Trailer Premiere: Long Live Scala Cinema!
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Producer Stephen Woolley (The Crying Game, Carol) launched his career in the mid-1970s as an usher at a movie theater in Islington. In 1978, he decided to found and run his own repertory theater, the Scala Cinema, which would become, as the Observer’s Wendy Ide puts it, “famed for the anarchic creativity of its programming, the stickiness of its carpets, and the exuberant, frequently X-rated antics of its audiences.”
In 1981, the Scala moved from the West End to King’s Cross, and as Ian Winwood explains in the Telegraph, “its status as a members-only repertory picture-house permitted the screening of films that had been ‘banned’ by the then-vigilant British Board of Film Censors. This was the place at which one could catch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Driller Killer, not to mention erotic esoterica such as Thundercrack!”
“The Scala taught you that Jimmy Cagney was as punk as the Sex Pistols,” writes Nick Hasted in the Financial Times, “and that Russ Meyer’s bosomy Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! needn’t bow to Bergman.” An unauthorized screening of A Clockwork Orange (1971), which Stanley Kubrick had pulled from circulation in the UK, got the Scala in serious legal trouble and eventually forced its closure in 1993.
Jane Giles, the author of Criminal Desires: Jean Genet and Cinema, started going to the Scala when she was seventeen, and from 1988 through 1992, she was the cinema’s programming manager. In 2018, she wrote Scala Cinema 1978–1993, which won the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. Last year, Giles teamed up with writer Ali Catterall (Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties) to codirect Scala!!!, a documentary that critic Mark Kermode calls “a riotously entertaining and yet also impressively serious account of the legacy of London’s wildest cinema club.”
Metrograph is bringing Giles and Catterall to New York for Long Live Scala Cinema!, a series opening this weekend with the original King Kong (1933) and returning next Friday with Scala!!! and a selection of what Metrograph calls “Scala standards.” John Waters’s Pink Flamingos (1972), for example, which, as Howard Hampton points out, “burrows into the psyche in a backhanded way that justifies Jonas Mekas’s hyperbole in a quote featured on the original posters: ‘Ten times more interesting than Last Tango in Paris.’”
Along with regular Scala patrons Ben Wheatley and Mary Harron, Waters appears in Giles and Catterall’s movie to declare that “the Scala had magic. It was like joining a club—a very secret club, like a biker gang or something. It’s like they were a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high . . . which is a good way to see movies.”
Critic and screenwriter Nick Pinkerton (The Sweet East) will introduce a screening of Walerian Borowczyk’s La marge (1976), starring Sylvia Kristel as a Parisian sex worker and Joe Dallesandro as her devoted client. The program naturally includes David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977), which Wheatley calls the “dark lord of midnight movies.” And you can be sure that Metrograph will make a point of screening A Clockwork Orange.
We’re pleased to premiere the trailer for Long Live Scala Cinema!
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