page_title: Clara Bow
section_title: Preferred Pictures
hierarchical_section_title: Clara Bow / Career / Preferred Pictures
caption_attribution_description: English: Single frame from newly found (June 2006) lost American drama film Maytime (1923) with Clara Bow and Ethel Shannon.
context_page_description: Clara Gordon Bow was an American actress who rose to stardom in silent film during the 1920s and successfully made the transition to "talkies" in 1929. Her appearance as a plucky shopgirl in the film It brought her global fame and the nickname "The It Girl". Bow came to personify the Roaring Twenties and is described as its leading sex symbol.
  Bow appeared in 46 silent films and 11 talkies, including hits such as Mantrap, It, and Wings. She was named first box-office draw in 1928 and 1929 and second box-office draw in 1927 and 1930. Her presence in a motion picture was said to have ensured investors, by odds of almost two-to-one, a "safe return". At the apex of her stardom, she received more than 45,000 fan letters in a single month.
  Two years after marrying actor Rex Bell in 1931, Bow retired from acting and became a rancher in Nevada. Her final film, Hoop-La, was released in 1933. In September 1965, Bow died of a heart attack at the age of 60.
context_section_description: On July 22, 1923, Bow left New York, her father, and her boyfriend behind for Hollywood. As chaperone for the journey and her subsequent southern California stay, the studio appointed writer/agent Maxine Alton, whom Bow later branded a liar. In late July, Bow entered studio chief B. P. Schulberg's office wearing a simple high-school uniform in which she "had won several gold medals on the cinder track". She was tested and a press release from early August says Bow had become a member of Preferred Pictures' "permanent stock". Alton and she rented an apartment at The Hillview near Hollywood Boulevard. Preferred Pictures was run by Schulberg, who had started as a publicity manager at Famous Players-Lasky, but in the aftermath of the power struggle around the formation of United Artists, ended up on the losing side and lost his job. As a result, he founded Preferred in 1919, at the age of 27.
  Maytime was Bow's first Hollywood picture, an adaptation of the popular operetta Maytime in which she essayed "Alice Tremaine". Before Maytime was finished, Schulberg announced that Bow was given the lead in the studio's biggest seasonal assessment, Poisoned Paradise, but first she was lent to First National Pictures to co-star in the adaptation of Gertrude Atherton's 1923 best seller Black Oxen, shot in October, and to co-star with Colleen Moore in Painted People, shot in November.
  Director Frank Lloyd was casting for the part of high-society flapper Janet Oglethorpe, and more than 50 women, most with previous screen experience, auditioned. Bow reminisced: "He had not found exactly what he wanted and finally somebody suggested me to him. When I came into his office a big smile came over his face and he looked just tickled to death." Lloyd told the press, "Bow is the personification of the ideal aristocratic flapper, mischievous, pretty, aggressive, quick-tempered and deeply sentimental." It was released on January 4, 1924.
  The New York Times said, "The flapper, impersonated by a young actress, Clara Bow, had five speaking titles, and every one of them was so entirely in accord with the character and the mood of the scene that it drew a laugh from what, in film circles, is termed a "hard-boiled" audience", while the Los Angeles Times commented that "Clara Bow, the prize vulgarian of the lot ... was amusing and spirited ... but didn't belong in the picture", and Variety said that "... the horrid little flapper is adorably played ..."
  Colleen Moore made her flapper debut in a successful adaptation of the daring novel Flaming Youth, released November 12, 1923, six weeks before Black Oxen. Both films were produced by First National Pictures, and while Black Oxen was still being edited and Flaming Youth not yet released, Bow was requested to co-star with Moore as her kid sister in Painted People (The Swamp Angel). Moore essayed the baseball-playing tomboy and Bow, according to Moore, said "I don't like my part, I wanna play yours." Moore, a well-established star earning $1200 a week—Bow got $200—took offense and blocked the director from shooting close-ups of Bow. Moore was married to the film's producer and Bow's protests were futile. "I'll get that bitch", she told her boyfriend Jacobson, who had arrived from New York. Bow had sinus problems and decided to have them attended to that very evening. With Bow's face now in bandages, the studio had no choice but to recast her part.
  During 1924, Bow's "horrid" flapper raced against Moore's "whimsical". In May, Moore renewed her efforts in The Perfect Flapper, produced by her husband. However, despite good reviews, she suddenly withdrew. "No more flappers ... they have served their purpose ... people are tired of soda-pop love affairs", she told the Los Angeles Times, which had commented a month earlier, "Clara Bow is the one outstanding type. She has almost immediately been elected for all the recent flapper parts". In November 1933, looking back to this period of her career, Bow described the atmosphere in Hollywood as like a scene from a movie about the French Revolution, where "women are holl
caption: Frame of Bow comforting Ethel Shannon in Maytime (1923), which had been classified as a lost film until a partial copy was found in New Zealand in 2009[50]
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