“By order of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Titicut Follies may be shown only to legislators, judges, lawyers, sociologists, social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, students in these or related fields, and organizations dealing with the social problems of custodial care and mental infirmity.” On the basis of this ruling, Wiseman’s first documentary film went unseen in Massachusetts for two and a half decades because of the horrors it chronicled in an institution for the criminally insane and the threats the state felt it posed. Titicut Follies initiated a string of Wiseman documentaries that have continued to examine the institutions that form the fabric of America.