Name a major city in America, and I should be able to rattle off a list of countless movies famously shot set on its streets.

And yet, there are countless smaller cities from sea to shining sea that rarely grace the silver screen, and I appreciate whenever a movie showcases such off-market local color. 

A few recent examples:

• Gazer’s Newark, New Jersey.
• Secret Mall Apartment’s Providence, Rhode Island. 
• Sacramento’s [take a wild guess].
• And a double feature in America’s finest whale’s vagina: Novocaine and On Swift Horses.

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Note the lede’s strikethrough of “shot” in favor of “set.” That’s because, even if the city’s identity plays an important role in the movie, that doesn’t mean it was actually filmed in said city. 

The history of cinema is the history of the push-pull between shooting on a studio set made to look like reality…versus bringing the cameras into the real world to show us that real real. 

And nowadays, CGI — and AI — can try to pass itself off as the latter.