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gale-gentlepenguin · 16 days ago

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So my friend @knightsweeties has been getting me to think about DC lately. And one of the things I’ve been doing what my take would be on some of the heroes and villains. At the time we have only talked about Gotham.

So I wanted to share my Take on one of DC’s greatest Villains, The Joker

Gale Cut: The Joker

What would I do differently with the Joker?

I think the biggest problem with the joker is that DC seems to forget what the Joker is. He isn’t just some chaos loving guy dressed as a clown. No, he is a Clown that wants to make fun of society! Everything he does is for the sake of the bit! That’s what the joker is, a clown committed to the bit in an insane degree.

All his plans need to revolve around a joke, and if the joke isn’t funny, he won’t do it.

Now for example. Joker could be reading the newspaper and see how the cost of fuel has gone up.

So what does he do? He fills the entire street with Whoopee cushions because he wanted to show Gotham has a real “Gas Problem”

Maybe he runs into a renown surgeon and decides to cut his limbs off and reattach them so he can have him “In stitches”

Or maybe Gotham is having a lobster festival. So Joker decides to light the coast line on fire. To help bring things to… A boil.

The point is Joker only wants to make jokes and do what’s funny to him.

Is he still psychotic and kills people? Absolutely, but only if he thinks it’s funny.

Joker will never do something if he doesn’t find it amusing. Thats the point. He only cares about the comedy of the situation.

And before anyone says this joker is soft. He is not.

He kidnapped orphans and injected them with joker venom. His joke was that “You can’t kidnap unwanted children. What I did was adoption.”

He then proceeded to blow up the orphanage with most of the staff inside and send the jokerized kids to every school in Gotham to show how the school system was “The real joke.”

————-

Now for his relationship with Harley.

Oh it’s still toxic but very different.

Joker didn’t manipulate her with some sob story.

Joker simply made her laugh. He could tell that deep down that she needed someone that got her humor. And as someone that appreciates a good sense of Humor, joker recruited Harley.

Though instead of a toxic domestic abusive relationship, I decided to go a different direction.

Joker doesn’t understand emotions, and thus Doesn’t get that Harley is in love with him. If she ever confessed to him, he would look confused and ask what the punchline is?

To Joker, Harley is someone that can provide feedback if a joke is funny. And if she likes the joke. More of a reason to do it. Because if someone else finds the joke funny, that’s even better!

Though Joker isn’t above slapstick if Harley messes up his plans. But it’s never a portrayal of abuse in the domestic abuse sense. More like him slapping her with a trout.

To Harley, Joker is someone that showed her the truth. Society is a joke, and all it needs are people to show the people the punchline.

Now if something were to happen to Harley or if Harley stopped getting the joke. Joker would shrug and move on. He does value her insight and her opinion, but to say it is genuine care is incorrect. If it means a funny enough gag. He’d kill her without hesitation.

—————-

Joker being in love with Batman is dumb to me. He’s also not Batman’s true opposite. So for their dynamic I actually did change it.

Joker sees Batman as the funniest Joke in Gotham. A grown man dressed as a bat fighting crime in a city more corrupt than anywhere else? That’s pure comedy.

Joker even asked Batman to team up with him early on. “You’re a bat, I’ve been driven bats. We’d be a great comedy duo!”

But what joker found out was that Batman has no sense of humor. He needs to make this man laugh!

Joker views Batman as the straight man in the comedy routine. Having him react is what he wants!

Batman sees Joker as insane, and in need of help. So despite everything, believes there is still someone that can be saved.

Joker doesn’t care about Batman’s identity. It would be like finding out the punchline to a joke without the set up. And if anyone tried to spoil it. He would kill them.

Now Joker is willing to kill Batman, but only if the way he kills him would be funny enough to justify killing him. Joker only cares about what’s funnier

————

What’s Joker’s backstory?

It doesn’t matter. And joker likes it that way. All he knows is that he had one REALLY bad day. And that’s all he needs to know.

Anything else would be unnecessary.

#gale cut #joker #my take on the joker #Batman

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justforbooks · 5 days ago

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David Lynch

US director whose wildly unconventional films burrowed into the unsavoury depths of his nation’s psyche

David Lynch, who has died aged 78, was the most original film-maker to emerge in postwar America, as well as the greatest cinematic surrealist since Buñuel. His understanding of desire, fantasy and dread was unparalleled; the Paris Review called him “the Edward Hopper of American film”.

He made his debut with the experimental Eraserhead (1977), shot in sooty black-and-white and set in a churning industrial landscape where a man with a tombstone-shaped pompadour tends to his mewling, reptilian baby. From the first frames, Lynch mapped out a cinema of the subconscious that thrived on its own dream logic and nightmare imagery. It shaped everything he did, including his masterpiece Blue Velvet (1986), in which an innocent young man (Kyle MacLachlan) discovers a human ear and is drawn into the sleazy, violent world of a psychopath (Dennis Hopper) and a terrorised torch singer (Isabella Rossellini).

That film introduced into the archetype of cosy small-town America some potent notes of scepticism and revulsion that have never been dispelled.

This project to burrow into the unsavoury depths of his country’s psyche continued with the television whodunnit Twin Peaks, co-created with Mark Frost, which ran for two series in 1990 and 1991 then spawned a big-screen prequel, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). The show returned 25 years later in a bold but often harrowing and impenetrable third series that, despite being made for TV, was voted the best film of 2017 by Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound magazines. To preserve the spell cast by his work, Lynch refused to be drawn on explanations. Asked what the third helping of Twin Peaks was about, he replied: “It’s about 18 hours.”

He exposed the horrors lurking beneath apparently placid exteriors, and found beauty in the quotidian, the industrial – “I’d rather go to a factory any day than walk in the woods” – or the repellent: “If you don’t know what it is, a sore can be very beautiful.” For all the darkness of Lynch’s vision, his films could also be extremely funny, peppered with verbal and visual non sequiturs, skew-whiff line readings, slapstick violence and comic embarrassment. The mix of folksy naivety and elusive strangeness in his work extended to his persona and even his wardrobe: 1950s-style slacks and blazer, and a shirt buttoned to the gullet.

He drank a milkshake in the same diner (Bob’s Big Boy) every day for seven years between the late-70s and mid-80s. Watching him on set, the novelist David Foster Wallace observed: “It’s hard to tell if he’s a genius or an idiot.” The musician Sting, who starred in his science-fiction adventure Dune (1984), called him “a madman in sheep’s clothing” while Mel Brooks, who produced Lynch’s second film, The Elephant Man (1980), described the affable director as “Jimmy Stewart from Mars”.

Though his films were wildly unconventional, Lynch was still nominated three times for the best director Oscar. (He won an honorary Oscar in 2019.) Wild at Heart (1990), a road movie marked by baroque violence and homages to The Wizard of Oz, won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and he was named best director by the same festival in 2001 for Mulholland Drive, a warped neo-noir thriller about an aspiring actor (Naomi Watts) whose dreams of stardom disintegrate horribly after she befriends the amnesiac survivor of a car accident (Laura Harring). Developed by Lynch from his own butchered TV pilot for a series rejected by the ABC network, Mulholland Drive was one of his most seductively strange pictures.

But linear narrative was not beyond him, as he proved with two deeply moving films based on real events: The Elephant Man, about the severely deformed Joseph Merrick (“John” in the screenplay) paraded as a circus freak in the Victorian era, and The Straight Story (1999), in which an elderly man travels 300 miles on a riding mower to see his ailing brother. Both earned Oscar nominations for their lead performers (John Hurt and Richard Farnsworth respectively), which served as a reminder that Lynch’s skill as a director of actors could sometimes be obscured by his extraordinary imaginative powers.

He was born in Missoula, Montana, to Edwina (nee Sundholm), known as Sunny, who occasionally taught English, and Donald Lynch, whose job as a research scientist for the US government’s Department of Agriculture dictated the family’s peripatetic lifestyle. When Lynch was two months old they uprooted to Sandpoint, Idaho, and by the time he was 14 they had moved a further four times.

He described himself as a “troubled” child who was quick to intuit that all was not well. “I learned that just beneath the surface there’s another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn’t find the proof. It was just a feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force – a wild pain and decay – also accompanies everything.” The aftertaste of that memory can be found throughout Lynch’s work but particularly in the opening of Blue Velvet, where a montage showing schoolchildren, roses and white picket fences gives way to shots of insects thrashing in the undergrowth.

Having shown an aptitude for painting since adolescence, Lynch began studying art at the age of 18 at the Boston Museum School, then dropped out after a year to travel to Europe with his friend (and future production designer) Jack Fisk, only to return to the US a fortnight later. He got on better at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where his canvases took a darker turn (one work, The Bride, showed a woman performing an abortion on herself). It was there that Lynch met Peggy Lentz, a fellow student, who in 1967 became the first of his four wives. Together they had a child, Jennifer, and there have been almost as many attempts to link the pressures of youthful parenthood to the plot of Eraserhead as there have been theories about what exactly that film means, with its flying sperm-like creatures, roast chickens that writhe when sliced, and a balloon-cheeked chanteuse who lives behind the radiator.

He had his first solo exhibition in 1967, the same year he made his debut film work, the one-minute loop Six Men Getting Sick. He received a grant from the American Film Institute to make his 34-minute 16mm featurette The Grandmother (1970), in which a neglected child grows an elderly companion from a seed. The film combined jerky stop-motion animation with live-action footage, and showcased the sound design work of the great Alan Splet. Along with Fisk and the composer Angelo Badalamenti, Splet would become one of Lynch’s most vital collaborators.

In 1972, Lynch began work on Eraserhead. The shoot lasted five years, with regular pauses whenever the production ran out of money; Lynch would then supplement the budget with cash from family and friends (Fisk and his wife, the actor Sissy Spacek, were among those who donated) and by working odd jobs, including a paper round. After his marriage broke down, he also slept in the stables where the film was being shot. When it was finally released, Eraserhead was received with bafflement in many quarters, and with a slow-dawning fanaticism by those who caught it in the midnight movie slots at cinemas in the US, where it played, in some cases, for several years consecutively.

The film attracted the admiration of the poet Charles Bukowski and the musician Tom Waits, and went on to influence film-makers including Terry Gilliam and Darren Aronofsky, the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, who reportedly screened it to the cast and crew of The Shining to put them in the appropriate mood.

During the early stages of production on The Elephant Man, Lynch’s attempts to design the complicated makeup failed catastrophically. But the finished film, with makeup by Christopher Tucker, a clammy feel for Victorian England and some unmistakable Lynchian touches (such as the main character’s birth in a giant ball of smoke), was an outstanding success. It melded the director’s sensibility with compassionate, classical storytelling, even if it did play fast and loose with the facts (the real Merrick, for instance, took a healthy cut of profits from being exhibited).

Lynch’s next project, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling space epic Dune, was the only one of his films to escape his control entirely, and to be released in a form not approved by him. He was unsuited to the rigours of blockbuster film-making, and his attempts to wrestle Herbert’s many-tentacled narrative into coherent shape were doomed. The film was an expensive flop – Lynch called it “a fiasco” – but it still contained astonishing sets, costumes and sound design. And it introduced Lynch to MacLachlan, who played the bland hero and would become the director’s on-screen alter ego, the Mastroianni to his Fellini, in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. In the latter, MacLachlan played the coffee-and-cherry-pie-loving FBI agent Dale Cooper, whose dreams guide his detective work as strongly as any physical clues.

The experience of making Dune left Lynch drained and depressed. “I was almost dead,” he said. “Dune took me off at the knees. Maybe a little higher.” He amused himself by contributing a four-panel comic strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, to the LA Reader newspaper; it ran for nine years, during which time his drawings of a dog chained in a yard remained unaltered and only the text in the speech bubbles changed.

His fortunes were revived, along with his right to final cut, with the sumptuous and terrifying Blue Velvet, a project he had been planning since before Dune. The novelist JG Ballard called it “the best film of the 1980s – surreal, voyeuristic, subversive”.

Wild at Heart could only look frivolous by comparison, despite game performances by Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as the lovers on the run. But Lynch was back at the height of his powers with the first series of Twin Peaks, which began with the discovery of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) washed up dead and wrapped in plastic. It altered television irrevocably, paving the way for shows such as The X-Files and Lost, True Detective and The Killing; David Chase also cited it as an influence on The Sopranos.

That enthusiastic reception made it all the more bruising for Lynch when Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was widely panned. In its focus on the days leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder, the film sacrificed the quirkiness of the series in favour of an intense mood of violence and suffering, and it was several years before the picture was reappraised more positively.

Lynch’s next film, Lost Highway (1996), was a profoundly unsettling thriller that hinged on an audacious narrative fracture: one moment a jazz saxophonist suspected of murder is sitting in his prison cell; the next he has vanished and the guards find in his place a young mechanic who has no idea how he got there. The film was steeped in deadpan humour and violent imagery (there is a memorable death-by-coffee-table), as well as nausea-inducing high-speed driving footage that would be subverted comically in his next movie, The Straight Story, which never exceeded 4mph.

Acclaim for The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive restored Lynch to his late-80s standing – the latter went on to be voted the best film of the century so far in a poll of critics conducted by the BBC in 2017. His last film, Inland Empire (2006), was concerned, like Mulholland Drive, with an actor (Dern) suffering a breakdown. But at three-hours-plus and with an unusually ugly visual style (it was shot by Lynch on a handheld Sony digital camera), as well as a meandering narrative interrupted occasionally by a rabbit sitcom complete with laugh-track, it offered little of the compensatory seductiveness of the director’s other films.

That said, Lynch was not alone in feeling that Dern deserved an Oscar nomination, even if his decision to express this view by sitting on a Hollywood street corner with a cow and a poster of the actor’s face was more unorthodox than the usual method of taking out a full-page ad in the trade papers.

With the exception of the third series of Twin Peaks, Lynch devoted the rest of his days to painting, music and writing, while resisting suggestions that he had retired from film-making: “I did not say I quit cinema. Simply that nobody knows what the future holds.” Among the albums he released was the avant-garde blues collection Crazy Clown Time (2011). He also worked with the journalist Kristine McKenna on the memoir Room to Dream (2018), in which her biographical chapters about him alternate with ones in which he muses on what she has written and adds his own reflections, and gave an uncanny performance as the eye-patch-wearing, cigar-smoking film-maker John Ford in the final scene of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans (2022). Though initially reluctant to take the role, he was persuaded by Dern and by Spielberg’s assurance that there would be a large bag of Cheetos waiting in his dressing room. “Any chance I can, I get them,” Lynch said.

He was a passionate advocate of transcendental meditation, writing and speaking at length on the ways in which it had helped his work and enabled him to “catch fish” – his favourite metaphor for the creative process. (“If you get an idea that’s thrilling to you, put your attention on it and these other fish will swim into it.”) The clarity engendered by meditation was perhaps at odds with the gnomic quality of much of his work.

Last year, he revealed that a lifetime of smoking had left him with emphysema. “I can hardly walk across a room,” he said. “It’s like you’re walking around with a plastic bag around your head.”

He is survived by his fourth wife, Emily Stofle, whom he married in 2009, and their daughter, Lula; by a daughter, Jennifer, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; by a son, Austin, from his second marriage, to Mary Fisk (sister of Jack), whom he married in 1977 and divorced in 1987; and by Riley, his son with Mary Sweeney, who edited and produced many of his films from the 1980s onwards, as well as co-writing The Straight Story, and whom he married in 2006 and divorced the following year.

🔔 David Keith Lynch, director, born 20 January 1946; died 16 January 2025

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

#just for books #David Lynch #in memoriam

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vetteltea · 1 year ago

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Sebastian Vettel and Baking Christmas Treats [no warnings]

Day 3 of the Vetteltea Advent Calendar

You have never been able to understand how your husband brings such a gentle wave of peace to a household, but you would never complain.

Complaining would be pointless, especially when the ability to keep such a peaceful home had gained you an extra hour in bed that morning. It would have been so simple to let sleep overtake you, bury your head into your husband’s pillow and drift back into slumber, but curiosity had taken the better of you.

For a start, there was music coming from downstairs, upbeat, festive songs floating through the open-plan kitchen and up the stairs. You could hear his voice, singing along to each song which came on, only seemingly more performative in his vocals as they continued. Without hesitation, you slipped on the dressing gown which he had lovingly left at the end of your bed, adjusting the blankets on the bed and slipping away from the bedroom.

“Sweetheart?” Your footsteps were clearly not as subtle as you had intended. It either must have been that or the fact that you had stepped on the one creaky stair; both of you kept reminding one another it needed fixing, though with the life you both lead, sometimes it was easier to place a job aside for another day. “Are you coming to join?”

Stepping into the kitchen, you were certain you felt your heart melt and rejoin in various patterns. Your husband stood at the counter, blonde curls which he had finally let you trim still as unruly as when you had first met. He’s wearing an old t-shirt, his pajama pants are clearly stained, though to you he is still the most handsome man in the universe. In one hand, he holds a baking tray, shortbread biscuits already baked and if your visual clues are correct, ready for decorating. In the other, a blinking, smiling one-year-old, her curls identical to her father, but blessed with your eyes.

“Good morning, Momma!” His voice raises an octave, gently bouncing your daughter in his grasp and placing down the baking tray, his free hand now motioning you over. Your routine settles in, pressing a soft kiss to your daughters forehead, another to Sebastian’s lips.

“Are we decorating, then?” You adjust the sleeves of your dressing gown, making sure that they won’t dip into the icing or sprinkles he had already bought out. It had become a tradition when you were first dating, long before the birth of your daughter or even moving in together; the first weekend of December was for making Christmas Cookies and watching movies. Whereas last year was some slapstick about a holiday romance, you were more than excited to flick back to an animation this year for the youngest member of the family.

The youngest member in question has already transfixed onto the bright colors of the icing and sprinkles, cooing loudly and attempting to reach her tiny hand to grasp at the decorations. Your husband has always been a firm believer in physical development, hence why he gently leant forward, letting her hands grab onto what he thought would be one of the cookies they had baked whilst you had been asleep.

It all happens too quickly for you to stop; one hand dips into the royal blue icing before lifting dramatically at the sensation, flinging her tiny paw away from the counter and into your husband’s face, his chin and lips now frosted in icing.

For a moment, you think you’re about to have a crying baby and an annoyed husband - but, this is Sebastian. More importantly, his daughter inherits so many of your traits, though one which he holds close to his heart; the ability to laugh and smile anything off. Immediately, your daughter falls into a bout of giggles, her father being painted bright blue clearly amusing.

And of course, you can’t disagree, laughing alongside the baby as you walk over to the drying rack, collecting some kitchen paper to wipe away the frosting.

“Thank you, my darling.” He shakes his head at the grinning baby, still in fits of giggles as you gently take her hand, wiping away the remaining icing, before turning the attention to your husband, gently cleaning his jaw and chin. When the icing only remains on his lips, you pull away, smirking.

“I think you missed-” He begins, before realizing your intentions, his own grin mirroring your own. Lips are finally back on his own, the feeling of kissing you always identical to the first time; how his heart had raced and was shocked to believe it was actually happening. You were kissing him.

He would have kept it up, completely forgotten the cookies for another hour, if he hadn’t felt a tiny hand on his cheek, a whine from his daughter. The moment he pulls away, her tiny face is pressed to yours, adamant that she now wants kisses from her mama. The two of you trade her off, letting her nuzzle into your chest and blink up at your face whilst keeping eye contact with her father.

“Traitor.” He mumbles. “My own girls are against me!” It’s said with nothing but the sincerest amount of love, really.

“Awah, she just wants to decorate cookies, don’t you?” Your attention presses to look at the baby, kissing the top of her forehead. Sebastian doesn't hesitate this time in stepping forward, his arm around your shoulder as you both step back towards the cookies, keeping traditions whilst adding a third member to the memories.

#Sebastian Vettel #SV5 #Sebastian Vettel x Reader #Sebastian Vettel Imagine #Sebastian Vettel One Shot #Sebastian Vettel x You #Reader Insert #F1 #Formula 1 #F1 x Reader #Sebastian Vettel Blurb #Sebastian Vettel x Y/N

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safedistancefrombeingsmart · 2 months ago

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🥳

“We are thrilled beyond words that Martin has agreed to host our 20th birthday gala,” says Slapstick director Chris Daniels. “He is known and loved worldwide for a huge variety of iconic roles, but what makes him extra perfect for the festival is that he is charming, witty and a genuine admirer of the comedies and comedians Slapstick champions.”

#martin freeman #Silent Comedy Gala

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blueiscoool · 29 days ago

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Century-Old Clara Bow Silent Film Believed Lost Forever Found

Long-Lost Clara Bow Silent Film Found in a Omaha Parking Lot.

The Pill Pounder, one of the key titles in the CV of the iconic flapper, has enjoyed a belated revival at the San Francisco Silent film festival

A century after she first began to turn heads, Clara Bow is “It” once more. The iconic flapper of the silent film era inspired Margot Robbie’s character Nellie in Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood epic Babylon, is namechecked on Taylor Swift’s forthcoming album The Tortured Poets Department, and yesterday at the San Francisco Silent film festival, one of her earliest films was shown for the first time since the days of bathtub gin.

The story of the film’s discovery has already caused excitement online. Film-maker Gary Huggins inadvertently snapped up a slice of lost silent film history at an auction in a car park in Omaha, Nebraska, that was selling old stock from a distribution company called Modern Sound Pictures. Hoping to bid on a copy of the 1926 comedy Eve’s Leaves that he had spotted on top of a pile, Huggins was informed that he could only buy the whole pallet of movies, not individual cans. The upside? The lot was his for only $20.

Huggins soon discovered that his new pile of reels included 1923’s The Pill Pounder, a silent comedy that had been thought to be lost for decades. It is a short, two-reel film, shot on Long Island, New York, and directed by Gregory La Cava, best known for later classics such as My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937). The film stars rubber-faced vaudeville veteran Charlie Murray, the so-called “Irish comedian” who was actually from Laurel, Indiana. He plays a hapless pharmacist, the “pill pounder” of the title, who is trying to host a clandestine poker game in the back room of his drugstore. What few realised until Huggins watched the film, was that it also features 17-year-old Bow in a supporting role. She plays the girlfriend of Murray’s son, played by James Turfler, who had already appeared with Bow in her second film Down to the Sea in Ships, directed by Elmer Clifton and screened in 1922. Turfler’s character is the butt of some bizarre gags. At one point, he chugs a jug of effervescent “fomo seltzer” and Bow watches in horror as he floats up to the ceiling.

In this, one of her earliest surviving performances on film, Bow looks even younger than her years. Although she lacks the sleek Hollywood glamour she later acquired, she has the charisma to turn a thankless bit-part into something of a scene-stealer. The critics took note: based on the evidence of this film, the Exhibitors’ Trade Review described her as “perhaps the most promising of the younger actresses”. In his introduction to the film at San Francisco’s grand Palace of Fine Arts theatre, Bow’s biographer, the screenwriter David Stenn, speculated that the actor may have forgotten that she made the film, as she never talked about it. It was made during a traumatic period in her life, only a few weeks after her mother’s death following prolonged mental illness. He invited us to imagine how Bow might have felt appearing in a lighthearted slapstick comedy in such circumstances.

The film, which has been restored by the festival’s organisers and was screened with accompanying music from composer Wayne Barker, now looks remarkably good for its age. The festival’s senior film restorer, Kathy Rose O’Regan, said it was in great shape when they received it. She added: “We imagined it was screened maybe a few times, but there’s hardly any damage – a few scratches here and there, some dirt, but overall in pretty stellar condition.”

Now it has been freshened up and looks its best, but it is still incomplete, being in what Stenn called a “beta version”.

That’s because the copy Huggins found was not from the 1920s, but a 35mm print from the 1950s or 1960s of an edit of the film that was destined to become part of a 16mm compilation of old silent films with a comic voiceover poking fun at its archaic aspects. The intertitles have been removed and there are a few scenes and shots missing, too.

This process is deeply unflattering to old movies, but it has been responsible for preserving versions of silent films that would otherwise have been lost, including the Lois Weber melodrama Shoes from 1916. And the lack of titles are no barrier to following the film.

“For me, it is a pretty perfect 14-minutes of fun,” says O’Regan. “It would be nice to know what the titles were, but you can certainly get the gist without them.”

Stenn called the tale of the film’s discovery “miraculous” and led a round of applause for Huggins, who was in the audience. He explained that there was reason to believe that some of the discarded material was among the other cans that were sold at the Omaha auction. The hunt is on to round out The Pill Pounder, and several people have joined in the search, combing through thousands of reels. One Omaha-based film-maker and silent film enthusiast, Alexander Payne, was quick to offer his support.

The film fills in a brief blank period in Bow’s filmography. She shot the role – probably in just a couple of days – in the early “false start” phase of her film career. Bow, a tomboy from a troubled home in Brooklyn, made her debut after winning a magazine talent competition in 1921 but struggled to get her career off the ground.

“I wore myself out goin’ from studio t’studio, from agency t’agency, applyin’ for every possible part,” she later recalled. “But there was always something. I was too young, or too little, or too fat. Usually I was too fat.”

In 1923, she found her way into a handful of films, including The Pill Pounder, where she had the chance to shine in supporting roles, and this is when she finally got her ticket to Hollywood and Paramount.

“She’s not the star of the film, but you can’t take her eyes off her,” says O’Regan. “For the few minutes she’s there she’s divine, she’s fun, she’s full of energy.”

The festival screened The Pill Pounder alongside another new restoration. The feature film Dancing Mothers directed by Herbert Brenon in 1926, is a flapper drama that Bow made for Paramount, in one of her last supporting roles. She plays the reckless daughter of a lonely woman (Alice Joyce) who tires of staying home while her husband and daughter party hard in New York and steps out to go nightclubbing. Bow completely pulls focus from the grownups around her, playing a hedonistic minx, whose body spasms with pleasure when she sips a cocktail.

Stenn described the later film as “like watching a star being born”. Finally, Bow was able to make good on her early promise and start her career as a leading lady. With the breakout comedy It directed by Clarence Badger in 1927, she became a genuine star for the ages. It is easy to look back and assume Bow was destined to become a sensation, but her overnight stardom took a good five years of hard work. The Pill Pounder offers a fascinating glimpse into the route that she took to get there.

By Pamela Hutchinson.

#Clara Bow #The Pill Pounder 1923 #Century-Old Clara Bow Silent Film Believed Lost Forever Found #Film-maker Gary Huggins #lost film #silent film #lost and found #flapper #the it girl #american actress #film star #silent film star #silent film era #1920s #1920s style #1920s cinema #1920s hollywood

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