Small Town Wisconsin
Wayne is having a bad day in the opening scene of Small Town Wisconsin, but then, every day is sort of bad for him. He mumbles angrily at the Brewers game on the radio of the garage where he labors; he sneaks a swig of beer behind the hood of the car he’s servicing; and his boss reminds him that he’s only hired for 20 hours a week. If Wayne (David Sullivan) works late to finish the job, “I ain’t paying you for it.”
The latest by Milwaukee-reared director Niels Mueller (The Assassination of Richard Nixon), Small Town Wisconsin is an accomplished film on all levels. Cinematography and editing are excellent; Jason Naczek’s screenplay tells stories and back stories succinctly without unnecessary exposition; the cast of familiar faces (stars from several television series) gives believable, fully realized performances. And it’s good to see Milwaukee actors in small roles, including a cameo by Flora Coker as Wayne’s trailer park neighbor.
Wayne’s situation is quietly suffused with the pathos of social decline. He slips inside the old family home, long-since foreclosed, and continues to rehab the kitchen even though it will never be his again. He brings his 9-year-old, Tyler (Cooper J. Friedman), and marks the boy’s age and height on the same doorjamb where his folks scratched the record of his childhood. Tyler is the bone of custody contention with his exasperated ex-wife, Deidre (Tanya Fischer).
Set in a rural patch of the Badger State, Small Town Wisconsin was finished at a perilous moment. “We were literally in the middle of our final sound mix when the pandemic hit and the theaters all closed down and film companies and distributors stopped buying and major festivals like SXSW and Cannes were cancelled,” he says. Small Town Wisconsin was screened at the 2020 Milwaukee Film Festival and traveled from there to the wider festival circuit, collecting some 60 awards and many accolades before finding a distributor.
Small Town Wisconsin’s national debut is set for the Oriental Theater 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 3 prior to its national rollout on June 10. For the premiere, the director, cast and crew will be in attendance—including executive producer and two-time Oscar winning filmmaker Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) who went to film school with Mueller and who brought him the script. For tickets, visit mkefilm.org.
Mueller took time out from preparing for the red-carpet event and answered some questions.
Tell me about your inspiration to make a movie set in a small Wisconsin town and about the production.
I grew up with folks very much like the characters in this film. Not in Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay where I lived but, when I was a teenager, I worked in my father’s office furniture store warehouse with guys who drove in from Slinger, Wisconsin every day to work. And when I was a kid, we took weekend family road trips to New Holstein and Chilton and Kiel where my father’s business partner had family who had dairy farms. Good, decent people, some understated, some big personalities but all sharing that Wisconsin culture that’s hard to define—straightforward, hardworking, friendly, judging the person more than their status.
I always thought it would make for an entertaining film to capture these characters and to tell a story set in a part of the country I know well and that really isn’t portrayed very often on film, and when it is, more often than not it’s made with an outsider’s eye and you get the exaggerated accents and the “aw shucks, look at the quaint people of Wisconsin” vibe. I wanted to avoid that at all costs. I wanted to make an authentic Wisconsin film. That authenticity was achieved deliberately and painstakingly. I asked every prospective financier I met with to allow me to cast simply the right actors—to ignore the usual requirement of noting “whose Q score is highest in France” to sell the film.
I felt the only way to cast a film that starts in a small, far northern Wisconsin town properly would be to cast actors who had Wisconsin roots or had small town life in their blood and bones. And this cast does. Kristen Johnston, one of our great comediennes, grew up in Milwaukee, Tanya Fischer grew up in West Bend, Bill Heck grew up just south of the Wisconsin border in Illinois and spent every summer at his grandmother’s in Minocqua. David Sullivan doesn’t have midwestern roots but grew up in small town East Texas and, the day I met him, was on his way to a washer-throwing contest—an East Texas version of corn hole — so I knew immediately I had my Wayne.
The other thing I said to every financier I met with was that, to achieve authenticity, I absolutely had to shoot in Wisconsin—in spite of the lack of a tax credit here. I wanted Wisconsin to be a character in the film. And I wanted the cast to be living Wisconsin culture while we were making the film.
Shooting in and around Milwaukee was one of the best professional experiences of my life. My executive producer, Alexander Payne, who’s shot most of his films in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska told me before I shot, that I’d never want to shoot anywhere else after shooting at home. He was right. With just a couple of exceptions the whole city opened its collective arms and doors to help us make this film. The Wisconsin State Fair invited us to come and shoot, The Pfister Hotel, Usinger’s, The Edeleweiss Lake Cruise folks, the mayor’s office, Sheriff’s Department, the department of public works—everyone helped us make this film. And the film really is a love letter to the city and state.
What is the film’s future after the June 3 screening at the Oriental?
Yes! We have our official theatrical premiere June 3 at The Oriental. That will be followed by an exclusive theatrical run at the Oriental for a week and then, on June 10, an expanding limited theatrical run in other markets which commences simultaneously with our nationwide digital release.
As for our distributor, very briefly, Quiver Distribution, who acquired the film, is a company I had been hearing a lot about the past couple years. A couple of seasoned veterans from Lions Gate Films formed Quiver. And as we emerged from the pandemic, when we suddenly had a number of distribution offers on the table, Quiver won us over as they are cinephiles who also happen to be great at the business of distribution. I am not trying to do a commercial for them—but they’re great partners. They love film and specifically love our film. They’re getting us national press and exposure and they’re going to get us out across the entire country.
Are you thinking about your next film?
I have written a script titled, A Letter for Matsche” set in the Weimar Republic that I would love to make next. It’s an entertaining meditation on the dangers of nationalism. Sound timely? It won’t be easy to finance but neither were my first two films.
