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

wifr.com ^ | March 9, 2024 | Marlo Lundak

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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.

WHO IS CLARA BOW?

Clara Bow biographer David Stenn said she was the most popular film start of the late-1920s.

“The fact that this film was discovered a century after it was made, when does that happen?” he said.

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