Long Live Scala Cinema!

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Founded in 1979 by actor, producer, and director Stephen Woolley in 1979, for 14 years The Scala—initially a venue on Tottenham Street in central London then, two years later, relocated to its long-term home near the King’s Cross railway station—was the destination for adventurous London cinephiles with a taste for somewhat more disreputable fare, envisaged as Albion’s answer to the Times Square grindhouse, with an eclectic, daily-changing program that included all-night Shock Around the Clock horror marathons. Welcoming directors Ali Catterall and Jane Giles—a former programmer at the theater—to screen their new documentary SCALA!!!, examining the cinema’s history and legacy, Metrograph presents a program of Scala standards: films by John Waters, Bette Gordon, Stephen Sayadian, and David Lynch, as well as the banned-in-the-UK A Clockwork Orange, whose screening landed the theatre in legal hot water.