The other day, our own Nerd in the Basement discovered the existence of an upcoming film called C.I.Ape. As you can well imagine, once we found out this existed, we spent ridiculous amounts of time poring over its IMDb page—Nerd, Anthony Pizzo, Persia, and I were delighted by the whole thing. We quickly noticed certain details, though. Most notably an overlap in what movies many people on the cast had been in. You see, they’re all from Oklahoma, and so are the productions. It’s hardly surprising that one person had been in one of the Stanley Spadowski scenes of UHF, which was also filmed in Oklahoma.

Los Angeles is a big city. The twenty-third largest city in the world, in fact, depending a bit on your terms. And a lot of those people are actors. Yes, obviously, a lot of actors’ careers overlap. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about “there are only a few dozen professional actors in our town, so if you make a movie using locals, what you get is the same people over and over again.” Even Seattle is too big for this to apply, helped I suppose by the constant filming just about 150 miles north in Vancouver.

This could be called the Murdoch Rule. Yes, I’m aware that Canada is the second-largest country in the world, but even our Canadian friends must admit that Canadian TV is an awfully insular thing. Our article images today come from the fact that Paul Gross has done a recurring character on The Red Green Show, while both Steve Smith and Patrick McKenna have done Due South. Of the three, I am shocked to declare that only McKenna has done The Murdoch Mysteries, even though Canadian authorities are clearly just going door to door now, giving every Canadian their turn. Both Bruce McCulloch and Dave Foley did Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel, come to that.

This is unsurprisingly an even larger factor when you’re in, say, Tulsa. There are probably still people in the Oklahoma film industry who got their start when Francis Ford Coppola was in town. I haven’t looked, because it would be really in the weeds of minor characters and crew, but I suspect the overlap between The Outsiders and UHF is higher than you would expect of two such wildly different movies. There’s no surprise when multiple people who made C.I.Ape are also in 1921: Black Wall Street and The Adventure of A.R.I.: My Robot Friend. A lot of them will be in both the upcoming Reagan, with Randy Quaid, and the upcoming Stillwater, with Matt Damon.

Am I particularly focusing on Oklahoma right now? Yes. C.I.Ape, after all, was a discussion, and therefore an IMDb rabbit hole, from this weekend. But doubtless you could pick any other region in the country with local films made there and find much the same thing. Especially somewhere that’s not that close to major movie centers. It’s more likely in Santa Fe than San Francisco; it’s more likely in Omaha than Seattle. I suspect it’s more likely in Saskatoon than Kitchener, come to that, and the film industry in Toronto, as established, is already pretty overlapping.

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