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.
Gutter oil was reported in 2000, when a street vendor was found to be selling oil obtained from restaurant garbage disposals. In September 2012, an ongoing investigation into the suspected use of gutter oil as a raw material in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry was revealed. A scandal involving 240 tons of gutter oil in Taiwan affecting hundreds of companies and thousands of eateries, some of which may have been exported overseas, broke in September 2014. The collected waste oil is sold to local workshops or small factories for cleaning and packaging. When sold to workshops it is often transported on the back