Two gems from the silent era get makeovers

TWO silent rarities, “The Curse of Quon Gwon” and “Her Wild Oat,” are on the bill Thursday in “Lost and Found,” the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ periodic series showcasing recently discovered archival prints or films that have been recently restored from new materials.

Programmer Randy Haberkamp expects an eclectic audience of not only traditional older fans of the silent-film form but a far younger crowd of aficionados. “I am finding with silent films there’s a whole group of kids who are really into it as performance art,” says Haberkamp. “We get a lot of Goth kids. They love the whole look of it, and they like the limitation of it. With silent films, you can talk to people about it and get them to understand the concept of music and pantomime and get them to say that sounds like something really cool. But when you get into older talkies, they just look at them as technically inferior movies.”

The Academy Film Archive restored both of the films on the program Thursday at the Linwood Dunn Theatre. “The Curse of Quon Gwon,” from 1917, is the first known feature made by Chinese Americans. Directed by Marion Wong, one of the few female directors during the silent era, the film never received an official release 80 years ago.

“It was this failed production company,” says Haberkamp. Still, he says, it’s impressive to think “that this Chinese American woman had this company of people and made a movie in 1917.”

San Francisco-based filmmaker Arthur Dong learned about the production company Wong ran with her sister while researching a documentary. He tracked down the daughters of the film’s lead actress and discovered that they had two 35mm nitrate reels, as well as 10 minutes of additional footage in 16mm. Dong brought the reels to the academy archive for preservation.

The nitrate original picture negative was preserved and a new print was made. It was then transferred to digital along with the 16mm print, whose picture quality was poor. The 40-minute film will be screened digitally.

According to the archive’s preservation officer, Joe Lindner, there was decomposition and shrinkage with the original negative. “That’s why we hurried to protect it,” says Lindner. “But the image quality is pretty good.”

There are no archival notes or letters to let archivists know if this is a complete print. “There was just handwritten sections [in the reels] where they were to have inter-titles [titles that further the story]. There are notes with numbers. We have no copy that has anything but the main titles.”

After the restoration was complete, the Library of Congress selected it in December to be added to the National Film Registry.

“Her Wild Oat,” from 1927, is one of the few surviving films starring silent superstar Colleen Moore. With her bobbed hair and bouncy demeanor, she brought the movie heroine from Mary Pickford’s Victorian damsel into the flapper era with 1922’s “Flaming Youth.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who chronicled the jazz age in such books as “The Great Gatsby,” once said: “I was the spark that lit up ‘Flaming Youth,’ and Colleen Moore was the torch.”

Moore, the precursor of such flapper stars as Louise Brooks and Clara Bow, is almost forgotten these days because most of her films have succumbed to nitrate disintegration.

In “Her Wild Oat,” she plays a young woman who owns a lunch wagon and falls for a young man who is a duke’s son but pretends to be his own chauffeur.

The film opened to decent box office and reviews Christmas Day 1927.

“When looking at her as a box-office star, she was always well regarded in terms of a performer and an earner,” says Lindner. “But this film is never talked about. It disappeared [after its initial release].”

Someone doing research on Mary Pickford discovered the 1927 nitrate print in the Czech National Film Archive. He identified the film and told the academy archive about the print.

“We brought the nitrate print here,” says Lindner. “It was in great shape.”

But the preservation wasn’t trouble-free -- every title in the film was in the Czech language. Because First National, which was sold to Warner Bros. in 1928, produced the film, a continuity script for the film was found at the Warner Bros. archives at USC. Save for a few gaps, it gave the archive the information for the main titles and title dialogue.

Michael Mortilla supplies live musical accompaniment for both films.

susan.king@latimes.com

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‘Lost and Found’

Where: The Linwood Dunn Theater, 1313 N. Vine St., Hollywood

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday

Price: $3 & $5

Contact: (310) 247-3600 or go to www.oscars.org.