eMoviePoster.com

As many of you know, I, Bruce Hershenson, owner of eMoviePoster.com, have collected pressbooks (and related movie paper like studio yearbooks) for over 30 years, and I have the world's foremost collection of such material. I thought I would share one item with you each week, the type of items you almost surely have never seen before, and which might not come up for sale for DECADES!

So below is the pressbook from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the classic 1932 Mervyn LeRoy southern-U.S.-prison-camp escape crime thriller (based on the autobiography "By Robert E. Burns"; nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award; about the real-life man who through misfortune ended up in a Georgia prison working on a chain gang; against all odds, he escaped and returned to his hometown of Chicago, where he became a major success, hiding his past; his prison escape was discovered, and in the movie, he agrees to serve a short amount of time in the prison, but he is double-crossed, and he escapes again, but this time, his future is very bleak) starring Paul Muni (in his nominated for Best Actor Academy Award role), Glenda Farrell, Helen Vinson, Everett Brown (as the black African American convict Sebastian, who hits Paul Muni's shackles with a sledgehammer!), Noel Francis, Preston Foster, Allen Jenkins, Edward Ellis, and Harry Woods. Note that this is one of the rare cases where Hollywood took a happy ending and made it unhappy! In real life, Robert Burns refused to return to the prison, and Illinois refused to extradite him to Georgia, and he lived out his life without ever returning to prison. But apparently, Warner Bros. wanted a more dramatic ending to the story, and so they invented their ending, where Burns returns, is double-crossed, and escapes a second time!

Here is an image of the pressbook's covers and two interior pages:

   

Each week I will showcase a different pressbook (or related item) from my collection (so in just 20,000 weeks or so, I will have shared the entire collection with you!). And remember to check out our previous Cool Items of the Week in our Cool Item of the Week archive (which is fully searchable!).