Our modest town of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, may not get as much play on the big screen as big boys like New York City, but it certainly gets blown up/invaded/taken over by super-evolved apes a lot less, and has been used in movies as a good spot for disposing of Nazis, an educational tool for ‘70s rockers, and, um, Hell. Before Michael Bay destroys the city’s very expensive art museum expansion in the forthcoming Transformers sequel, here’s a small sampling of movies that have given a nod, good or bad, to Brew City. (Contains spoilers for movies you probably would’ve seen already anyway and clips that may be NSFW).
Dogma (1999)
Director Kevin Smith’s religious comedy garnered a lot of controversy even before its release, thanks to its controversial plotline that featured an heir to Christ (pre-DaVinci Code) and crudely satirized elements of the Catholic church. Perhaps of more concern to Milwaukeeans was the idea that the film’s primary antagonists, a pair of renegade angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon), begin the film exiled to Hell. In Smith’s smart-alecky comic universe, Hell is not a fiery pit, but our own City of Festivals. Smith makes sure we know it’s meant to be Milwaukee by making sure to awkwardly show a vendor of foam “cheesehead” hats – that’s he what he gets for watching a Packers game as “research” – and to add insult to injury, the scene wasn’t even filmed in Milwaukee (Pittsburgh stood in).
Smith’s concern was apparently not a malicious one, but a geographical one – various characters had to converge on a small town in Illinois to drive the plot – though the last laugh may be on him. On his recent speaking tour stop in Milwaukee, the very first question asked of him was why he made Milwaukee Hell, and Smith agitatedly confessed that he gets asked the same question every time he runs into anyone from Wisconsin. In his defense, he may know a thing about Hell: he’s from New Jersey. (See? Easy jokes are fun!)
The Blues Brothers (1980)
Sure, it’s widely (and accurately) seen as a love letter to Chicago, an obscure Midwestern city rumored to be located somewhere to Milwaukee’s south. But our town makes at least one memorable appearance in the famed ‘80s comedy about blues musician brothers (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd) on a “mission from God” to save the orphanage where they were raised. Causing a stir wherever they take their “Bluesmobile,” the Brothers incur the wrath of “Illinois Nazis,” who are explicitly and repeatedly referred to as such; apparently they’re somehow even worse than regular Nazis. In any event, this leads to a car chase through the city, and the vagaries of shooting and editing in various locations ensure some screen time for downtown Milwaukee and a Bridge-to-Nowhere-era Hoan Bridge.
Kicking and Screaming (1995)
Not to be confused with Will Ferrell’s 2005 soccer comedy, writer-director Noah Baumbach’s first feature was this infinitely quotable indie comedy about a group of friends who find themselves aimless after graduating college and fall into various bad habits and bad situations. Among the most pitiable of these is man-child Otis (Carlos Jacott), a mess of nerves, anxiety, and utter laziness who, early on in the film, opines that he fears “spending the rest of [his] life in Milwaukee,” where his graduate school is located. Horrors! He even stands around the airport fretting about things like the one-hour difference in time zone. So great is Otis’s fear of Lake Michigan settlements that he flees and decides to stay back home indefinitely. Otis does (probably) eventually get to Milwaukee, but as an engineering student, he likely then became MSOE’s problem to handle. Baumbach eventually went on to direct the excellent The Squid and the Whale and co-write Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, none of which had a bad thing to say about us.
Wayne’s World (1992)
Schwing! The mulleted pride of Aurora, Illinois, Wayne Campbell and Garth Elgar (Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey) jumped from a “Saturday Night Live” skit to pop culture ubiquity in the early ‘90s, complete with a passel of catch phrases (“Party on!”) and a movie franchise of their very own. Dudes with a love of hockey and rock ‘n’ roll, they are enticed by a television executive (Rob Lowe) to sell out their unusually popular cable access show. Among the enticements? A trip to Milwaukee to see shock-rocker Alice Cooper. This leads to a loving re-creation of the opening credits of “Laverne and Shirley” and a memorable scene back stage at the concert as Cooper provides a history lesson on Brew City. The Ojibwe might take issue with Prof. Cooper’s Algonquin etymology of “Milwaukee,” but it’s probably not wise to argue with the man who wrote “Billion Dollar Babies.”
Major League (1989)
Probably the movie that leapt to mind at seeing the title of this article and, for many residents, the most memorable, since the film used thousands of extras for the scenes shot at County Stadium (R.I.P.). On paper, it’s a fairly standard lovable-losers-make-a-comeback sports comedy. In practice, it’s a classic modern comedy, succeeding in getting R-rated laughs from the rough-and-tumble baseball team and unnaturally prolonging the careers of Corbin Bernsen and Tom Berenger. Though the stadium doubled for that of the Cleveland Indians, sloppy set dressing left Brewers logos plainly visible in the outfield. Not content to simply use our citizen’s as cheap labor, they even gave parts to Brewer Pete Vuckovich and our own Bob Uecker. Uecker “played” irascible announcer Harry Doyle (“Juuuuuuuuust a bit outside!”), thereby keeping his resumé from reading, “Baseball Player and Announcer, 6th Billing on ‘Mr. Belvedere.’”
