Mary Pickford Film Restored After Barn Find

The only copy of a 1911 film starring Mary Pickford, one of Hollywood's earliest stars, is being restored after its discovery in an old barn.

The restoration of the silent movie, titled Their First Misunderstanding, is being funded by the US Library of Congress and will be shown next month at Keene State College in New Hampshire.

The film is the first for which Canadian-born Pickford was given a credit in the advertising materials.

Before that, movie studios did not want actors to become household names because they would demand more money, said Pickford scholar Christel Schmidt, the editor of Mary Pickford: Queen Of The Movies.

Carpenter Peter Massie, who discovered the film along with six other vintage reels in a barn he was tearing down in 2006, is looking forward to seeing it.

"This is the coolest thing I've ever found on any job," he said.

The property where Mr Massie found the films apparently used to be a summer camp for boys, and the movies were probably shown to entertain the campers, said Larry Benaquist, who founded the film programme at Keene State.

Mr Massie donated the films to the college, and Mr Benaquist led the effort to identify and restore them.

Pickford, known as America's Sweetheart, was a co-founder of the United Artists film studio with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Sr, who later became her second husband, and helped establish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Pickford and Fairbanks Sr became one of Hollywood's earliest power couples and hosted parties attended by Noel Coward, F Scott Fitzgerald and HG Wells, among many others.

She retired from acting in 1933, but continued to produce films. She died in 1979.

The 10-minute comedy-drama stars Pickford and her first husband, Owen Moore, as newlyweds having their first argument. The first minute or so was destroyed, but the rest was in remarkably good condition, Mr Benaquist said.

He quickly determined that one of the reels was a lost 1913 silent film about Abraham Lincoln, but it took longer to identify the Pickford film because the 35mm celluloid had stuck to itself.

Pickford had been known only as Little Mary, The Girl With The Curls and The Biograph Girl, after her former studio, but that changed after Their First Misunderstanding, Mr Benaquist said.

"Now she was an actor with clout, and I think she used that to great advantage," he added.