Adult Movie Theatres in Milwaukee

What is open right now

Nothing inside the city itself. Parkway News on Lisbon Avenue, which had magazines and peep booths, closed in 1986. Paradise Books and Video ran from 1976 to 2003 and split itself into a straight video shop and an adult arcade before it went.

Fifty-six years of censorship with no legal power

Milwaukee had a film censor board. That much it shares with plenty of cities. What makes it worth the page is that the board was never given any legal authority to ban a single frame, and it worked anyway, from 1914 to 1970.

It started as the Citizen’s Commission on Motion Pictures and ended as the Milwaukee Motion Picture Commission. It could not prosecute, could not fine, could not seize a print. What it had was the mayor, and the mayor issued the licences the theatres needed to open their doors. A cinema that ignored the commission was not taken to court. It was reminded about its licence.

Note what is on that list. Not one of them is pornography. Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle are films about teenagers, The Public Enemy is a gangster picture, The Moon is Blue was refused a seal for using the word virgin. Across its life the commission kept dozens of films out of the city entirely and cut hundreds of scenes from others.

It ended the way informal power always ends, which is that somebody calls it. Mayoral support thinned, the national courts moved, and in 1969 theatre owners simply stopped complying. The city tried to give the commission real teeth with legislation in late 1970 and a federal court struck that down the following summer.

The Princess, and the case that carries its name

The building at 738 North Third Street opened as the Princess on 9 December 1909, 1,119 seats, cushioned seating and a pipe organ, designed by Henry Lotter and John Menge Jr. It was a first-run house in a city that had several.

On 15 January 1960, under a lease to Prudential Theatres, it went over to adult programming, and that is what it showed for the rest of its life. By the 1970s it was hardcore, in a downtown that also held the Brass Rail, the Downtowner and a row of bookstores.

Then in 1980 the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided State v. Princess Cinema of Milwaukee and held the state’s criminal obscenity statute unconstitutionally overbroad. The adult cinema on Third Street did not just survive the prosecution. It took the state law down with it, and the case is still cited under the theatre’s name.

The Princess closed on 31 August 1984 and was demolished. The site is a car park and has been ever since.

Which is the order of events worth holding on to. The censor board with no power lasted fifty-six years. The cinema that beat the state of Wisconsin in open court lasted four more years after winning. Almost nothing in this directory was closed by the thing that was trying to close it.