She’s in the news again for two reasons: One of her lost silent films was recently discovered at the bottom of a box of films that sold for $20 at an auction in Nebraska. It will be screened at a film festival next week.
Additionally, pop star Taylor Swift announced at the Grammy Awards that she was releasing a new album. One of the songs is called Clara Bow.
The lyrics to Swift’s song won’t be released until April 19, but fans are already drawing comparisons between Swift and Bow, the Brooklyn-born silent film actress, as both women rose to fame early in their career. young age and have also been the subject of criticism. The tabloid rumor mill feasts on their romantic relationships.
Bow was the first actress on screen to show that women could lead independent lives, said Bow biographer David Stenn.
“Her characters always had careers, and for a generation of women who had never seen anything like this before, it was life-changing,” Stenn said. “She seemed real to people.”
Bow’s lost film was found in October by filmmaker Gary Huggins, who didn’t know he had purchased the silent film when he picked up a box of old reels for $20 at an auction in the Nebraska.
Once he got home, he sat down to watch one of the reels of black and white silent film when he saw a familiar face.
The woman featured in the 12-minute main draw of “The Pill Pounder” had curly black hair and a cupid’s bow mouth, and she wore a cloche-style hat.
Huggins recognized Bow immediately.
1923’s “The Pill Pounder” features Bow when she was a teenager and not yet famous, in a small role as the girlfriend of an annoying drugstore customer.
The obscure clip Huggins found is scheduled to premiere at the 27th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival on April 11 along with another Bow film, “Dancing Mothers.”
“It’s going to be surreal to watch a film whose survival was unknown only six months ago,” Huggins, 56, said. “It’s such a charming little comedy that I hope audiences around the world get a chance to see it.”
When Huggins watched “The Pill Pounder” on his projector in Kansas City last year, he said he didn’t realize its significance. He only ended up with the film print because he had to buy a whole bin of 20 old reels to get a cartoon he spotted at the top of the pile.
Huggins said he went to Omaha with a hunch he might find some old films he could resell to pay for a trip to Japan this spring for a screening of his own film, “Kick Me.”
An Omaha auction house was clearing out a bunch of antique items acquired by a defunct local film distributor, and Huggins thought $20 was a good deal for a box of mystery reels.
“It was a horribly hot day, with the sun beating down on the parking lot where thousands of reels were being sold,” he said. “By pure chance, the box at the bottom of my pile happened to contain ‘The Pill Pounder’.”
Huggins had never heard of the film and said he couldn’t find anything about it online.
“It took me a few weeks to realize what I had discovered,” he said. “I began to suspect that it might have been a lost film.” Omaha’s 6 News first reported its rare discovery last month.
One of Huggins’ friends mentioned the discovery to David Stenn, a New York writer and producer who wrote a book about the legendary silent film star, “Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild.”
“I asked Gary to send me a quick capture of the film – an enlargement of one of the images – and my eyes bugged out,” Stenn said. “I couldn’t believe what I saw: 17-year-old Clara Bow, still unknown, in her third film, shot in a small studio in Queens.”
“I always thought ‘The Pill Pounder’ was a lost film,” he said. “Of all the old stories I have discovered, this is the most miraculous. That it is presented in such perfect condition is unheard of.
Stenn purchased the short from Huggins for an undisclosed price and paid to have it restored so it could be shown on the big screen, 101 years after its original premiere. Stenn is now searching for eight minutes of the film that were apparently cut from the copy Huggins found.
“The original would have been 20 minutes, so we have a little more than half that,” Stenn said. “I called everyone I can think of to see if anyone could have bought the rest at auction in Omaha.”
Even without those eight minutes, the film reveals why Clara Bow would soon become the most famous female star of her era in Hollywood, he said.
“She was America’s first sex symbol,” Stenn said. “Women wanted to be her and men wanted to be with her. She had a warmth and vulnerability that appealed to everyone.
At the height of Bow’s fame, the U.S. population was 119 million and about 80 million movie tickets were sold each week, he said, noting that Bow had directed 57 films.
“About a dozen of them were talking pictures, after sound came along,” Stenn said, referring to the first film to incorporate synchronized sound in 1927.
“Clara Bow had a nervous stutter and a Brooklyn accent, so she was nervous about it,” he said. “Suddenly she felt inferior and insecure, and the work experience was very different. »
Bow grew up in poverty with a mother who suffered from mental illness. Her big break came when she was 16 and won a movie magazine’s “fame and fortune” contest in 1921. In 1928 and 1929, she was the No. 1 star at the box office, Stenn said , but her acting career ended in 1931 after she suffered an emotional breakdown. Bow was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and lived in Los Angeles until his death from a heart attack in 1965 at the age of 60.
About a third of Bow’s films are now extinct, Stenn said. The Library of Congress estimates that about 70 percent of all silent films have been lost due to time, improper storage and the flammable chemicals used in their manufacture.
“We now have a wonderful opportunity to see Clara Bow in ‘The Pill Pounder’ on the big screen,” Stenn said. “He’s a genius on the level of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and no one breathing right now would have seen this movie before.”
Huggins said he was excited about opening night in San Francisco.
“For me, the most exciting part of filming and discovering forgotten films is that moment of first contact, where the audience is confronted with something completely new,” he said. “To be a very small part of it, and add even a simple footnote to the history of silent cinema, is a dream come true.”
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