Newspaper Article

The battle to save the Curzon Soho

Romney, Jonathan

2016

Overview

The Curzon Soho and its audience aren't taking the threat lying down. Last year, a protest was fired off to Crossrail by Save Soho, an organisation devoted to halting the encroaching blandification of the West End's cosmopolitan core, and founded in response to the closure of cabaret venue Madame Jojo's ; it was signed by Save Soho's committee, including chairman Stephen Fry and Benedict Cumberbatch. Eddie Marsan tweeted \"I didn't go to film school, I went to the Curzon Soho\", and other celebrities have rallied to the cause on video. On curzonblog.com, you can find Matt Smith babbling excitedly, writer-director Charlie Kaufman musing ruefully and High-Rise director Ben Wheatley grumbling that he can't see the point of Crossrail 2 anyway: \"It's not that far to walk ... to Tottenham Court Road ... I'm getting heavier as I get older and I kind of need the exercise.\" As for the ripe, pithy cursing I mentioned earlier, that's the brashest, most singular weapon in the Save Curzon Soho arsenal. Earlier this year, the campaign put out a call for ideas to raise awareness, and the winning concept came from producer-director duo Sam and Ed Edwards. The result was Curse for [Curzon], a 90-second film you can watch online, in which a mix of volunteers -- some professional actors, some Curzon staff and film industry people -- fulminate with relish, reworking vibrant profanities from assorted movies, some with a familiar ring, others less so. It starts gently enough -- \"Listen you fuckers, you screwheads, here is a man who would not take any more...\" -- then gets saltier and angrier. The sources include Withnail and I, Pulp Fiction, The Exorcist, Melissa McCarthy vehicle The Heat, and -- not that you'd expect this to be the richest vein of obscenity -- Bridget Jones's Diary. \"We shot about three minutes worth of great swearing,\" says Ed Edwards, who directed it. [Ally Clow] himself delivers Ewen Bremner's line from Mike Leigh's Naked -- \"I'll tear your fuckin' heed open, eh!\"-- from a scene shot just up the road at a local landmark, the Lina Stores deli in Brewer Street. Before it finally folded in 1993, the Scala embodied wilder, more unpredictably diverse days. \"You'd have a drag queen all-nighter, then a few minutes later, all-day Tarkovsky,\" says the BFI's Jane Giles, who used to programme the Scala, and is currently writing a book about the venue. But she recognises that the particular cultural climate that fuelled such haunts -- a mixture of intellectual cinephilia, political dissent and rock'n'roll raciness -- has waned since then. \"There was a time when, intellectually and culturally, it was a way of expressing your discernment to go and see a Robert Bresson triple bill at the Everyman, drink a certain type of coffee and eat a certain type of cake. It was just the thing to do, but tastes change. It stopped being cool.\" Besides, the rising price of film-going -- up to [pound]15 at Curzon Soho, up to [pound]18 at its Bloomsbury sister cinema and Picturehouse Central -- mean that the fancy-free omnivorous browsing my generation practised is no longer so easy. Today, Giles says, \"cinema-going has become a wealthy person's occupation. You can't afford to take a risk on a film any more.\"

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Clow, Ally / Edwards, Ed