Revised Format Budget Reissue of the Award Winning book

“Lavishly showcases every one of the cinema’s famous fold-out monthly programmes, alongside a month-by-month history that lifts the veil on a unique venue”
~ Starburst

“If all author Jane Giles had done was to collate this stuff without further comment, filled out with sundry cat photos and authentic memorabilia, she would have done us a great service. The accompanying text, however, adds bounty upon bounty, providing a richly researched account of what it was like to run the place month in month out, augmented by fascinating nuggets of social history, both global and local”
~ Sight & Sound

Postpunk and predigital, the Scala cinema was the most infamous and influential of all cinemas, a pirate ship on the stormy seas of Britain’s Thatcher government, 1978-1993. Specialising in cult movies, arthouse classics, horror, sexploitation, Kung Fu, Psychotronic, and LGBTQ+, the Scala showed a different double-bill every day with legendary Saturday All-Nighters, music gigs and club nights. Over a million people passed through its doors, including future filmmakers, musicians, writers, artists, actors, and activists, who would credit the Scala as part of their cultural inspiration.

This unique book gathers all 178 of the Scala’s iconic monthly programmes along with rare photographs, ephemera, and an in-depth, often outrageous time-travelling commentary to take the reader behind the scenes of the cinema described by John Waters as “a country club for criminals and lunatics and people that were high… which is a good way to see movies”.

A must-have for cinephiles everywhere
Financial Times Weekend Film Book of the Year 2018
Winner of the 2019 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award