Scoring “LA” movies and actors to crown the LA Movie Mount Rushmore

I built an LA Movie Trivia Game — using Tableau, Microsoft Copilot, Letterboxd, and YouTube music videos. 

In the end, I crown my official Mount Rushmore of LA movie actors after finding my favorite "composite score."

Core Data

211 “LA” Movies grouped across three title-based categories

• LA or Los Angeles in the Title
• LA City, Street, Landmark, or Nickname
• LA is central to the Plot (Act 1, 2, or 3)

Metadata

• Primary genre (according to IMDb)
• Domestic Box Offices (standard and inflation adjusted)
  • 1977 onward: The Numbers
  • Pre-1977: Box Office Mojo + CPI-2024 inflation adjustment
• Top 5 billing actors per title (with billing order)

Why I Built This

Every month, my company hosts a 1-hour bonding session for ~30 people. We celebrate birthdays, eat snacks, and play trivia. 

Whenever it was my Marketing Analytics team’s turn to host…I’ve been phoning it in. No trivia — just ordering great food from Porto’s or Prime Pizza to compensate. Meanwhile, other teams were showing up with legitimately creative games.

I needed to step up — I just didn’t have the spark yet.

The Spark

I remembered a note on my phone from five years ago: a list of 60+ “LA movies.” I made it after the best moviegoing experience of my life with my wife. We saw Sunset Boulevard — on Sunset Boulevard — in Hollywood at a pop-up drive-in theater. 

I moved the list into Excel and expanded it using Copilot:

• Missing LA-set movies
• Genres
• Actors and billing orders
• Domestic box offices (standard gross and inflation-adjusted)
• And way more metadata than any trivia game reasonably needs

Eventually, I built a composite scoring system to crown a Mount Rushmore of LA movie actors.

The Point (Important Context)

This wasn’t built as an academic exercise.

The audience was media and marketing teams at a studio — in a large boardroom with a gigantic TV that was perfect for projecting my Tableau “Story." 

The goal wasn’t rigorous analysis — it was to:

• Make trivia more fun
• Show how "composite scores" work (similar to paid media metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, etc.)
• Prove Tableau can be used creatively for internal meetings — not just dashboards

And honestly…it worked way better than I expected. I managed to hold my entire department’s attention for a full hour. 

I Invite Critique

Please feel free to:

• Tear this apart
• Suggest missing LA movies (or movies that you don’t think should qualify)
• Recommend better ways to weight the composite score
• Argue about who actually deserves LA Movie Mount Rushmore status