Movie herald for the Will Rogers film The County Chairman: Museum Object and Cultural History

The object in the museum catalogue

Movie herald for the 1935 comedy film The County Chairman, directed by John G. Blystone and starring Will Rogers. Movie heralds were one page flyers printed and distributed to promote motion pictures, usually included in the press kit sent by a studio or distributor to local movie theaters. The County Chairman herald is folded in half, with one side printed with a poster for the film with photos and information printed in red ink. The other side is printed with an illustration of a parade where participants are holding a box-style sign with a photo of Rogers and the slogan "THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE / Will Rogers". On the other side of the fold, information about the theater is printed: "Gralyn Theatre Gouverneur / SUN MON TUE JAN 27 28 29". The Gralyn Theatre was a single screen storefront movie theater that operated in Gouverneur, NY from 1920 to 1989.

The County Chairman was the last of Rogers' 71 films; a political comedy, it features Rogers as the chairman of a Wyoming county political party who eschews negative politicking in his campaign for prosecutor. By the time of the film's release and his sudden death the same year, Rogers was one of the nation's highest-paid and best-known entertainers. Known for his humorous observations on current events and disdain for electoral politics, had staged a mock campaign for president in 1928. Born to mixed-race Cherokee parents in Oklahoma (then Indian Territory) in 1879, Rogers worked as a trick roper in traveling circuses and Wild West shows before taking to the vaudeville stage, earning national attention as a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies. In his laconic yet intelligent banter between rope and horse tricks, he was an early practitioner of the style of observational humor that later comics honed as "stand-up." By the late 1910s he was primarily performing as a comedian, and Rogers earned a reputation as a "humorist-philosopher" by commenting on news, politics, society, and culture with a populist, democratic, and individualist bent. He wrote a newspaper column from 1922 to 1935 and toured the world for a series of articles in The Saturday Evening Post in 1926. Rogers' death in an air crash with Wiley Post in Alaska in 1935 - at the height of his fame - was a national media event that inspired incredible acts of mourning.

Materials, dates and provenance

• date made: 1935
• associated date: January 27-29 1935
• Associated Name: Rogers, Will
• Object Name: flyer
• Object Name: movie herald
• Physical Description: paper (overall material)
• Physical Description: printed (overall production method/technique)
• Measurements: overall: 6 in x 9 in; 15.24 cm x 22.86 cm
• place made: United States: California, Los Angeles
• occurred: United States: New York, Gouverneur
• Subject: Motion Pictures
• Subject: Politics
• ID Number: 2021.0102.03
• accession number: 2021.0102
• catalog number: 2021.0102.03
• Data Source: National Museum of American History

Sources and reuse

Catalogue descriptions and facts adapted from National Museum of American History through the Smithsonian's official Open Access dataset. This record explicitly marks its metadata CC0 1.0; formatting and selection have been changed.