Scala!!! - So Extraordinary, Three Exclamation Marks Hardly Seems Sufficient
January's only half-done and already the documentary of the year is upon us!
Right, cards on the table - Scala!!! Or The Incredibly Strange Rise And Fall Of The World’s Wildest Cinema And How It Influenced A Mixed-Up Generation Of Weirdos And Misfits is co-directed by my friend and former colleague Ali Catterall. As such, I’ll fully understand if my opinions are dismissed as the biased ranting of a very proud pal. However, I sincerely believe that Scala!!! could’ve been co-directed by Catterall Parish Council, Lancashire, and I’d still consider it the first essential film I’d seen in… well, quite a while, actually.
Co-directed by Jane Giles without whom any Scala documentary would be very short and not especially spectacular affair, the picture covers most every iteration of the cinema-cum-concert venue-cum-meeting place. And who better to tell the story of this influential, much-missed institution than the people who worked there - Jane, Stephen Woolley, Withnail’s Ralph Brown, JoAnne Sellers, whose once had to remove a body from the cinema and now fills movie houses with Paul Thomas Anderson pictures - and the people who went there - filmmakers Mary Harron, Ben Wheatley and John Waters. comedians Stewart Lee and Adam Buxton, S Express’s Mark Moore, The The’s Matt Johnson, PiL’s Jah Wobble, LBC’s James O’Brien, plus the incomparable Caroline Catz.
Scala!!! also features an outstanding Barry Adamson original soundtrack - the Moss Side Story man was also a regular attendee - and an amazing wealth of film clips which should send you home wanting to reacquaint yourself with The Devils, Jubilee, Eraserhead, Salo and the many other pictures that, though they seemed far too extreme for the mainstream, appeared perfectly at home in the grand building in King’s Cross which was the cinema’s final home.
Something else Scala!!! might leave you with is the strange sense of missing a place you never went to. A student at Birmingham in the early ‘90s who in the 1980s, thought cinema began and ended with Johns Landis and Hughes, I’d only just begun to get excited about the Scala!!!’s kind of cinema around the time its doors shut for good in 1993. To discover that your spiritual home was closed for business by the time you’d figured out its significance is to experience what many a modern filmgoer must feel when they learn about the BBC’s Moviedrome, another champion of alternative cinema that was done by the time the year 2001 came around.
Now, as you might have gathered, I could go on and on about the magnificence of Scala!!! Rather than do that, however, I’d like to focus on something Ali Catterall said while we were toasting his and Jane’s success. For as I first met Ali while when we were both working for FilmFour.com so he was keen to stress that this documentary is the sort of thing he’d like to think us, Team FilmFour.com, might have made. And while I’d never dare to speak for Matthew, Jon, Dan, Holly, Helene, Matt, Louise et al., I myself would’ve have died of pride had I made Scala!!!
As it is, a huge grin spread across my face when I noticed my name in the closing credits. But to have directed such a film… I can only hope Ali and Jane realise what a gift they’ve given to moviegoers. Now here’s to as many people as possible tearing off the wrapping paper.