Like ‘a missing Picasso’: As Swifties ponder Clara Bow, KC man finds her lost film

Thanks to Taylor Swift, Clara Bow might be on the verge of a huge new wave of popularity. So, it appears Kansas City filmmaker Gary Huggins picked a good time to make his discovery of a lifetime.

Huggins, who grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, found a lost silent film featuring the actress known as “The It Girl.” It’s a comedy short — just 11 minutes long — called “The Pill Pounder,” made in 1923.

David Stenn, author of “Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild” (1988) and the world’s preeminent expert on her films, indicated that about 80% of all silent movies have been lost.

“So to find a missing film of hers, exactly a century later, I’ve never heard of that before,” he said. “It’s a miracle. That’s not a word I use lightly. It’s a dream come true.

“In the world of film history, it’s like finding a missing Picasso.”

With Stenn’s help, Huggins sold “The Pill Pounder” to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which restored it and will show it with another Bow restoration (“Dancing Mothers”) on April 11 at the historic Palace of Fine Arts Theatre there.

The next week, on April 19, Swift will release her “The Tortured Poets Department” album, which, as any Swiftie worth his or her salt knows, will include a song titled “Clara Bow.”

When Swift unveiled the album tracks last month, multiple online publications asked and answered the question “Who is Clara Bow?” Speculation has run rampant about what the lyrics by the most famous entertainer in the world (and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce’s girlfriend) will say about a woman who was once the most famous movie star in the world.

But Clara Bow was more than a movie star.

“She was a role model for a whole generation of young women who were changing the world,” Stenn said. “In the ’20s, women for the first time had jobs. They cut their hair. They raised their skirts. They drank. They smoked. … They were doing things that women had never done before.”

“The Pill Pounder” was made before all that. Directed by Gregory La Cava (“My Man Godfrey,” 1936; “Stage Door,” 1937), it focuses on a small-town pharmacist. Bow has a small role as the girlfriend of an annoying customer.

“It documents Clara Bow at the very beginning,” said Anita Monga, artistic director of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. “She’s only 17 years old in this film. And I think she’d been on film maybe two or three times before, and just in small, tiny moments. It is always interesting to see a major, major star caught on film before she was real famous.”

Both Monga and Stenn credited Huggins not only for recognizing the importance of his find, but also for sharing it with the world.

Huggins obtained the film Oct. 8 in Omaha at an auction of movie posters and other memorabilia from film distributor Modern Sound Pictures, which had closed years before after operating since 1937.

Never having attended such an auction, Huggins wasn’t sure what to expect but hoped to find an old movie or two he could resell. He didn’t think there would be any silent films, much less one of “missing Picasso” proportion.

“What they had were thousands of reels and other stuff, way too many to catalog,” Huggins said. “So they put everything into a parking lot, stacked on tables, and they went table by table and auctioned these stacks.”

He passed on the likes of “Santa and the Three Bears” and “Blood of the Vampire” before something caught his eye.

“I saw one stack that had one thing on top that looked interesting, a cartoon. So, I bought this whole stack for $20, and it was just pure chance I bought the one stack that had ‘The Pill Pounder’ on the bottom.”

It was weeks before he sifted through the material and realized he had something special. He discovered a film canister marked “Pill Pounder” and searched the internet, with no luck, for any information about the film.

“That’s what made me think that maybe I’d found something that’s considered lost,” he said.

He ultimately contacted Stenn, who has an ongoing relationship with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival folks.

“They have an archive, so I knew they’d take care of it,” Huggins said.

The bonus was earning enough from the sale of “The Pill Pounder” to travel to Tokyo for his own movie’s Japanese premiere. “Kick Me,” a “nightmare comedy” set in Kansas City, Kansas, played last year at the Kansas City Film Fest International and Panic Fest at the Screenland Armour. It is streaming on Tubi, Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

Monga said the Silent Film Festival plans to make “The Pill Pounder” available for other events and perhaps eventually for wider distribution. She said her group, like most major film archives, searches the world for such lost treasures.

“I love when these things happen,” she said. “I love when people find stuff in a parking lot in the middle of the country or in an old gardening shed in the south of France.

“It really takes an interested eye to cherish this bit of cinema history.”

Evidently, Taylor Swift also has an interested eye.

“To name your song ‘Clara Bow’ means she knows who Clara Bow is,” Stenn said. “That means that her hundreds of millions of fans will now know who Clara Bow is. So the timing of it is just surreal.”