The title of Ali Catterall and Jane Giles’s new documentary 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 pretty much says it all. A nostalgic trip down the sticky corridor of offbeat and eccentric cinema in the heart of London from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, it will provide cinephiles who appreciate movies off the beaten path with a thrilling reminder of how exhilarating the theatrical experience could be—not the technology, per se, but rather, the community. For those with less experience, it will be a historical lesson on the importance of physical space and human presence when it comes to movies, a forceful reminder in the era of streaming on iPhones that movies are fundamentally a collective experience.

The titular theater was not so much a physical location as it was a state of mind, an experience, a place where outsiders, punks, queers, oddballs, and eccentrics could congregate to experience the weirder fringes of international cinema long before you could call them up on YouTube. This is familiar territory for the film’s two directors, as Jane Giles authored the 2018 Kraszna-Krausz award-winning book Scala Cinema 1978–1993, which was edited by Ali Catterall, a staff writer for Film4.com who has also worked for the BBC and The Guardian and also co-authored Your Face Here: British Cult Movies Since the Sixties (2002). This is ground they know very, very well.

The Scala actually had two different homes during its lifespan from 1976 to 1993: First in the basement of the Scala House on Tottenham Street in London, which was constructed in 1969 over the ruins of the Scala Theatre, which dated back to 1772, and then in the repurposed Odeon King’s Cross cinema on Pentonville Road in the north London inner-city district of King’s Cross, which was originally constructed in 1920 and went through all manner of uses over the decades, including a mainstream cinema, a short-lived porn theatre, and a live venue that was notable for hosting the London debuts of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. An imposing corner building with a large cupola towering five stories over the street below, it looked too classical a structure to house such fringe cinema, but that is exactly what it did for nearly 15 years.

Those years are recounted in the documentary by the people who lived and experienced it directly: employees and managers of the Scala and regulars who saw movies there week after week in the company of myriad oddball souls who didn’t (or didn’t want to) fit in anywhere else. A number of the people who frequented the theater went on to become significant artists and filmmakers themselves, including Mary Harron (American Psycho), Isaac Julien (Derek), and Ben Wheatley (Kill List). There are some expected celebrity interviews, as well, including filmmaker John Waters (who insists that his experience seeing one of his films at the Scala ranks among his greatest movie-going experiences) and film critic Kim Newman. Many of the interviews, though, are with people you have likely never heard of, but all of whom were vital to the Scala’s existence as either employees or regular patrons.

Some of the stories they tell are darkly amusing, others are curiously entertaining, and a few are simply tragic, including one about a young man who committed suicide by jumping from the top of the building. There was sex and drugs and a carnivalesque sense of wild abandon, and the screen was always alive—sometimes all night on the weekends—with a wide array of movies from every corner of the spectrum, all of which were advertised each month on elaborately designed fold-out posters that alone were worth the price of admission. The first film ever shown there was King Kong (1933), and the last was A Clockwork Orange (1971), which at the time was still banned in England and therefore set off a legal firestorm that resulted in the theater’s permanent closure. It was an immense loss for film culture, to be sure, but Scala!!! does a regal job of capturing the exuberance of that lost past when cinema-going could be thrillingly dangerous.

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