You mean, Fred Ott's Sneeze wasn't actually filmed in New Jersey? 
The wiki entry is interesting, but there are zero citations and, anyway, motion pictures began well before the 1920s. The examples given are pretty mundane. What we're taking about is verisimilitude; taking time to get the details right, so that dramatic license can be excused. For example, the first Star Trek movie had NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory experts who helped the production team get most of the astronomy and other scence right, so that the audience can excuse dramatic license. The reboot Star Trek films have virtually no scientific accuracy whatsoever. Most don't mind. Some of us do; it's the difference between science fiction and fantasy.
But we're all getting pretty off-topic here. Maybe we should start a film criticism thread? I'll do so in a day or so if no one else does.
It would have been more accurate if I had written, "since the origination of
montage". So: not William Dickson, but rather Lev Kuloshov.
I agree with most of what you're saying, except to point out that filmmakers usually don't slavishly depict realistic geography to "excuse" a measure of dramatic license; creative geography
is dramatic license, taken in service of expedient storytelling.
I was hoping the wikipedia article would cite some of the more famous examples of the technique, but no dice.
Here are a couple of more specific examples:
http://crewofone.com/2013/editing-creative-geography/ http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/2008/08/creative-geography-in-cinema.htmlI'll pull a quote from the latter link:
In (John) Ford's "The Searchers," Ethan and Marty spend seven years looking for Debbie. They ride through summer and snow, covering vast distances....but without ever leaving Monument Valley! In "Stagecoach," the first Ford film to be set (in Monument Valley), the coach spends most of the duration of the film traveling from Tonto to Lordsburg. But Monument Valley is clearly visible at both the place of origin and the destination. Finally, in "Cheyenne Autumn," the Cheyenne journey a thousand miles, but amazingly, we as viewers never really lose sight of the Valley.
In the case of the Thor movie, train routes were simplified because the real-world details of getting from Point A to Point B weren't as important as arriving at Point B quickly and getting on with the story. If the discrepancy took you (or Salem) out of the movie, then you're part of the tiny fraction of the audience that directors necessarily "write off" because they're too familiar with the locations to suspend their disbelief.