Wait a minute, you don’t remember the scene when Kevin Costner reminded James Earl Jones that he used his fathers name in a book about baseball?
Sorry. I promise to do better next time.
Let’s see…
Joe Kensella “played in the minors for a year or two, but nothing ever came of it”.
Terrence Man did have a character in a story named “Joe Kensella”, but it was a story called This is Not a Pipe, which appeared in the April 1962 issue of Jet Magazine. There is no description of the story other than “it is not his best work”. No claim that the story is about baseball.
Ray went to find Mann because he thought a mysterious voice told him to take Mann to a baseball game.
The man who played only one inning of baseball was Archibald Graham, who neither Ray nor Mann had heard of before his stats showed up for them on the scoreboard at the baseball game.
If you wish to refresh your memory, the script is here:
An uncle of mine showed up, by name, in a murder mystery. And no, he wasn’t the victim nor a suspect. He was the police chief of the town where the book took place (and where the author was from).
Who figures in baseball lore as Moonlight Graham. I only know this because I’m a history buff.*
*a graduate student once asked Mrs. J. duriing one of her stints as a reference librarian if she was a history buff. Reassured, he went on to ask her which war it was that was going on in 1944. He said he was a journalism major. 
This is also normal somewhere in the front pages of most fiction books.
I think it’s just basic legal boilerplate. I think once in a while somebody gets sued anyway; I don’t know how often they win.
So much this. It’s often a shock to me when people tell me how they see me. But after thinking about it, I can sometimes see why they view me the way they do.
In college, reading Pride & Predjudice for class and I just couldn’t get into the book for some reason. I was explaining my difficulty to a coworker and she changed my perspective by telling me to think of someone I know who could stand in for each irritating character. And boom, there it was. I was enjoying the book and laughing my head off at some of the people I knew at the same time. It was a great discovery.
You do know that “Field of Dreams” was based on a novel, right?
And the novel is straight up fiction based directly on a coincidence around names? The author of the book was WP Kinsella and the character is “Ray Kinsella” whose name WP (the author) took from a JD Salinger story because he liked the coincidence around the last names? And that the James Earl Jones character was JD Salinger in the novel but changed in the movie to avoid lawsuits?
Basically, it’s ‘interesting’ because the author thought “hey the same as my last name, neat-o” and wrote something around that. The author deliberately used that sort of coincidence (the characters in the book aren’t like their real world counterparts at all) of last names as the premise of the novel, which is the opposite of the thesis of the thread.
Every single movie? I’m not a lawyer, but I have a feeling that all the movies that are based on real people and real events do not carry this disclaimer.
Famously “Fargo” does not, though it is now known to be nearly entirely made up (there have been robberies before, of course and some of them may have been loose inspirations) and not based on real events or people, though if you check the end credits, it does have the standard disclaimer
I’ve never written novels, but I wrote sales manuals and such. In the sections dealing with difficult clients, there may or may not be resemblance to people I went to high school with.
Same. Also cannot watch The Office for the same reason.
My user name is based on a conversation with my husband (January 2005). There’s an obscure comic character which appeared around the same time. I do not have a twitter account, publisher or website under this name, but they are out there.
It could be worse. Carly Simon wrote a song about me once.
I’ve read a metric ton of novels, but I’ve never come across a character that remotely reminded me of me.
It’s definitely not always true, because they put it at the end of movies that fictionalize actual events. I watched “80 for Brady” the other day and laughed a little at the disclaimer because Brady and Superbowl LI (at first I was puzzled why they picked a Superbowl from a few years back until I saw the box score for that game and realized they used it for the “come back late from way behind” aspect) are very real even if many characters and events in the movie aren’t.
People in my writers group use each other’s names for minor characters in all of their work, but the person so named bears little resemblance to the character. Still it’s a weird bit of whiplash reading a manuscript where I’m the head of national security or something. “Do I really talk like that?”
Just to circle back to this question: it actually can be traced back to a particular case – the 1932 MGM film Rasputin and the Empress. As described in Wikipedia:
The article also notes this:
No, this isn’t what I was saying. My uncle is (or was; I’m sure he’s retired by now) the actual police chief of that actual town. And so when the author, also from that actual town, wrote a fictional murder mystery set in that town, he used the actual name of the actual police chief, for local flavor.
Now the OP would be really impressed if your author had used the name of an actual local person from your town for the victim and for the killer and then the bok-named victim had actually turned up dead IRL.
In which case the local police chief should probably interview both the book’s killer and the book’s author; they’re probably in cahoots. 
A corollary that I keep falling for here is “Omigosh, the poster that showed up with the witty reply in that thread? I swear that’s Chucko, my roommate in the Phi Sig house at Slippery Rock State Teacher’s College! No one else would use his catchphrase ‘Random Guttural Anglo-Celtic Obscenities’! Let me just check the poster’s name … CDPM!?! Whoa! Those were Chucko’s real-life initials!”
But ten minutes of going through his past posts, and it’s clear that this CDPM is a Brit living in Digby, NS, not a priest in Chagrin Falls, OH.
Hey, I’m not delusional… I’ve only done this about once a year (but that means twenty times).
.
Side note: @Tibby, why are you trying so hard to hide the fact that you’re Tibby Welcomer from Wauwatosa, who I spent nine days with on our “Let’s take a raft down the Mississippi” scouting trip?
All those facts, like that you grew up over 2000 miles from there, isn’t fooling anyone…