Name a prominent figure in contemporary British arts and culture, and it’s likely they spent some time at the Scala. Although its countercultural heyday spanned just 15 years between the late 1970s and early 1990s, the eclectic theater spiritually dates back to the 1700s. That’s not the period documentarians Ali Catterall and Jane Giles are interested in, though. They’re more concerned with what the verbose subtitle of their film suggests: “the incredibly strange rise and fall of the world’s wildest cinema and how it influenced a mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits.”
With so much eccentricity at the heart of the story, Catterall and Giles wisely stick to a pretty basic structure for their doc. After a rapid rundown of the first seven decades of the 20th century, Scala!!! slams to a halt in 1978: the year the Scala Theatre officially (re)opened to the public. (There are so, so many name changes that preceded the theater’s now-iconic moniker — the directors didn’t waste much time on them, so neither will this critic.) It’s here that the documentary really slows down, moving through the next decade-and-a-half with the kind of care and consideration that the era deserves.
From the venue’s short tenure in London’s legendary Charlotte Street to its eventual 1981 move to the shuttered Odeon location in King’s Cross (and the fateful events that led to the end of an era in 1993), Scala!!! spares no minor detail in its comprehensive overview of what so many illustrious figures consider England’s most important independent movie house. Its hyper-focused 15-year window plays a large part in accomplishing such an all-inclusive approach: There’s no need to rush the timeline when you have nearly 100 minutes to fill. By its conclusion, one struggles to pinpoint a chunk of time that felt glossed-over or underserved.
This is a true credit to Catterall and Giles, both making their directorial debut here. It’s all too easy for so-called cinematic love letters to don rose-colored glasses and brush past the thornier bits of the past. Likewise, it’s just as common for such documentaries to be flat-out boring, waxing poetic about some niche venue, celebrity, or subculture that hardly warrants such shamelessly fulsome treatment. Here, Catterall and Giles show viewers the good and the bad as they actually happened, all of it conveyed to the audience by the folks who were actually present to witness it.
Editors Edward Mills and Andrew Starke keep everything chugging along like a well-oiled machine, precisely dropping perfectly timed and expertly curated clips from some of the theater’s greatest hits — which, remarkably, seem to touch on every possible cult classic, rock ’n’roll, avant-garde, New Wave, sexually explicit, cartoonishly violent, hugely influential work a person could ever even begin to imagine. It’s enough to make any lover of the weird and wonderful wish they could’ve been there to frequent the place themselves.
Though the titular Scala no longer exists in the way it did between ’78 and ’93, Catterall and Giles prove that it lives on through the works of those icons who filled the seats. The long list of famous names and faces that concludes the film — each one functioning like a symbolic exclamation point tacked to the end of the doc’s already exuberant title — is a pertinent reminder of this. From pop-punk chart-toppers to indie trailblazers to groundbreaking activists, Scala!!! demonstrates the sheer power and importance of the arthouse in a time where such a message has never been more vital.
Scala!!! screens nightly at 7:30 p.m. on July 26 – 28 at the Webster University Film Series.
