In the spaghetti western My Name is Nobody, the outlaw gang was called the wild bunch. In one scene, the main character is in an Indian cemetery. He looks at the name on a tombstone and says, “Sam Peckinpah. That’s a beautiful name in Navajo.”
Not a movie, but the TV show Leverage has lots of fun insider references, particularly when it comes to their aliases.
For example, in one where Timothy Hutton is forced to improvise and get an alias while getting on a plane, he’s given several different names to choose from, all of whom are actors who played “the Doctor” in Doctor Who, while his partner, Sophie, is given just one, “Sarah Jane Smith”(which all fans of Doctor Who will note). IIRC, Hutton settles on “Tom Baker”.
Similarly, whenever Hardision and Parker pretend to be government agents they always have names like “agent Elmore and agent Leonard.”
Also, if you watch the great 70s horror movie The Howling, lots of the characters are named after famous horror directors and actors from a different generation.
The same is true of the movie Final Destination where you have characters with names like “Max Schreck” and “Billy Hitchcock.”
Did you see the one where Timothy Hutton’s character came fancy-dressed as literary Detective Ellery Queen?
At the end of the opening scene of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, when Ford and Capshaw leap out of the window, they end their fall by clinging onto the awning of the bar below.
The name of the bar: Club Obi-Wan.
This was also true of the zombie movie “Night of the Creeps” with characters named Chris Romero and Sgt Raimi. (I fondly remember that movie for this exchange:
Detective Cameron: I got good news and bad news, girls. The good news is your dates are here.
Sorority Sister: What’s the bad news?
Detective Cameron: They’re dead.)
Christopher Walken’s character in Batman Returns was named Max Schreck as an inside joke. The original Schreck, the actor, was known for playing the vampire Nosferatu.
In an early Burn Notice episode, Mike and Sam masqueraded as a couple of detectives named Cagney and Lacey. Sharon Gless, who played Chris Cagney, also stars on Burn Notice as Mike’s mother, Maddy.
Actually that was Sam and Fi.
Itself an inside joke, as Schreck is German for “horror.”
Yeah, that was a fun episode.
It’s hardly the deepest show ever, but it’s alway fun.
It was a few seasons ago. I misremembered. I shoulda looked it up. Thanks for the correction.
One of the Stormtroopers’ uniforms purloined by Han and Luke belonged to a 'trooper whose call sign was “THX 1138” in the novel, but was shortened for the film as “TK 421”.
In the " A-Team " 's second episode the Team meets a client on the back-lot of a film studio. Face, played by actor Dirk Benedict, encounters an actor dressed as a Cylon, one of the baddies from Battlestar Galactica, in which Benedict played “Starbuck”. Face takes a double-take as he looks at the cyborg and says, “Haven’t we met before…nah…” and as quickly dismisses the exchange as Deja Vu.
Likewise, in an early episode of " Stargate, SG-1 ", reference is made to “MacGyvering” a makeshift solution to a problem as Richard Dean Anderson gives an “annoyed” reaction shot.
I’ve just seen Premium Rush, and the use of the name “Forrest J. Ackerman” is pretty arbitrary. It’s like the screenwriter said to a friend, “Hey, I need a pretentious name for the villain to be constantly using as an alias.” The friend said, “What do you mean by pretentious?” The screenwriter said, “You know, like a name with a middle initial of J. That sounds pretentious.” The friend (who was a science fiction fan) said, “What, like Forrest J. Ackerman?” The screenwriter said, “Yeah, that sounds good.”
Not a movie…but there’s that episode of The Wire where the Dominic West (British actor playing an American) character tries to imitate a British accent, and does a terrible job.
I thought this was clever, but I was also glad they didn’t push this too far – it was just a scene or two.
And the piece of audio gear that Buck tries to push on a customer in Boogie Nights was the TK421.
Along those same lines, I saw a movie years ago called Death Machine that had characters named “John Carpenter”, “Sam Raimi”, “Weyland”, “Yutani”, and “Scott Ridley”. There’s also a “Jack Dante” that might be a reference to director Joe Dante.
In the final credits there’s a “Special Thanks To” section, followed by, “No Thanks To: They know who they are…”. I suspect that might be related to the character names somehow.