North Dakota is a sparsely populated rectangle of mostly flat prairie. Life is agricultural, unsophisticated, and within the last dozen years, blasted with the hoopla and tumult of the oil business. The roads and pipelines to the Canadian Alberta oil sands go through North Dakota, and the deeply buried shale oil reserves found in the western part of North Dakota have given a steroid boost to the state. Oil attracts big oil interests from Houston, Dubai, and New York. That's like throwing a lit match into an oil drum. Set in North Dakota in 2014, CRUDE is about crude... oil that is. It's about a New York hedge fund and its crude maneuvers with North Dakota's oil refiners. It's about crude political ambition driven and financed by North Dakota's deeply buried, expensive crude. It's also about manipulating real estate polluted by crude. It's about ranchers, dead in their Buick after inhaling crude fumes. Maybe all this crude dripping on the pristine prairie is just background pollution. Could be the story is really about scorned love and revenge crudely taken.