Matt Damon as the guy singing “Scotty Doesn’t Know” in Eurotrip. Impossible to miss if you’ve seen the movie, but I’m guessing in these parts plenty of people haven’t seen it. Funny, dumb movie.
In the most recent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy movie with Gary Oldman, John le Carré makes a cameo at the MI6 office Christmas party, standing next to a guy dressed as Lenin.
Also, in the Tom Cruise movie Jack Reacher, author Lee Child has a cameo - he’s the cop behind the desk that agrees when Cruise tells Samantha Bond that a cop would never use their personal vehicle for work.
I don’t know if he was a director yet, but he cast Frank Oz (from the Muppets) in small, similar roles (as an annoying bureaucrat) in both An American Werewolf in London and The Blues Brothers. Oz returned the favor in The Muppets Take Manhattan (“A frog, with an afro…”)
James Brolin and Morgan Fairchild are fairly obvious in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure as Pee Wee and Dotty (movie versions), the members of Twisted Sister and Godzilla as themselves, Jason Hervey as the child actor, maybe even Jan Brooks as the tour guide at the Alamo but how about Phil Hartman as a reporter?
Hartman was a long time Paul Rubens collaborator and a co-writer on the movie, so that explains his presence. You may remember he was also Captain Carl in the Pee Wee Herman Show and Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
Perhaps others noticed this, but for the longest time I didn’t realize it was Steve Buscemi as the Buddy Holly waiter in Pulp Fiction. Also in that movie was Bronagh Gallagher, from The Commitments.
There are quite a number of Le Carre cameos in film/TV versions of his novels. He crops up in the recent BBC The Night Manager.
[QUOTE=chacoguy]
George Harrison in Life of Brian
[/QUOTE]
Which also has the fleeting cameo from Spike Milligan. Who, so the story goes, had happened to be holidaying in the resort that they were using as the base for the location filming.
It is rather British specific, but there is the claim that Janet Street-Porter is one of the tennis players at the end of Antonnioni’s Blow Up.
Though two of those are from just this year. Which may reflect the fact that his family, particularly his sons, have recently been actively pushing new film/TV versions of his works. Which now seem to come attached with the condition that Dad gets the cameo.
I’ve heard Le Carre hold forth in person about his minor speaking role in the film of The Little Drummer Girl; he openly acknowledges that he was truly abysmal.
Former wrestler and then future governor and insane person Jesse Ventura played a prison guard in Batman and Robin. It was the third time he’d appeared in a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger after The Running Man and Predator, but you’d never miss him in those two.
Gordon Liddy plays an FBI agent toward the end of “Feds” (1988).
Richard Dreyfuss can just barely be seen as an extra on the sidewalk in “The Sentinel” (1977).
Chuck Jones plays a supermarket customer in “Innerspace” (1987).
And a somewhat weird one:
Ralph Bellamy and William Castle both seem to be playing the same impatient person waiting for Rosemary to get out of the phone booth in “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968).
According to Michael Winner’s autobiography Dreyfuss, who was already a big name having done Jaws, was visiting someone he knew on set when they where shooting that scene. He appeared in the scene as an extra without a credit just as a joke. Winner made sure that he was visible in a shot.