Some people have all the luck:
It's a movie that hasn't been seen in decades, missing for so long that many didn't even know it existed.
That is, until it turned up in Omaha, Nebraska. ...
"Wow, I think I've discovered this film that nobody's seen in at least 50 years, if not 100," [Gary] Huggins said.
It's true: Huggins, a local filmmaker, had found the only known copy of "The Pill Pounder," a 1923 silent comedy film starring the legendary Clara Bow alongside Charles Murray.
Pretty much no information has existed about the film for decades; nobody has seen it for that long. Images of the film are few and far between:
Huggins ultimately sold the film to Clara Bow biographer David Stenn, who stressed the miraculousness of finding a film like this:
Stenn estimates that 80% of all silent movies have been lost due to the unstable chemicals used to make them, including about half of the movies Clara Bow was in. Throughout his career as a film preservationist, Stenn has helped find and restore at least three films she starred in.
"It's so rare, it's so obscure," he said. "It was made by an independent studio. It was made in Queens, New York."
Stenn plans to premiere the film next month at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the first time the movie will have been shown on a big screen in over a century.
As an aside, how did the film end up in Omaha? Stenn has an idea:
"What happened in the late 1950s and 60s was people would rent silent films for the whole market ,and silent film comedies, they would take them and they would make digest versions that you could buy a print and show it on your 16mm projector at home. They would make 16mm prints from the original 35mm prints, and somehow the original camera negative, the negative from the camera, you can not get more of the essential source than that, was sent to a film lab where they made prints from it. The prints were then sent to a store called Modern Sound in Omaha."
However it founds its way there, very cool that someone found it before it got trashed!
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