Unfinished film (1966)
Prior to forming The Red Crayola, Mayo Thompson and Frederick Barthelme collaborated on an amateur avant-garde film in the summer of 1966. They eventually abandoned the project and destroyed the film.
Retrospectives
Frederick Barthelme, 1996[1]
So there we were in the Red Krayola [...] a name that had come to us while trailing down Main Street in my roofless [...] blue Fiat, shooting 16mm film for a movie we were making at the time (because, before we were a band we were filmmakers, you see). I do not remember what the movie was called; I do not know what became of the evidence. It had burned film, hand-tinted frames, stop-action stuff, cartoons, action scenes, recreations of Godard and Truffaut and much more. It was an amalgam. We had seen Cleo from 5 to 7 and dozens of other fine films, and we were 16mm. There was talk of an Eclair, the camera, not the pastry.
Mayo Thompson, 2015[2]
I had been making movies when I met [Barthelme], I had a 16-millimeter Bolex and I was making movies, and I asked him to be my star and he said he would, so he was my star. So I filmed, we filmed, something like that. We had a 500-foot roll of film and we had maybe 400 feet of it full already and we were getting ready—we had more coming. But when I came back from Europe I said, “Dude, the way forward, I think, is to start a band.” I’d already done a few folk house gigs, coffeehouse gigs, sung a couple of songs, done one thing on the radio, and he said, “No, you should do that on your own.” I said, “Listen, I’m not doing anything on my own. Forget it. I know what I can do on my own, that’s really not very interesting. Could we please do this together?” And so he agreed and we then destroyed the film that we had made. We drove in his car and I had reeled it out of the window and it just disappeared behind us; a cavalier relation to hundreds of dollars of production, much of it paid for by my wonderful, delightful, supportive, ever-supportive mother, and so on and so on and so on.