Cyril Cusack, a well known stage and screen actor at time, received 4th billing in Harold and Maude. He played Glaucus, an ice sculptor, and is onscreen for less than a minute.
In the novelization his character has a bigger part: he’s continually trying to sculpt one perfect work of art from ice before it melts. He also loans the title duo tools. I don’t know if these scenes were shot or not, but it would explain why they had a name actor play a part any extra could have done.
Speaking of Drew Barrymore, she was top billed and the only actor featured on the movie poster for Scream. She’s dead in, what, 5 minutes?
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress went to Beatrice Straight, for her role in “Network.” An Academy record at just under 6 minutes. Thus speaketh the sainted Wiki. 
I recall watching Logan’s Run thinking that it “starred” Farrah Fawcett. I was surprised that she was only in one(?) scene or sequence. Maybe 5 minutes?
I would have caught it on TV (not first run) and seem to remember a lot of mentions of Farrah Fawcett in the promos.
Jude Law gets relatively little screen time in Spy, but he and Jason Statham not only get top billing but their pictures appear on the DVD disc.
You know whose picture doesn’t appear on the disc? Melissa McCarthy, the star who’s onscreen pretty much continuously.
Sean Connery and John Cleese had top billing in Time Bandits as opposed to any of the actors who might appear throughout the film. They each had two fairly small roles, while the majority of the movie was concerned with people that were far smaller in stature, both physically and in fame.
While Mark Hamil’s role in The Force Awakens is surely one for the record books, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford also deserve mention here. While they both have screen time and lines, it’s much less than Finn and Rey, the real leads of the movie.
Mid 60s’ Operation Crossbow is a wonderful example of this. Sophia Loren was at the top of her career when this WWII spy film was made. So in spite of having less than eight minutes on film she is the "star’ of the movie. She was featured on posters, in the previews, on radio spots, etc In reality, however, she, at best, had a bit part.
Oh, another one: In Alien, the characters die in reverse order of their prominence. Sigourney Weaver was, at the time, a no-name.
Since the posts about Drew Barrymore getting killed off and so on should’ve made it clear by now that SPOILERS AHOY, I’d sure like to mention “Sleuth”: the fourth-billed and fifth-billed and sixth-billed actors got less screen time put together than Paquin did in that X-MEN flick, and yet got higher billing.
Something similar happened with the movie Can I do it Til I Need Glasses*, which was a series of short comedy bits strung together, starring no-name comics. Except that one of the no-name comics achieved Fame between the filming of the movie and its release – Robin Williams. All the ads for the film featured him prominently, even though he’s in precisely two sketches. They stuck his name in big letter at the top of the poster, and, later, on the DVD and VHS cases.
It wasn’t “top billing”, but the credit for Alex Hyde-White got prominent placement in the closing credits for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, even though any shots of his face (he played the young Professor Jones to River Phoenix’s Indy in the opening sequence) ended up on the cutting-room floor. I think there’;s one still photo of him somewhere in the movie.
*It was the “sequel” to If You Don’t Stop You’ll Go Blind.
The video of The Groove Tube prominently features Chevy Chase and Richard Belzer. Chase has about three minutes of screen time and Belzer not much more.
YES! I came in to make this very observation 
She’s my favorite actress and I rented the film mostly to see her – what a ripoff! (I thought the movie was pretty much a hot mess,* Iron-Jawed Angels*, for all its anachronistic flaws, was far better. YMMV.)
Bruce Boa got pretty big billing for Full Metal Jacket and he was in one short scene. He played the Colonel that asked Joker about his helmet and peace symbol.
Jet Li is top billed in THE EXPENDABLES 3 but is onscreen for less than 5 minutes.
Chronos writes:
> Sigourney Weaver was, at the time, a no-name.
Interesting piece of trivia: Before Alien, Sigourney Weaver appeared in one minor movie, one minor TV show, and one minor TV mini-series, all in what were apparently small roles, and also in one other movie which was an Oscar Best Picture winner, although her time on screen was only ten seconds.
That movie was Annie Hall. She appeared in the scene at the end where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton’s characters meet again at a showing of The Sorrow and the Pity. She played Allen’s date in the scene. You would never recognize her if you weren’t told that it was her:
Sandra Bullock is in “Crash” for about 6 minutes.
[quote=“Wendell_Wagner, post:56, topic:746198”]
Chronos writes:
> Sigourney Weaver was, at the time, a no-name.
Interesting piece of trivia: Before Alien, Sigourney Weaver appeared in one minor movie, one minor TV show, and one minor TV mini-series, all in what were apparently small roles, and also in one other movie which was an Oscar Best Picture winner, although her time on screen was only ten seconds.
That movie was Annie Hall. She appeared in the scene at the end where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton’s characters meet again at a showing of The Sorrow and the Pity. She played Allen’s date in the scene. You would never recognize her if you weren’t told that it was her:
[/QUOTE]Well, in *Alien *at the end, would you rather see Sigourney Weaver in her tighty-whiteys, or Yaphet Kotto in his?
I felt about the same when I saw “Suffragette” in the theater last year.
The biggest impact I got from the film was at the end credits, when they listed countries and the year women finally got the right to vote.
Switzerland - 1971.
Seriously Switzerland? It took you that long to give women the vote???
I was surprised by that too!