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A group of people watch as famed actor Will Rogers tells Universal Studios founder Carl Laemmle how he's going to represent the audience. Followed by the two men shaking hands, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., 1930. William Penn Adair Rogers was an American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator. He was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma), and is known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son". As an entertainer and humorist, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films (50 silent films and 21 "talkies"), and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns. By the mid-1930s, Rogers was hugely popular in the United States for his leading political wit and was the highest paid of Hollywood film stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska. Carl Laemmle was a German-American film producer and the co-founder and, until 1934, owner of Universal Pictures. He produced or worked on over 400 films. Regarded as one of the most important of the early film pioneers, Laemmle was born in what is now Germany.