Nice. Had I seen Antman, I think I would have actually got that.
The Cold War comedy Spies Like Us has a very funny but not at all obscure cameo but there were others, by various directors. The one I remember in particular featured Frank Oz as the proctor during the foreign service exam.
In the James Cagney film White Heat, there’s a famous scene where Cagney’s character learns his mother is dead and goes crazy. He gets the information by whispering the question (and getting the answer) to the convict next to him, who whispers to the next as they go down the line.
The convict in the middle of that line is Jim Thorpe, the athlete. Here’s the clip.
Sam Raimi, Joel Coen, and Martin Brest are the drive-in theater guards.
As far as Chris Walken, John Glover, Jeff Goldblum, Shelley Hack, and Sigourney Weaver are concered, I wouldn’t really consider those cameos. They weren’t famous at that point in their careers, they’re all just early roles. Annie Hall was both Walken’s and Weaver’s debut. Weaver is difficult to recognize, she only appears in a brief long shot and was only hired because she was so much taller than Woody Allen.
I’m just not convinced that’s the actual intended Truman Capote joke. It’s surely funnier if both Alvy and Annie realise full well that it’s the real Truman Capote, only for them to knowingly dismiss him as just a Truman Capote lookalike.
It’s hardly an unheralded example - see this discussion - but there is the suggestion that Raymond Chandler had a long-unnoticed fleeting cameo in Double Indemnity.
In a similar vein, there’s the suggestion that Ian Fleming crops up in the background in a scene in From Russia With Love.
In Young Guns, the escape from the burning house scene, Tom Cruise is on of the soldiers who gets shot.
I’m sure everyone knows about Bruce Campbell’s cameos in the three Spider-Man movies. He was getting to be a regular Stan Lee until they rebooted the series. He also does the narration (in a very funny way) in the games based on those movies, which might not be as well known.
Nicholson was also one of the movie’s writers.
A ton of other celebs of the day show up in the music video for Ghostbusters.
It’s obvious now, but during the original run of Seinfeld, I don’t think a lot of people recognized Larry David, who popped up as Frank’s lawyer (with the cape), a newsstand operator, and probably a few more I don’t remember. But what I didn’t notice until I Curb Your Enthusiasm came along is that his voice is all over that series. Aside from Steinbrenner, he was lots of off-screen voices, I think even Newman before Wayne Knight was cast.
In THEM! watch among the bit players.
William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, & DeForest Kelly are all there.
No phasers for the Giant Ants, though.
Should have had a giant ants episode on Star Trek.
In THE IPCRESS FILE, with Michael Caine as the bespectacled anti-007 who – gasp! swoon! – cooks for a woman, that’s Len Deighton who cracks the eggs one-handed, because (a) if our hero is going to cook for a woman, let’s have the guy do it in as manly a way as possible; and (b) the actor can’t do that, but the writer can.
Took someone telling me to realize that Hugh Laurie was the very funny British man on friends. Never occurred to me that he was English.
Watch the second or fourth series of Blackadder someday, or the Jeeves & Wooster series he did with Stephen Fry.
I’m partial to a bit of Fry and Laurie.
I’ve only seen a bit of it, but liked it. He played lots of different characters on that, from what I remember; someone who knows him only from House should see him in the full upper-class twit role that he does so well.
Mel Gibson shows up in the Billy Crystal comedy Father’s Day as a man showing off his body piercings.
Airplane! used Howard Jarvis – a big political figure in California at the time. He’s the passenger in Ted’s cab who’s left at the airport at the end of the film. No one recognizes him today, but he was a very familiar face when the film was released. Most people also know Barbara Billingsley has a couple of lines.
John Landis likes to give other directors cameos in his movies.
Sam Raimi returned the favor in Spider-Man 2. Landis is the surgeon who tries to remove Doc Ock’s mechanical arms.
Nimoy certainly, but where do Shatner and Kelly appear?
Yeah, I didn’t remember them being in it either. Here’s the full cast list on IMDb. They really get into a lot of uncredited folk, including Nimoy, but no sign of the other two.
(You have to pretty much be on the alert for Nimoy to spot him. But once seen he can’t be unseen.)
Roger Clemens has a brief cameo in Kingpin as well for no apparent reason.