Didn’t see it come up on google, despite it sounding very plausible.
Then again, I could have been whooshed.
Only for HAL, though. IBM would have to be pronounced as a string of letters. Seems to be a whole whackload of different acronyms in Wiki.
And btw - in an old Frank Capra flick (or possibly Noel Coward) there are several veiled suggestions to acronym initials getting spelled backwards and coded - a winking future reference to this post.
I had never heard that story before. That’s pretty damned funny.
In the movie Kingpin, during the bowling tournament someone from the audience yells “Attaboy, Luther!”
Luther was the name of Don Knotts character in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken and in that movie, during a scene depicting a presentation in his honor (the locals think he’s a brave hero) just as he’s about to give his speech someone in the audience yells “Attaboy, Luther!”
Just discovered this one:
Sister Act 2 takes place in St. Francis Academy. Mary Wickes plays the part of Sister Mary Lazarus.
Years before, Wickes appeared as a nun in The Trouble With Angels. The school there was called “St. Francis Academy.”
At an earlier point in the film, someone says that Stallone thinks he’s Rambo, to which he replies, “Rambo was a pussy.”
They were also 3 characters in Return of the Jedi.
Ha!
In the movie Big Trouble in Little China, when Lightning (James Pax) gets struck with the Big Stone Buddha (that presumably kills him), there is a flourish of lightning bolts. Off on one side, some of the lightning can be seen to make a Chinese character briefly, before it al fades out altogether (you might not have seen this if you didn’t catch the movie in the theater, or in a letterboxed edition. The image gets clipped off on a regular TV “fullscreen” image).
For years I wondered what that character meant. It was obviously an in-joke.
It wasn’t until the Internet Movie Database came around that I found the answer in the “Trivia” section. It’s the character for “Carpenter”, because John Carpenter was the director.
Another TV reference is the series My Name Is Earl. It aired during the transition period between standard definition 4:3 televisions and widescreen HD televisions and broadcasting, and they would sometimes include some joke moment that could only be seen in the edges that would be cropped in pan and scan or signs that could only be read on HD broadcasts. Also, a Mexican character would occasionally rant angrily in Spanish, but actually be commenting to Spanish-speaking members of the audience.
In the Truffaut interviews, he claimed that he first came across the Du Maurier short story when it was anthologised in one of the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” books. That would seem to be 1959, so a few years after To Catch a Thief.
(The Wikipedia page suggests that the script was started in 1961, but overlooks the story that someone - Jack Trevor Story? - produced a script rather closer to the original, with the gimmick that it was entirely confined to a house and so the birds were only heard rather than ever seen. That would be before Evan Hunter was brought on board.)
A few:
Quentin Tarantino always uses the fictional “Red Apple” brand for cigarettes in his movies. In “Hateful Eight”, the cigarettes are Spanish, called “Manzana Rojas”.
Hot Shots Part Deux, Charlie Sheen on a river boat crosses paths with Martin Sheen on another river boat, in full Apocalypse Now regalia. They each point at each other and yell “I loved you in Wall Street”.
The navigational deflector in Star Trek: First Contact is shown to be an “AE-35” model, which is the unit on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The same thing happened to me the first time I saw Blazing Saddles (1974), when they got to the line “Badges? We don’ need no steenkin’ badges!”
Clearly, I was the only one in the theater who had seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Not sure if this qualifies, but in Chaplin, Geraldine Chaplin plays her real-life grandmother, Charlie Chaplin’s mother.
In The Maltese Falcon, Walter Huston, father of director John Huston, plays Captain Jacoby, who dies without uttering a line.
In Buster Keaton’s The Navigator, a photo of the captain which is the basis of several gags is actually a photo of Keaton’s co-director, Donald Crisp.
TV, not movie (again): In the episode of Batman where Alfred has been brainwashed by The Penguin, Batman makes him review a Rogues’ Gallery on the Batcomputer in the Batcave.
The first two photos are those of William Dozier and Howie Horowitz, the series’ Executive Producer and Producer, respectively.
There’s also the badgers of UHF.
In the final scene “What’s Up Doc?” (1972 ) there’s an exchange between Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal that is a clear reference to his earlier film “Love Story”. But I don’t know whether something so obvious counts as an “inside joke” for this thread. Ditto for the fact that while the pair shared a kiss and remarks the 1950 Bugs Bunny movie of the same name was playing.
So here’s one from television that could easily slip by even a die-hard comics fan:
In “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” (TV series, 1979) at one point Buck is crossing through a spaceport and an announcement over a spaceport’s loudspeaker system asks for “Doctor Adam Strange from Alpha Centauri” to “please report to the reservations desk.” 
I guess I’m not a die-hard comics fan (at least not since the early '70s), because **this **is the first thing that came to my mind when I read your post:
I went “WTF?!?” :dubious: 
and had to Google “Adam Strange” to get the joke!
In Boogie Nights, the stereo that Buck tries to sell to the young guy is called the TK421.
In Fargo, Jerry Lundegaard is called by a man name Riley Dieffenbach. I never thought about this for years until I saw Seven Days In May and heard several references to generals Riley and Dieffenbach.
And Sunset Boulevard had a lot of these. Gloria Swansons character pretty much echoed her own career, being a huge hit as a young silent movie star to an unrecognized nobody. And her bridge-game friends are supposedly other silent film stars played by actual silent film stars like Buster Keaton.
In Coming to America, Prince Hakeem (Eddie Murphy) gives money to two homeless men (Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche). They are the Duke Brothers, who were bankrupt by Billy Ray (Eddie Murphy) in Trading Places. Both movies were directed by John Landis.
In Psycho 2 filmed years after Hitchcocks death you can see his silhouette on one of the screens in Norman Bates attic.
R2-D2 got his name because George Lucas heard it when a sound editor was talking about “Reel 2, dialogue 2” while editing American Graffiti, and the name stuck in Lucas’s mind.
C-3PO got his name after a post office which is located at reference C3 on a map of Lucas’ hometown.