine, starting with a crash course in serious cinema. What Danny Leigh remembers was a serious place. 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. 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. It was this very rigorous and unchanging approach to cinema as high art. Yeah, it was like the NFT as it was known then. It was daunting. I remember once going with a friend to see a Buñuel film and they were laughing and someone told them to be quiet. And I thought, well if you can't laugh in a Buñuel film, well, why are you here? It was a very oppressive atmosphere. Luckily in the mid-seventies, there were more spots for Stephen to choose from. 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. But it was very fractured. Yeah, each of these joints had their own little niche. London filmmakers co-op specialized in avant-garde and experimental film. The Electric Cinema played Sam Fuller style auteur noirs. The Classic in Notting Hill was known for its horror marathons. When I was 17, I would go to these all night shows that would take place in Notting Hill. So I would supplement this kind of odd diet, of seeing art-house movies with horror movies like The Hammer movies. 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. Wouldn't it be cool if one place showed it all? 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. August 29th, 1976. That night, Stephen was working as an usher at his favorite theater known for hip, sometimes outrageous double features. It was called the Screen on the Green. His first cinema job. 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. Now, those three bands were unknown bands. Buzzcocks had never played London before, and The Clash and the Sex Pistols, maybe half a dozen gigs. So this whole punk thing suddenly arrived at my cinema. First up, a screening of The T.A.M.I. Show a cool rock and R&B concert film from 64, and then... Came the live music. They made a makeshift stage, a tiny stage at Screen on the Green. It was very, very small. I mean these bands kind of came on stage...<i>Lights please!</i> And I have to admit by then I was a bit of a snobby jazz fan. And suddenly everything went wrong. I just thought, this is it. This scene, this music is everything. Johnny Rotten's instantly hypnotic. It was a sort of, oh, my God, he really doesn't care. I'd never seen anything like it before in my life. They really didn't care about the audience. They really didn't care about themselves. And it was absolutely addictive. 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. It seemed clear it could all go together, and he spent the next few years figuring out how. First, Woolley took a gig at a place called the Other Cinema in London's Tottenham Street. The place was known for running great but super serious left wing political movies and for not making much money. So I started helping out on the programming side, and I was putting films on like Jimi Hendrix the Movie. And they were packed because everybody that was a member of the Other Cinema was basically an old hippie. 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. That would be, yes, the Sex Pistols movie. And soon, yes, Woolley brought in live punk and new wave acts. The Slits, Sham 69, Squeeze. The pioneering queer rocker Tom Robinson. And Aswad were a reggae band. I would program movies around them. Then we had discussions about music in the club room, which was huge and was packed full of people. It was great. And suddenly they were seeing all these people coming into cinema and realizing alternative programming wasn't so bad. Eventually, Woolley and a crew of folks at the Other Cinema re-branded themselves in the same location. Taking the name of an old theater that once stood at the same address, The Scala. 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. No, no snobbery. 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. We're going to have performers. We're going to have... 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. Yes, I am an intellectual and a child that gets to watch cartoons. And I get to be a punk that is just kicking against the pricks. Exactly. And one day in 1981, just as London school kids were really getting into it, the Scala's Tottenham Street building... It was sold to Channel Four, which was a new venture that time. 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. Which is where the Scala legend really took hold. 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. It had for the last year or so been something called the Primatarium. It was set up by a guy called Cyril Rosen, and he was actually a dentist. You remember Jane Giles from the top of this episode? She literally wrote the book on The Scala and she's co-directing a doc about it. That'll be out next year. Anyway, so Cyril Rosen was also a huge fan of primates, he had a little monkey. It had its own credit card, had its own American Express card, which was in the name of Mr. S Monk. All of a sudden, American Express doesn't seem quite so exclusive, just like some random dude's monkey could have it. Well, you know, and Cyril was determined to make people care more about conservation and the threat to species. So he knew that the... the best way of doing this was through setting up an experience. They'd taken all the seats out and they'd covered it with false grass. 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. It was crazy. It was completely bonkers. It was all decked out like a forest, a rain forest. There was a waterfall running through the middle of the building, a 40 foot waterfall. And it was an abject failure. Nobody came. So in 1981, the Scala moved in, cleaned up the place a bit. Although patrons would later insist the leftover mildew smell from the waterfall was actually monkey urine. And the first film they screened... King Kong, of course. And Danny Leigh says in this new space, the Scala soon became the 800 pound gorilla of England's repertory theater scene. The whole thing was just kind of exploding. You get people coming from all across London to the King's Cross Scala. And in fact, maybe, possibly it doesn't hurt that it's by a kind of major railway hub. People start coming from across the country as well. I mean, the Scala, I think starts to get quite a national reputation quite quickly. But how'd the whole country hear about the Scala in the first place? Back then there was no internet, but there was the UK music press. 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. I read The NME, the Scala was often mentioned. There was a big, porous cultural overlap between film of all stripes and the energy of music as well. And that was all tied up with the new Scala, you know, the King's Cross Scala, the fabled Scala. You know, the Scala was a very rock and roll kind of venue, I think. Mary Harron would know. In the early eighties she wasn't making movies yet. She was living in London writing for the music mag Melody Maker. 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. 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. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Kill!<i>You're trying to say something?</i><i>I never try anything.</i><i>I just do it. Like I don't beat clocks.</i><i>Just people. Want to try me?</i> 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. 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. 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. Yes, exactly. It was, it was fun because it was like a new thing. And that was the first time I'd seen a combination of film and music in that way in a movie theater. And it turned out to be catnip for aspiring musicians and filmmakers alike. The auditorium was full of musicians or young people who would go on to become musicians like the Jesus Mary Chain, great bands. 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. And at that point, they were students. Steve McQueen, Christopher Nolan, Martin McDonagh. 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. And for the generous helping of queer movies Woolley held over from the days of the Other Cinema. And then there were just nerds. like Danny Leigh, and had I been there, me. I was 14, going on 15, and I went to the Scala for the first time. This won't do my cinephile credentials much good, but I went to see Steve Martin's The Man with Two Brains. Oh, that's a great film. It is a great film. Right. Thank you for saying that. But you know, it's not Tarkovsky. You know, that was the atmosphere of the Scala is a kind of melting pot of people who loved movies for totally different reasons. 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. The cinema was exciting again. 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. The moral panic that kicked everything up a notch. Coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe, all of them handpicked by real people who really know movies. And with a new film debuting on the platform every single day, there's always something new to discover. 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. Hopefully it inspires you to love and support your local cinema that much more. And we've got a new thing going that can help you do exactly that. It's called MUBI Go. And when you sign up, you get a free movie ticket every week to see a hand-selected film in theaters. Previous picks include award winning films like Drive My Car, The Lost Daughter, Cha-Cha Real Smooth and the Power of the Dog. MUBI Go is now available in the UK, New York and Los Angeles, and it is coming to more U.S. cities soon. 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. 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. As always, you can find all the links you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. All right, so it's the early 1980s. 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. He and a business partner start releasing movies on video.<i>Some of the best movies on television aren't on television.</i><i>They're on SelectaVision.</i><i>A four hour video cassette recorder from RCA.</i> Now, this was just as VHS cassette players were becoming affordable. And most people running cinemas worried home video was going to kill their business.<i>With SelectaVision, you can go to the movies at your house!</i> But not Stephen.- Because interestingly...- I wasn't running a cinema. 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. 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. The label was called Palace Video. And small problem, its first few releases tanked. But then at an L.A. film festival, Stephen got a glimpse of a horror movie by a newbie filmmaker named Sam Raimi. Called The Evil Dead.<i>I fear that the only way to stop those possessed</i><i>by the spirits of the book is through the act of bodily dismemberment.</i> I saw it by mistake. I just went into the last 15 minutes of this movie and saw the last shot. Thought, what on earth was that? And then I immediately went see the whole film again. Palace put it out on video and simultaneously screened it at the Scala. And it was an incredible success for us. I mean, it was made for the Scala because it's funny, sophisticated. It was edited by these editors called the Coen Brothers. Nobody had ever heard of them. It was made totally tongue in cheek by Sam Raimi. It will scare the life out of you. And it'll make you giggle and it's the perfect Scala cult movie. All fine for cinemas, but for home video? Powerful forces in government and media were aligning over the idea that gory horror films like this sophisticated or not, were less than perfect.<i>These are the cassettes Driller Killer and Death Trap,</i><i>the first two of the so-called Video Nasties to be withdrawn from distribution.</i> They came to be called the Video Nasties. And the outcry over them was about to put the Scala smack in the middle of the cultural conversation. So the Video Nasties were a list of 72 banned films. They were banned in the UK in the early eighties. Prano Bailey-Bond is a Welsh filmmaker. Last year she put out an amazing horror flick called Censor. 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. Essentially, this happened off the back of the birth of VHS. 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. And there was quite a big moral panic around what these films were going to do to people.<i>In court, a solicitor for the Director of Public Prosecutions</i><i>called the material an extravaganza of gory violence, capable</i><i>of depraving and corrupting those who watched it.</i> Fans, horror fans were having their houses raided. They were having their video collections confiscated by the police. They were having their VHS players confiscated by the police. And then, of course, video stores were being raided as well.<i>I thought that one was banned.</i><i>Um, I don't know what you mean?</i> There's a scene in Censor where the hero tries to convince a video store owner to rent her a Video Nasty. It plays out like a back alley drug deal.<i>Maybe you can help me. I was looking for some of the more unusual...</i><i>Frederick North films.</i><i>I've seen, erm...</i><i>Don't Go in the Church.</i><i>Perhaps, maybe you will have something else</i><i>of his under the counter?</i> 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. And he looked so scared, he looked so sketchy, and he was clearly terrified of saying the wrong thing. 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. In other words, movies suddenly felt legitimately dangerous. And Danny Leigh thinks that for young people, especially, that made movies incredibly cool. The sense that film had become criminalized in a way that, you know, punk rock maybe had been a few years before. Film was now seen as a threat to the established order. That was really exciting. 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. The Scala was the absolute epicenter of that. It's where you went for edgy film of all stripes, and now definitely for horror. In fact, by then the Scala was being program by a horror fiend named JoAnne Sellar. She made it her mission to show plenty of Video Nasties, and she did it by any means necessary. Jane Giles remembers the subterfuge around a movie from director Abel Ferrara. Scala wanted to put on Driller Killer. Now Driller Killer was one of the so-called Video Nasties. 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? Oh, that's not coming into the country?" The new guy in the office was quickly conscripted into service. Mark Valen, who'd just started work at Scala. Was sent to New York to pick up another print of Driller Killer, put it in his suitcase and come back next day. He had an American passport, of he went, met Ferrara, who stuck a kind of false label on the film can. 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. 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.<i>Research is taking place, and it will show that these films</i><i>not only affect young people,</i><i>but I believe they affect dogs as well.</i> 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. It felt, although it's actually on ground level, it felt subterranean. It was just a vast space. 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. It was really dark back there, you know, and it had a kind of"here-be-monsters" vibe to it. I mean, for me, it was it was all just beyond mind blowing. Right, so now we're going up the steps into the magic heart of the cinema. What would have been the auditorium, which was the auditorium. Last fall in London, Jane Giles gave me a tour of what was once the Scala cinema. It's now a nightclub also called Scala. And in the light of day, the back of the auditorium doesn't seem so creepy. Though I guess that's in the eye of the beholder. 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. And she'd sort of like run away for protection and things like that, but that was about it. 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. Just in the corner of the room, over there you can see a small, slightly sinister looking door. Yeah, it's like you're about three and a half feet tall. Yeah, it's the door to the boiler room. 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. Oh, yeah. And it's characterized by having tarantulas in the film. 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. But what actually happened was nobody thought to tell the front of house manager. 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. Because, I don't know, they've been too hot or too cold or something like that. And they were just like dead tarantulas everywhere. So that wasn't great. But I thought you were going to tell me the tarantulas that boiled to death. But they just killed each other. They'd killed each other. Yeah, unfortunately. Don't tell the RSPCA. That was 1988, the year Jane became the final programmer of the Scala. And as scary as the boiler room incident was, it was nothing compared to the stuff she was about to deal with. 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. So this was my first day at the Scala. That threat would hang over her whole tenure at the theater, and it was just the beginning.<i>Where to?</i><i>King's Cross.</i> 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. 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. Was the Bob Hoskins character cruising around the back of the Scala. From the character's car window. We get glimpses of a definitely seedy world. Laughing sex workers trolling for johns on a dark street strewn with trash.<i>- Down market, ain't it?- Shut up.</i> But this was shot in 86. As the late eighties rolled into the nineties, King's Cross turned even darker. Crack hit the streets and the scene was awful. 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. I remember going to the Scala for the last time, actually, and this has always stayed with me. It was the triple bill of Anthony Perkins films, because he just died. 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. It was like King's Cross had come into the cinema. Obviously, that kept a lot of people away. And Danny Leigh says so did something else. 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. 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. It's like if you want to go out all night, you're not necessarily going to go and see a Fassbinder all-nighter. Clubs like Heaven were going on till three or four in the morning and London seemed to be more alive. There was just much more going on. People had much more choice of things to do, and suddenly the Scala was losing its gloss. And its money until the final blow landed. In a form no one seemed to expect. 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. And one of the most requested films was A Clockwork Orange.<i>Can you spare some cutter, me brothers?</i> The reason director Stanley Kubrick had had it pulled out of distribution in the UK. Reportedly because after the ultra violent flick hit British cinemas, he and his family, who lived in London, got death threats. You could maybe see the film on a video bootleg in Britain. But you couldn't see a beautiful 35mm print of A Clockwork Orange unless you were tuned into the Scala program. Because back in JoAnne Sellar's day as a film programmer, she'd managed to get hold of a collector's print. And so we stuck it in every now and again. The occasional screening we didn't announce on the program. They put some clues on the program. We'd have a clockwork surprise or an orange surprise or give an indication. 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. The case dragged on for months. The Scala was fined, and though it definitely wasn't the only straw... it seems like it was kind of the last one. Yeah. So it was a very, very, very, very difficult time for the Scala that last year of its life. In a room at the Scala nightclub, Jane tells me about the end. So at almost the same time as the lease ran out, the Scala folded and closed its doors. And the last film that we showed at a party to mourn the demise of the Scala in June 1993 was King Kong. It feels like that would be poetic beyond just the kind of bookend nature of it. Just the idea of Kong, this giant falling from a height to the ground. What's the last line?"It was beauty killed the beast." Don't... Don't, don't... I'm sorry. This many years later, it still breaks you up. The Scala was the most important thing for me because it kind of... Everything that I became grew out of the Scala. And it's difficult for Jane, I think, because it's like talking about somebody that you know and love and... You wake up one morning and think,"Oh, I really love that about certain things." Because you see something that reminds you about them. You're suddenly reminded about why you liked them or what it was that you felt so important about them. 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. Another Scala patron was Steve McQueen and that the trashy culty kind of cinema that Scala is most frequently and most lazily associated with. 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. 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. 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. And again, that's the Scala. The Scala made lots and lots and lots of things possible. It was all just there in front of you to play with. And for some filmmakers, it's not just the Scala's programming that resonates, it's the experience of the theater itself. Going there felt as much about going to that specific place as much as it was about seeing the films. Peter Strickland is one of the UK's most celebrated filmmakers. Back in 1990, aged 16, he saw an ad for David Lynch's Eraserhead in, yes, Time Out magazine. It was playing at a theater he'd never attended in King's Cross. Very cavernous. It's just a very cavernous space, very dark. It had this kind of pungent aroma of beer and maybe other smells that I wasn't so familiar with, kind of illicit smells. And that the Northern Line was running underneath it. 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.<i>Are you Henry?</i><i>Yes.</i><i>A girl named Mary called on the payphone</i><i>said, she said her parents, and you're invited to dinner.</i> Who's is this low end rumble? 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. And that space, it felt like an extension of the film I was watching. It felt like it belonged in that cinema.<i>Thank you very much.</i> 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. Peter Strickland's breakthrough movie, Berberian Sound Studio, was a psychological horror film about a sound man. Next time you watch his work or his contemporaries listen close... sometimes you can almost hear the Scala, rumbling beneath them. And that's the MUBI podcast for this week. 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. A colleague and friend of mine, who is a wonderful film archivist. He told me once that we're like spoiled millionaires who eat extinct animals. The fiery tale of the Dryden Theater and its Nitrate Picture Show. Follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, this episode was hosted, written and sound design by me, Rico Gagliano. Beth Schiff is our booking producer. Stephen Colón mastered and engineered. Martin Austwick composed our original music. Thanks this week to Samuel Robinson, Yasmeen Omran and everyone at the Scala nightclub. The show is executive produced by me, along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Cakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca, for MUBI. 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. 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. Just head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Till next week. Actually, I don't need anything in concessions I smuggled in my own candy.