[Movie Press Book] The Norman Studios Present the Super Feature Photoplay The Flying Ace. Sensation of the Year. "The Greatest Airplane Mystery Thriller Ever Produced Co-Starring Kathryn Boyd and Lawrence Criner. . . . All Colored Cast . .

Arlington, Florida: The Norman Manufacturing Company, 1926. First Edition. Very Good Plus. The press book for a "Race" movie produced by white-owned Norman Film, which specialized in Race movies in the last decade of the Silent Era. This is the only one of eight full-length films made by the Jacksonville Florida studio that has been fully restored by the Library of Congress. It was also the second to last of of eight full-length Race films produced by Norman Film. Making the film required considerable ingenuity, as the budget studio used a single plane to shoot its dogfight scenes. The film also did not have a basis in history, as the U.S. Army did not allow African Americans to fly planes during the First World War. The publication, meant to excite exhibitors about the movie and to guide them then in promoting the film, is essentially a large folded sheet of newsprint paper, and thus four pages each 56 by 36 cm, is illustrated with photographs of clips, promotional posters, lobby cards and the like. This press book, though, relies more on fewer, but larger, photos than its prior press books. The window card on the front cover is shown again almost as large on the third page. The excitement of aviation may have been a reason -- a few dramatic shots more than equal a plethora of smaller images of many scenes. Also the large lobby card had multiple images with insets and a collage arrangement. This particular press book has less advice on promotional gambits exhibitors could do, less in the way of sober-toned promotional plans, and is almost entirely about hyping the movie's daring, and also the Norman Film brand. The publication also sought to generate interest in its small inventory of its earlier movies. We will observe that while Norman Film proudly promoted its movies as having "All Colored Casts", and did indeed seek to present positive role models of blacks in its films, the female star, Stella Mayo, was a very fair black woman who could easily at the time "passed", and this was the pattern at Norman Film and other companies making Race movies into the 1950s. This press book is held by Yale and Virginia according to OCLC First Search. And four institutions hold a publication that may be a smaller format version of this, with essentially the same content -- Temple, Texas A & M, U. of Florida and Florida State Library. Still uncommon, and arguably scarce, especially in as nice condition as our copy. As to Norman Film Mfg. Co., it stopped making movies with the advent of sound and switched over to distribution, since it was not in a position to invest in the new technology needed for sound. Condition: The front page has a few short closed tears and a small chip. The tears, while small, require one to handle the page with care, especially when trying to open the publication, lest one accidentally expands the tears.