“These people were so uptight”: how Milwaukee became the scourge of Hollywood’s Golden Age
The city of Milwaukee in the US state of Wisconsin hasn’t exactly been the most overrepresented in Hollywood movies.
Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake is set there, and there’s that joke in Wayne’s World with Alice Cooper, but that’s about it. Perhaps this is because (and no offence to any Milwaukeeans out there) the city just isn’t that interesting, or maybe it’s because, for six long decades, it was engaged in a brutal censorship war with the movie capital of the world.
Our story begins in the Golden Age of American cinema. As film projection technology was becoming cheaper and more accessible in the early years of the 20th century, more and more urban areas were seeing a rise in the number of movie theatres cropping up. In his book, Outlaws, Rebels & Vixens: Motion Picture Censorship in Milwaukee, 1914–1971, author Matthew Prigge says that four years after the first cinema opened in the city, there were 40 different moviehouses in operation.
With any new mass media innovation, there are concerns about content, where well-meaning citizens want to make sure that their children remain uncorrupted by this strange new force. Or, if you want to be more cynical about it, the government wants to control what people can and can’t have new ideas about. Milwaukee was no different, which in 1914 saw the creation of the Milwaukee Motion Picture Commission, one of the strictest censorship organisations in the entire country.
The MMPC leapt on anything they deemed inappropriate with breakneck speed, and one of their earliest victims was the 1914 picture called The Dalton Boys, which featured a shot of a woman’s legs. Over the years, they would outright ban a number of classics, with The Public Enemy, The Outlaw, and Freaks all falling under the commission’s iron fist. To their immense credit, they also banned DW Griffith’s hateful epic The Birth of a Nation on the grounds that it was “racially incendiary”.
One of the MMPC’s most famous opponents, though, was Rebel Without a Cause, and while the organisation didn’t ban the film from being screened, they did demand a number of changes. “They cut out the opening title sequence, with James Dean in the gutter,” Prigge writes (via Bookmaker Ratings), “Anybody who saw that movie here would have seen it start with the second scene, where he’s being taken to the police station, with no credit sequence at all!”
The MMPC maintained its grip on Milwaukee until the late 1960s, when new federal laws broadened what could be shown on screen. Theatre owners felt embolden to push back against the commission, who were powerless to stop them, and by the summer of 1971, the group had effectively ceased to exist.
While all this panic about women’s legs and James Dean might seem quaint by modern standards, the story of the MMPC is still relevant. With the rise of social media and online content in recent years, censorship is once again a hot-button issue, so who’s to say that our grandchildren won’t look back at TikTok videos we thought were scandalous and laugh at how prudish we all were?
“It’s one thing to kind of look at this and think, ‘Oh, these people were so uptight’ or that ‘the censors were just funny relics of a time when people didn’t really know what’s going on’,” Prigge wrote, “But if you look at their positions in the context of their times, a lot of it starts to make more sense.”
