Bilbo’s diaries weren’t fictional (or rather, they weren’t fictional in the LOTR stories). So that would be “fiction starring non-fiction”
Synecdoche, New York is about a man directing a play about a man directing a play about a man directing a play…
Misery by Stephen King. You all know it.
Living In Oblivion - Early 90s indie starring Steve Buscemi as a would-be auteur director trying to film a “deep” art movie, and watching it fall into shambles. (“Why is there always a little person in EVERY. DREAM. SEQUENCE??”)
For Your Consideration - Christopher Guest movie about another indie film “Home For Purim” that gets unexpectedly nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award.
The Myth of Fingerprints - Ridiculously overblown “dysfunctional family drama” starring Julianne Moore. During the course of the film, Moore is reading a book called “the Scream of the Rabbits”, and she’s tormented, tormented! when the copy of the book she has doesn’t have the last chapter in it. When “the MOF” came out, I was working at a bookstore. People actually came in requesting this book, thinking it was for real.
Jasper Fforde has made a career out of this.
And that novel is a novel about itself, something that doesn’t come through in the movie, which was a nice try but didn’t quite make it.
Even more fun, the Fairy Tale Mystery series clearly comes out of the compromise negotiated by Thursday at the end of The Well of Lost Plots.
Shakespeare in Love centers around the writing and staging of Romeo and Juliet.
The Thousand And One Nights. (A framing story that contains a whole series of stories, some of which contain stories-within stories)
Robert Silverberg’s The Book Of Skulls is about 4 people who have found a book called The Book Of Skulls, which tells them how people can become immortal.
The movie “The Number 23” is about the main characters descent into madness after reading a book called “The Number 23”.
Topsy-Turvy is about the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s famous operetta The Mikado.
The Player is about a Hollywood bigshot who commits murder and ultimately greenlights a movie about a Hollywood bigshot who commits murder; the movie will be called… The Player.
Ed McBain’s Downtown has background plots about a movie and a stageplay. It’s also his absolute best, well worth the reading.
When you move on to movies, there are hundreds of examples:
The Stunt Man
Behind the Screen (Chaplin short)
State and Main
The Pickle
Action (TV series about the making of a movie)
Nurse Betty
Tune in Tomorrow …
Soapdish
The Last Action Hero
Pleasantville
The Oscar
The Bank Dick (Fields directs a movie within the movie)
California Suite (Maggie Smith is up for an Oscar for a movie; once nice touch is that a clip of it is shown with James Coburn – who doesn’t appear anywhere else in the film – as her co-star).
Blazing Saddles (they go to see Blazing Saddles in a theater).
Melvaigs Vision (German review) by Richard Ford, heavily references a holy book that appears to be the first book of the author, The legacy (?) of the Elrond.
Another McBain: Fat Ollie’s Book. Proof that, when McBain wants to, he can write really really badly. The novel Fat Ollie writes is ghastly.
There’s a lot of cases of fiction-within-fiction here, but rjk seems to be asking for cases where the plot of the outer level is driven by the inner level (although that makes his own example of the Princess Bride somewhat tenuous). It’s an interesting concept, but I’m sure quite old.
“Og paint cave, show Thag paint cave!”
On that note - Spaceballs, where they watch a tape of Spaceballs as it’s being filmed.
Exactly! Many of the examples above sound interesting, but they’re not quite what I’m looking for. Dex’s Stark/Westlake post, on the other hand, is perfect. There are a few more, but I have no time right now to note them.
Agreed, The Princess Bride is marginal at best. (All I can claim is that I was tired when I posted.)
Another more or less appropriate example, visual rather than fictional, would be Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe. “What? Of course it’s a pipe! Oh, wait, I get it! It’s just a picture of a pipe!” (I’ve never seen anybody mention that the message itself is inside the painting, where that really is a pipe.) The accompanying cartoon is irrelevant but amusing.
Scott McCloud had fun with that painting. “Actually, it’s a printed reproduction of a drawing of a painting of a pipe. Ten of them, actually, or six if you folded over the page.”
Would the movie Throw Momma from the Train Count?
I seem to remember that after Billy Crystal’s character winds up in the hospital, he breaks free of his writer’s block and writes a novel basically about what happened to him throughout the movie, and he actually titled it “Throw Momma from the Train”.
(You could argue the kid’s pop-up book that Danny DeVito’s character writes, too, but that’s another story.)
Along these lines, Infinite Jest, to the extent it has a plot, revolves around a movie of the same name that is so entertaining that no one can pull their attention from it. American forces and Quebec nationalists are racing to find a copy. The latter group wishes to reproduce it for terrorist use.