Lost century-old silent film with star name-dropped by Taylor Swift turns up in Omaha parking lot in $20 auction
A century-old silent film believed to have been lost forever turned up in an Omaha parking lot – where it was auctioned off to an unassuming collector for a whopping $20.
“The Pill Pounder” will be screened for the first time in 101 years at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival next month after Kansas City filmmaker Gary Huggins scooped it up with a stack of film reels last year.
Huggins didn’t know the significance of his $20 haul but was shocked when he viewed one of the films and spotted actor Clara Bow, one of the biggest stars of the silent era whose name now lends itself to the title of a song on Taylor Swift’s forthcoming album.
He later learned it was the missing 1923 comedy short.
“It was the best $20 I’ve ever invested, for sure,” Huggins told WOWT-TV. “That was a big rush when I realized it was a Clara Bow.”
Clara Bow’s biographer David Stenn shared Huggins’ excitement over the incredible find, describing her as the “It Girl” of the late 1920s and the first sex symbol in American film.
“Men wanted to have her and women wanted to be her,” he said. “You have to imagine a time when the idea of a woman having independence and autonomy didn’t exist, and you went to the movies and saw Clara Bow. She was the first truly liberated woman on screen.
“The fact that this film was discovered a century after it was made … When does that happen?” he added.
Stenn estimates roughly 80% of all silent movies — including about half of Clara Bow’s filmography — have been lost due to the unstable chemicals used to create them.
Luckily, the copy Huggins purchased was a master printed on safety stock in perfect condition, but the filmmaker later ran into trouble when he went to look up “The Pill Pounder” online and hit a dead end.
“Usually, when you look up a film online somebody has something to say about it,” he said. “It seemed like nobody had seen it and that was the first clue that it was missing.”
Huggins later sold the reel to Stenn, who is restoring it before it screens in April.
“When someone says to me, ‘Would you be interested in a print of ‘The Pill Pounder’? I assumed they were making fun of me because I thought, ‘Would I be interested? It would be a miracle — and it is a miracle,” Stenn said.
Historians have compared Clara Bow to a modern-day superstar, making her connection to Taylor Swift no coincidence.
“She influenced her entire generation and successive generations after her, so in the 1930s, everyone said Jean Harlow is the new Clara Bow, in the 1940s it was Rita Hayworth, and in the 50s Marilyn Monroe and it went on and on and on,” Stenn said. “She didn’t break the mold, she created the mold.”
The silent film actress recently made a resurgence in pop culture after Swift announced the tracklist for her upcoming album “The Tortured Poets Department,” which includes a song titled “Clara Bow.”
The “Cruel Summer” singer has not shared why she used Bow in her album, which will be released on April 19, but fans have speculated it could be because both seemed to live similar lives, from their massive stardom at the height of their careers to the intense media scrutiny both endured.
While the forgotten silent film may shine light on Bow’s legacy, for Huggins it provided him the funds needed to attend the premiere of his own film, called “Kick Me,” in Tokyo, later this month.
