Howard Hughes was one of the most famous people in the world when he crashed his Hughes Aircraft prototype XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft into suburban Beverly Hills on July 7, 1946. The crash was recreated in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator in a scene that spared none of the brutality of the actual event. Hughes suffered numerous third-degree burns, a crushed collar bone and ribs, and a collapsed lung. The force of the plane hitting the ground was so great that Hughes’s heart had actually shifted the right side of his body. At the time, Hughes was also under investigation by the United States Senate for wartime misspending and fraud. Yet, in the midst of this investigation and his recovery from the crash, Hughes took a personal interest in the goings-on at a downtown Milwaukee movie theater.
Hughes was trying to secure bookings for The Outlaw, a film he had produced and directed about the bandit William “Billy the Kid” Bonney. Production on The Outlaw had wrapped in 1941, but the picture’s wanton display of violence and sexuality (the oft-displayed cleavage of star Jane Russell in particular) led the Production Code Authority (PCA) to deny the film a seal of approval. The PCA was Hollywood’s self-censorship enforcement mechanism and could essentially damn a film to obscurity if it ran afoul of its standards.
An “objectionable” image from The Outlaw.
The story of Hughes and The Outlaw is worthy of far more space than I have here. In short, by 1946 the film had become one of the most highly-publicized films of all time, and almost no one had actually seen it. Finally, after a seemingly endless battle with the both the PCA and the Catholic Church’s National Legion of Decency (which issued “condemned” labels to films it found immoral, effectively forbidding American Catholics to see them), Hughes vowed to release the film over their objections. Audiences were giddy with anticipation to see what had been so long kept from them.
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To get around the PCA, Hughes needed to book his film into theaters that had no affiliation with the Hollywood studios. In 1946, this was still a tricky proposition. But in Milwaukee, Hughes lucked out. The Towne Real Estate Company had just purchased the Miller Theater on North Third Street (the bright blue Ruess Federal Building is presently on this site) and, after $200,000 worth of renovations, reopened it as the Towne Theater, downtown’s newest independent first-run movie house. It was in September 1946 that Hughes personally worked out the details of the booking and placed a call to a Milwaukee insurance agent named Lester Bradshaw.
The Towne Theatre around 1950. Cinema Treasures
One of the reasons for the creation of the PCA was to stem the power of the dozens of state and local film censor boards that had sprung up during the motion picture boom of the 1910s and ‘20s. The Milwaukee Motion Picture Commission (MMPC) was created in 1914 and tasked with reviewing every film booked into city theaters. The body had no legal standing – its rulings were technically “recommendations” to theater operators – but going against these rulings risked the revocation of the theater’s operating license by the mayor. The MMPC was a force in the 1920s but, as with most boards of its kind, faded in prominence through the 1930s and ’40s as the PCA left it with little to censor. But in Milwaukee, film censorship came back into fashion with the 1940 election of Mayor Carl Zeidler, who demanded the MMPC take an activist approach to its work or be defunded.
By 1946, the MMPC was one of the toughest local censor boards in the nation. At its helm was the insurance agent Bradshaw. Most likely speaking to the MMPC head from his self-designed hospital bed, Hughes arranged for the MMPC to screen The Outlaw and was confident the board would approve his film as-is. But, two weeks later, the MMPC watched the film and declared that under no circumstances should the film be allowed to play in the city.
After years on the shelf, The Outlaw opened to a massive publicity campaign.
The week after the ruling, Bradshaw met privately with Andrew Spheeris, manager of the Towne Theater. Although Bradshaw would later insist he was misunderstood, Spheeris claimed that Bradshaw had offered to approve the film if Spheeris agreed to purchase insurance for the Towne from his firm. When Spheeris went public with the alleged quid-pro-quo, Bradshaw was forced to resign his post in disgrace.
While Hughes continued to negotiate with the MMPC over the film’s content, he also tried to convince Milwaukee Archbishop Moses E. Kiley to overrule the Legion of Decency’s ban on The Outlaw, thereby allowing Milwaukee Catholics to see the picture without fear of damnation. Kiley was considering the unprecedented move when the Legion heard of the plan and quickly convinced the Archbishop not to revisit the film’s rating.
The matter lingered for months as the MMPC refused to rescreen the film or even to provide Hughes with a list of its objections. Stumped in Milwaukee, Hughes started a fight much closer to his Hollywood home to try to get The Outlaw on the screen at the Towne. Hughes had signed a deal with Los Angeles-based United Artists (UA) to distribute The Outlaw, and UA had signed a deal with the Towne to show it. As the MMPC’s ban on the film had no legal weight behind it, Hughes saw no reason why these contracts were not being honored and threatened to file suit against UA, which in turn threatened to sue the Towne.
Backed into a corner, Spheeris agreed to open the film uncensored on February 13, 1947. As crowds rushed to the Towne to get a look, an emergency meeting between the city attorney, police officials, the MMPC, and Mayor John Bohn determined that the violence and lust of The Outlaw would have a terrible effect on the city’s young people. That Sunday, a special message from the Legion of Decency was read from the pulpit of every Catholic church in the city, damning the picture and the Towne Theater. Catholics were even told to avoid the theater after the picture left Milwaukee. After four blockbuster days at the Towne, the common council told Spheeris that he needed to pull the film or the theater’s operating permit would be revoked and the house shuttered indefinitely. He pulled the picture.
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A Milwaukee Journal ad promoting the outlaw debut of The Outlaw in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee Journal
Days later, Hughes dispatched attorney George Rafferty to Milwaukee to take up the fight. Rafferty told the press that Hughes was baffled as to all the trouble in Milwaukee and that in no other city in the nation had so much fuss been raised over The Outlaw. That summer, a full year after Hughes had first contacted the MMPC, the board screened a new Hughes-approved cut of the film. The MMPC begrudgingly agreed to approve the film, so long as advertising noted the film had been cut per local demands. The offer was relayed to Hughes in California. He refused.
The matter dragged on through November, as Hughes piloted his famous H-4 Hercules flying boat – at that time the largest aircraft ever built – just off of Long Beach in California. The flight was a stunt to prove to the nation that Hughes Aircraft had been faithful in its obligations during the war. It was a victory for Hughes, but he hardly enjoyed it. He was beginning to show the symptoms of the mental illness and drug addiction that would come to rule his life. The Hercules flight would be one of the last public acts of his life.
In January 1948, another Hughes representative flew to Milwaukee to plead for yet another screening of yet another cut of The Outlaw. The MMPC agreed and ruled that with two small deletions – both involving Jane Russell’s cleavage – the film could play in the city. Hughes’s man agreed and the film was booked into the Riverside Theater, the Towne having long ago given up on the picture. However, when the print of the film arrived in the city, the UA man traveling with it was unaware that edits were going to be made. When an MMPC board member showed up, splicer in hand and ready to cut the film, the UA representative refused. Spurned yet again, the MMPC once more banned the film from Milwaukee.
Jane Russell in a promotional shot from The Outlaw. The tepid response to the film’s sanctioned opening in Milwaukee suggests that there was more to the tease than the final product.
Finally, in May 1948, all sides came to agreement over (what else?) a new cut of the film. When The Outlaw opened at the Riverside, it had been nearly two years since the picture debuted in nearly every other major market in the United States. It ran for just two weeks to modest crowds and passed from the city almost unnoticed. The MMPC would remain a force in local exhibition until the 1969, keeping Milwaukee movie screens freer of sex and skin than any in the nation. Howard Hughes eventually lost the will to keep up the battles over the film. It fell into the public domain in 1971 after he neglected to renew its copyright.
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