Next weekend, London's BFI Imax cinema is holding a Bourne all-night movie marathon. Starting at 10.45pm on Saturday October 20, the entire Bourne trilogy (Identity, Supremacy and Ultimatum) will be screened, followed by the brilliant and caustic Team America: World Police. (If you haven't seen the latter, it features some entirely unjustified but very funny jibes at Bourne himself, Matt Damon.) But such all-night events, once a regular fixture in the UK, are few and far between these days. Whatever happened to the great all-nighters, those plentiful movie feasts on which film fans, insomniacs, reprobates, eloping couples and criminals on the run could gorge themselves? Most of my fondest cinemagoing memories relate to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when my then-girlfriend and I would often spend the twilight hours between midnight Saturday and breakfast on Sunday ensconced in the grandly seedy Scala Cinema in London's King's Cross.
You often felt you were taking your life, and your bodily hygiene, in your own hands when you entered the Scala, which was one of the thrilling things about it. But this feeling was amplified at the all-nighters, where the joy of being part of an excitable, expectant crowd of movie nuts was laced with the realisation that not all of them had taken their medication (while others had clearly taken too much). There were usually five movies, based around a particular theme or director; a road movies all-nighter included Wild At Heart, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and the freaky Truck Stop Women, while there was a memorably camp, pre-Christmas one featuring the original Hairspray, Shag and ABBA: The Movie. (People were dancing next to the screen; I was young and impressionable and had never seen anything like it.)
These were screened back-to-back, with enough time in between to grab another coffee, or some cake to stave off the munchies, which for some bizarre reason used to kick in whenever you breathed the Scala's fragrant air. My first all-nighter was a Cronenberg fest, which was scary - not so much the movies as the guy in front who kept nudging his snoozing girlfriend ever more violently. (During Videodrome: "Wake up, you're gonna miss the guy's face coming off..." During The Fly: "Oi, wake up, quick, he's gonna be sick on that bloke in a minute." And so poetically on...) Then there was the creepy man who was leaning just that little bit too close to me, and changed seats when I did - but then what can you expect if you come to an all-night serial-killer film show? (I bailed at Driller Killer, like the big girl's blouse that I am.) The real shock, though, was seeing King's Cross and its inhabitants when you rolled out on to the streets on Sunday morning. Or when you got home and glimpsed your zombie face and bloodshot eyes in the bathroom mirror.
I guess all-nighters went the same way as the rest of London's repertory scene, which was once alive with bargain-price double and triple bills, but has now all but vanished. Despite my nostalgia, I can't pretend I would be first in the queue for all-nighters if they were resurrected - as you get older it's a miracle if you can make it to the end of Newsnight without slipping into a deep and restful slumber. But what would it take to bring all-nighters back? And what are the best all-nighters you ever attended - or would like to?
