Harrisonburg’s beloved DIY venue Crayola House had its final show in 2024. Since then, a group has worked to document the show house’s more-than three-decade history in the film “No More Punk Time.” It debuts this weekend at the Virginia Film Festival. WMRA’s Calvin Pynn spoke with producer Pat Jarrett about the film and filed this report.
Crayola House had been the home to multiple generations of Harrisonburg punks since the early 1990’s, and its basement showcased hundreds of bands over the years – both local and from the broader D-I-Y scene who were passing through.
PAT JARRETT: It's very near and dear to those who lived the scene, but if you weren't part of the scene growing up, you can still connect it to kind of your own punk years when you're going to too many shows and basements and getting sweaty and drinking cheap beers.
That’s Pat Jarrett, one of the producers of No More Punk Time who, himself, was a newcomer to shows at Crayola House in its final years before the property was acquired by Matchbox Realty. He had been photographing show houses on a grant from the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art when he met fellow filmmakers Kyle Johnson and Terik Begic, who were interviewing attendees of the final Crayola show. The idea for the documentary came together that night.
JARRETT: We met literally on Old South High Street. Um they were recording interviews. If you see in the movie where you got the people on the last night sitting on the bench seat. I met them doing that and I was like, "What are you guys doing?" They're like, "I think we're going to make a movie." I was like, "Oh, wow. Can I help?" And they're like, "Yeah, sure. Let's keep in touch." And so that was the inception.
Johnson also produced the film while Begic directed. The next steps involved interviewing more than 60 people who had lived and played at Crayola over the years and tracking down decade’s worth of archival footage and photos of shows in the house’s basement.
JARRETT: That footage that was collected from back in the day just it and seeing it in kind of an outdated format, it was like it was the nostalgia bomb we needed. And for people that didn't know how far back Crayola House went, within the first 5 minutes of the film, you were just shuttled all the way back to 1990 thanks to this footage. It makes me so happy that we can tell the story through time because yeah, the last little bit was kind of monumental. But there are these ages. There are these, you know, populations that lived there and played there and loved there and peed there that came and went. And we have to weave these stories together.
Not all of those moments were caught on film, though. The stories that existed only in memory were told through animation.
JARRETT: We wanted a certain feeling of it – we didn’t want perfect animation, we didn’t want A.I. That would have been like the stake through the heart of this project.
Those were commissioned by local zine artists such as Chris Fulmer and Alex Dorney. The result? Visuals akin to zines that came to life.
JARRETT: So, we hired local people that had ties to Crayola House. Tarik [Begic] knew what he wanted it to feel like; I knew what I wanted it to feel like. It’s not a Pixar movie. It feels more like a zine than a Pixar movie.
No More Punk Time touches on an inherent impermanence in underground music scenes, as spaces like show houses often come and go. However, it also shows that Crayola House was an exception.
JARRETT: Some houses last for a year. Some houses have three good shows. and that's it. Crayola is an anomaly because it lasted 32 years. And there are a number of factors that made that remarkable. Part of it was the physical layout of the house, the fact it had it was in the shows were in the basement, the walls were thick, they're limestone. The only open door opened to a baseball field and a dual divided highway. And the neighbors tolerated the shenanigans.
No More Punk Time premieres Thursday night at the Virginia Film Festival. The showing sold out quickly, but there are also plans to screen the film again this Saturday at Infinite Repeats in Charlottesville followed by a show featuring the reunited Corn Rocket, a band that lived and played at the house in the early days. Crayola House also bore the band’s name before gaining its more colorful moniker.
Jarrett said that he and the crew behind No More Punk Time aim to continue telling the story of Crayola House with a podcast and are planning a home release for the documentary while pitching it to more film festivals. In the meantime, they could also take the film on the road and show it wherever they can…DIY style.
JARRETT: We are small enough that we can just literally bring a projector and a PA system and go to any place where you can hang a sheet and screen it.
For WMRA News, I’m Calvin Pynn.
Full disclosure: The Virginia Film Festival underwrites programming on WMRA.
