That brings up an interesting point. The people under contract were probably told to be in the movie. It’s still cool, but in the example I used, Entourage, I wonder what the impetus was to appear? Were these folks all fans of the TV show? Friends of the stars/director/producer? There were athletes (Brady, Gronk, Tyson, etc.), musical performers (Pharrel, Common), comedians (Andrew Dice Clay, Bob Saget) and many others.
I was also going to bring up The Player but wanted to bring up one clever gag involving cameos. The film takes place in Hollywood and throughout the film we get many, many celebrity cameos. One scene has Whoopi Goldberg holding an Oscar so we are led to believe this is yet another cameo. Then she starts to talk and it turns out she’s not Whoopi but is a detective and was just admiring the Oscar. I actually read a review that considered this an error on the part of the filmmakers confusing the audience rather than the clever misdirection it was.
Jim was Don Ameche’s brother, and a radio actor in his own right.
I don’t know if they got him because of the family connection – Don Ameche playing Bell in the 1939 biopic was so well-known that people used to joke that Don Ameche invented the telephone – but they surely couldn’t have been unaware of it.
It’s not unknown for brothers to play the same part
My dad used that line a lot: “I saw the movie.”
I didn’t know about Jim until I looked him up too. Damned if he didn’t look like his brother!
Like my dad also used to say, “You learn something new every day.”
Kinda ticks me off that they mention Lindsay Lohan but not Hayley Mills. 
Musicians often play themselves. Twelve in The Blues Brothers by my count.
Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, etc., are in a number of films, sometimes with their orchestras, which would raise the cameo count. Plenty of films like that since then.
Woodstock and similar documentary-type films don’t count, right?
They also include Linda and Leslie Hamilton in Terminator 2, but failed to even mention Don and Dan Stanton in the same movie.
Ahh, the blues band Anton Funderburg and the Rockets featuring Sam Meyers played in a bar in the movie China Moon.
There have been seven movie versions of the original 1949 German novel that inspired them all. The novel was based on a 1942 unproduced idea for a movie by the author of that novel. Some movie versions used one girl in both parts and some used two girls who looked enough alike:
Huh! I was not aware of this. Thanks for posting that link—it’s very enlightening.
I must have seen the 1961 version of the movie at least a half dozen times back in first grade. I’d go to the cinema with my older brother, who was infatuated with Hayley Mills. (I thought she was kinda cute too. 
)
Anthea Bell was an absolutely brilliant translator of multiple languages. Her work on the French Asterix comics with collaborator Derek Hockridge set the standard for everyone in the profession.
Oh yeah, I vaguely remember that. And The Meters in 48 Hrs and Delaney & Bonnie & Friends (with Ted Neeley) in Vanishing Point (although they’re credited as “J. Hovah’s Singers” so I guess they don’t count).
I think there will be more cameos, though, in other kinds of films in which several musical artists/groups appear. Regarding the swing/jazz genre I mentioned, I’ve seen bits and pieces of what may be entire films with Basie, Ellington, etc. It was a fairly common feature of Hollywood productions for a while, in films like The Glenn Miller Story.
But there may be more cameo potential in those rock-and-roll-themed movies from the 1950s, with Bill Haley & His Comets, etc.
She was a goddess to my child self. I had no idea why at the time. Eventually I understood what adult goddesses were all about but still have a fondness for Hayley. I’ll watch Trouble with Angels just to see her say “I’ve got the most scathingly brilliant idea!”. I watched the whole thing one day, it’s not a bad movie with a few real laughs. Interesting tidbit, Gypsy Rose Lee had a small part in the movie and Rosalind Russell who portrayed the mother superior in this one also portrayed Gypsy Rose Lee’s mother in Gypsy. Unfortunately they didn’t give Natalie Wood a part which would have put it way higher in my movie rankings.
I heard that after the movie came out one of the slang terms for a telephone was an “Ameche”. I never heard it used myself (I’m not quite that old).
The fitfully amusing National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon 1 has a lot of one-scene (or one-line) cameos, including, inexplicably, Bruce Willis and Whoopi Goldberg. No idea how they got roped into that one.
What about “Cannonball Run”? Or are those not cameo’s?
Crazy number of stars in that film!
MtM
My favorite Hayley Mills movie is In Search of the Castaways. She really was beautiful with that long blonde hair of hers.
She also showed how good an actress she was playing opposite her father John in Tiger Bay. At the time, Mr Mills was quoted as saying “As an experienced old ham, I could see immediately that Hayley was going to steal the show.”
The Wikipedia entry has been updated since I wrote that post to account for additional information… There have been ten film versions of this. Two were American, one was British, two were German, two were Japanese, and three were Indian. There were also three television sequels of the Lindsay Lohan version. There was a loose version in Malayalam. There’s a 1995 American movie called It Takes Two which is loosely the same plot. There’s a 1936 American movie called “Three Smart Girls” which has some resemblance to it.
Kind of surprised JFK was not mentioned. It has tons of cameos from stars for a very good reason. It’s a 3 hour movie with a huge cast in a convoluted story. By casting well known actors as the characters, the viewer has an easier time navigating the material then they might if the actors were less recognizable.
Can you explain this? That statement doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
it’s been a while since I watched the film, but essentially it’s a huge conspiracy theory writ large with many, many participants. If you were watching the film and those characters were played by generic unknowns, then it’s a huge information dump with too many characters to keep track of. You might not know Clay Shaw, but subconsciously you know the actors so it’s slightly less confusing. By casting well-knowns even in bit parts, it’s easier to wrap your head around Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pesci, John Larroquette, Jack Lemmon, Donald Sutherland, John Candy, Michael Rooker, Ed Asner, Walter Matthau, Wayne Knight, and so on.