The Undercrank Productions restoration of “The Cardboard Lover” (1928) starring Marion Davies will screen at the Library of Congress Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper VA on Thursday, November 19th. This screening brings the film full circle – from residing in the vaults at the Packard Campus, unrestored and rarely shown, to the facility’s movie theater in a new 2K digital restoration. I will introduce the restoration I produced and will also perform my original score on the theater’s Walker digital Wurlitzer organ.
The route the film has taken actually begins with a screening of it that I accompanied during Mostly Lost in 2018. The film identification conference held annually in July at the Library of Congress 2012 to 2019 included evening screenings that showcased films in the Library of Congress’s collection that which were difficult or impossible to program but which were worth screening, due to the film’s being incomplete or having too much decomposition in the surviving matieral. Sometimes a film would chosen simply due to its undeserved obscurity, such as when The Brides Play (1922) with Marion Davies or Bellboy 13 (1923) with Douglas MacLean were shown in 2016. (Fun fact: both of these films wound up being Undercrank Productions DVD releases.) In other cases, a film might be missing a reel or two, or in the case with The Cardboard Lover, the surviving preserved edition had light-to-medium amounts of nitrate decomposition throughout the film.
My experience of that screening of The Cardboard Lover I accompanied in 2018 – and that of everyone at that show – was that the film brought down the house. It did so again in November of that year when I programmed it as part of a block of three Marion Davies silents that I accompanied at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring MD, and which were introduced by Marion Davies biographer Lara Gabrielle.
After the film’s copyright lapsed in 2024, and once I had finished work on a couple of other projects, I decided it was time to move ahead with restoring and releasing The Cardboard Lover. I ran a Kickstarter to fan-fund the project in 2025, and 626 silent film fans backed the project. Digital restoration technology had also advanced a good deal since 2018. Through the careful, detail-oriented work of Thad Komorowski and Samantha Davis of Cineaste Restoration LLC, working with a new scan of the LoC’s 35mm preservation negative, the decomposition visible throughout the film could be sufficiently minimized. I knew improvements were going to possible, but I was very impressed with how much better the film now looked.
The restored film was released on Blu-ray and DVD by my Undercrank Productions this past July and received many glowing reviews. Over the past 11 months it’s been shown at MoMA’s annual “To Save and Project” festival, at my Silent Clowns Film Series, at the Cinema Arts Centre on Long Island, at the Cinema Museum in London during the Kennington Bioscope’s annual Silent Weekend, and in Tokyo with benshi narration by Oda Takatora. There’s already a west coast screening being planned for early 2027.
And now, on November 19th, The Cardboard Lover starring Marion Davies will hit the big screen, in its newly restored state, at the Library of Congress Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper VA. I’m both honored and pleased as punch that one of my Undercrank Productions projects done in collaboration with the Library is being showcased at its theater. The show is free, and details about attending are here.
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