100 years later, long-lost Clara Bow silent film found in parking lot

By Marlo Lundak
Published: Mar. 9, 2024 at 3:30 AM PST

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT/Gray News) - 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.

On a projector in a Kansas City home, Gary Huggins cues up a recent discovery. “I was relieved to find it wouldn’t explode!”, he said. Huggins soon refocused his attention from the technical to find something he definitely wasn’t expecting. “Wow, I think I’ve discovered this film that nobody’s seen in at least 50 years, if not 100,” Huggins said.

Huggins, a filmmaker himself, picked up the film at an auction in Omaha last year. “There was a distributor that had been in Omaha for decades that had gone out of business a while ago and this auction house had some of their films, and so I drove up just for that just to see what was up there,” Huggins said. Everything at the sale that day needed to be sold. “On one table, there were eight or nine stacks, about 3 or 4 feet high of films,” he said. It was an old cartoon on one pile that caught Huggins’ eye, but to get it, he had to buy the whole stack. “The stack was $20. It was the best 20 I’ve ever invested, for sure,” Huggins said. In that stack that Huggins bought was a silent film from 1923. “That was a big rush when I realized it was a Clara Bow,” he said.

(snip)

What Huggins bought in a parking lot in Omaha that day turned out to be a master copy from an original nitrate film printed on safety stock. “It’s completely mint and perfect,” Huggins said. While the internet seems to know everything, this movie called “The Pill Pounder” was nowhere to be found when Huggins went looking for more information on what he had playing on the projector inside his home. “Usually, when you look up a film online, somebody has something to say about it,” he said. At the time, he also didn’t know he had just found the only known copy of the film.

Link: https://www.wdbj7.com/2024/03/09/100-years-later-long-lost-clara-bow-silent-film-found-parking-lot/