Oil! oil museums in Kern County, California and the libraries and museums in the area around Silver City, New Mexico, as well as the period photography, which played a large part in shaping his screenplay and the film. Oil! Oil! is a novel by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1926–27 and told as a third-person narrative, with only the opening pages written in the first person. The book was written in the context of the Harding administration's Teapot Dome Scandal and takes place in Southern California. It is a social and political satire skewering the human foibles of all its characters.
Salad Oil scandal De Angelis, a former commodities broker who had been in trouble previously for providing the federal school lunch program with poorly prepared meat. Despite this, he was able to obtain a contract with Food for Peace, a federal program which sold excess food stocks to poor countries. De Angelis discovered that he could obtain loans based upon the company's supposed inventory of salad oil. Ships apparently full of salad oil would arrive at the docks, and inspectors would confirm that the ships were indeed full of oil, allowing the company to obtain millions in loans. In reality, the ships were