Won in a Closet / Won in a Cupboard (1914)
Production Company: Keystone. Director: Mabel Normand. Producer: Mack Sennett. Screenwriter: Mabel Normand? Cast: Mabel Normand, Charles Avery, Harry McCoy, Edgar Kennedy, Alice Davenport, Hank Mann. Transfer Note: Copied at 16 frames per second from a 35mm B&W negative produced under the direction of the Library of Congress from source material provided by the New Zealand Film Archive. Running Time: 15 minutes (silent, no music).

Won in a Closet was the second film directed by comedy legend Mabel Normand and is the earliest known to survive. The film was not only directed by the twenty-one-year-old but features her in the leading role. Although dismissed at the time by Moving Picture World as “a nonsense number,” the innovative use of split-screens and dissolves displays the work of a singular cinematic talent in the making.

By the time Won in a Closet was released by Keystone, Normand had already appeared in nearly 150 movies and was a beloved screen presence around the world. As one of the founders of Keystone, the comedienne was well placed to take on new responsibilities and become one of cinema’s earliest female directors.

This one-reel comedy was shot in Edendale, California, in December 1913, and took twelve days to complete. The story follows the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of Mabel and her beau, played by Charles Avery. As the plot careens into antics and pratfalls, Mabel’s father and Charles’s mother find themselves trapped in a large wooden closet, surrounded by spurned suitors and bumbling neighbors.

Somewhere along the line the film was retitled Won on a Cupboard for the British Commonwealth market. Keystone usually circulated two-thirds of its prints abroad, which helps explain why films like this one sometimes turn up in foreign collections.

(Thanks to Warren M. Sherk, archivist at the AMPAS Margaret Herrick Library, for contributing research.)

About the Preservation
This film was preserved under the direction of the Library of Congress from a 35mm black-and-white nitrate print found at the New Zealand Film Archive in 2010. The preservation was funded by the NFPF. Missing from the nitrate print, the main title was recreated in the style of other Keystone films of the period.