Milwaukee Movie Locations!

TL;DR

Milwaukee appears in films as a "big city small town" stand-in, with locations ranging from Blues Brothers to the surprisingly Milwaukee-packed 1995 TV movie Family of Cops.

Key Points

• 1.Milwaukee is Hollywood's default 'big city small town.' Filmmakers use it when they need an urban setting that isn't iconic like New York or LA, making it interchangeable with Cleveland in public perception.
• 2.The Blues Brothers' famous unfinished highway bridge scene was shot in Milwaukee, not Chicago. The iconic sequence where the Illinois Nazis' car launches into the sky was filmed on an incomplete Milwaukee freeway, yet almost no one knows it wasn't a Chicago location.
• 3.Wayne's World's Milwaukee scene is the city's most quoted pop culture moment. Though the film is set in Aurora, Illinois, the Alice Cooper concert sequence and the 'Milywake — Algonquin for the good land' line made Milwaukee famous globally.
• 4.Transformers 3 used the Milwaukee Art Museum as a billionaire's exotic lair. The unique architecture by Santiago Calatrava drew the production north from Chicago for several days of filming, with the interior cleared of art to house exotic cars.
• 5.Major League was set in Cleveland but entirely shot at Milwaukee County Stadium. The 1989 film preserved the old County Stadium on film before its demolition, with thousands of Milwaukee locals filling the stands as Cleveland Indians fans.
• 6.Mr. 3000 starring Bernie Mac filmed stadium scenes at Miller Park (now American Family Field). The film notoriously mispronounces nearby Waukesha County as 'Wisha County,' and virtually every Milwaukee extra at the time had it on their resume.
• 7.American Movie is considered the most authentically Milwaukee film ever made. The 1999 documentary following filmmaker Mark Borchardt captures genuine Milwaukee characters, accents, and culture, including editing done at UW-Milwaukee's Mitchell Hall.
• 8.The 1995 CBS TV movie Family of Cops with Charles Bronson is the most location-dense Milwaukee film discovered. Shot extensively downtown with references to Summerfest, Jeffrey Dahmer, Wisconsin Avenue, and the Pabst Brewery complex doubling as the police precinct nicknamed 'the Brewery.'