Bradley Cooper’s past comes back to haunt him in The Silver Linings Playbook. Check out what’s playing at the movie theatre that serves as a backdrop for an emotional confrontation between Cooper and co-star Jennifer Lawrence. It’s Midnight Meat Train, a pre-stardom cult curio in Cooper’s career. It’s a nifty visual in-joke — perpetrated by Silver Linings Playbook director David O. Russell — that may escape those unfamiliar with Cooper's oeuvre or are too wrapped up in the intense scene to notice. After the jump you'll find a representative sampling of some you may have missed and things to watch and listen for so you don’t.
Movie marquees and posters have long been handy props for filmmakers to sneak in a visual aside. In Lethal Weapon, a marquee displays the The Lost Boys, (“This summer’s hit”), which director Richard Donner executive produced. The Kiefer Sutherland vampire classic would not be release until four months after Lethal Weapon, however. In Back to the Future Part II, the main attraction in 2015 at Hill Valley’s Holomax theatre is Jaws 19 (“This time, it’s really, really personal”) directed by Max Spielberg, the son of BTTF executive producer Steven. Richard Benjamin paid homage to his wife in Made in America with a theater marquee announcing a Paula Prentiss retrospective. For the “Thriller” music video, John Landis (more on him later) couldn’t resist displaying a poster for his first film, Schlock, at the theatre where Michael Jackson and his date see a horror movie.
Alfred Hitchcock's tradition of making clever cameos in his films has, not surprisingly, inspired more contemporary filmmakers to do the same. Landis, for example, went Hitch one better. He enlisted other directors to make cameos in his films, including Dario Argento (Innocent Blood) Jonathan Demme (Into the Night), Terry Gilliam and Ray Harryhausen (Spies Like Us), George Lucas (Beverly Hills Cop III), Frank Oz (An American Werewolf in London), Spielberg (The Blues Brothers), and Robert Wise (The Stupids).
Like Landis, Joe Dante is a sucker for a movie in-joke and his films are peppered with them. In The ‘Burbs, among the framed photos on the mantle in Gale Gordon’s home is one of his Here’s Lucy costar, Lucille Ball. B-movie buffs will recognize producer Roger Corman, who mentored Dante, making a call in a phone booth in The Howling. But that in-joke is actually a reference to another in-joke: a scene in Rosemary’s Baby, in which horror-film producer William Castle, to whom Dante lovingly paid tribute in Matinee, makes a similar phone-booth cameo.
By the way, for those who aren't Hitchcock completists, his most ingenious cameo can be found in Lifeboat. Despite being set in the middle of the ocean, on a lifeboat, Hitch's picture appears in a newspaper ad for a weight-loss drug, Reduco.
Pixar has its own version of the Hitchcock cameo. Beginning with Toy Story, the Pizza Planet delivery truck has made an appearance in each of its animated films except for The Incredibles. In Brave, you’ll spot it as a wood carving in the witch’s cottage. Another Pixar touchstone is “A113,” a reference to the CalArts classroom where directors John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton studied. In Toy Story, it’s the license plate on Andy’s mom’s minivan. But that’s not all folks, if you’ll excuse a cross-studio reference: Each Pixar film teases future productions. Another of the witch’s woodcarvings in Brave is of Sulley, anticipating next year’s Monsters Inc. sequel, Monsters University.
But it is Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, who thanks to a nifty piece of editing, welcomes Bugs Bunny to Sherwood Forest in the cartoon Rabbit Hood. Unbilled star cameos are another playful form of movie in-joke. When they weren’t on the road together, Bing Crosby often popped up in Bob Hope’s solo films to get the last laugh. In The Princess and the Pirate, he appears just before the end to steal away Hope’s love interest, Virginia Mayo.
In What’s New Pussycat?, Peter O’Toole is greeted in a bar by passerby Richard Burton, who asks, “Don’t you know me from someplace? They had just completed filming Beckett. And Robert Patrick would don his old Terminator 2 T-1000 garb to menace Mike Meyers in Wayne's World. He also can be seen exiting police headquarters — just after Sharon Stone, reprising her Basic Instinct murderess — in The Last Action Hero. To paraphrase Danny Glover, who makes a surprise appearance in Maverick as a masked bank robber opposite his Lethal Weapon costar Mel Gibson, this shit never gets old.
At heart, movie in-jokes are affectionate winks from filmmakers to fellow film geeks that pay homage to the films that influenced and inspired them. Perhaps the most elaborate of these is “See you next Wednesday.” In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, this is the last line uttered by Frank Poole's father during the ill-fated astronaut's videophone conversation with his parents. In Landis' films, the phrase has enjoyed many lives: It’s a movie title splashed across a billboard in The Blues Brothers, a movie in Kentucky Fried Movie, and a porn film in An American Werewolf in London.
“The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat,” Cary Grant blusters in His Girl Friday. Leach, of course, was Grant’s real name. Michael Caine fans will recognize his real surname as the inspiration for the store named Micklewhite in The Muppet Christmas Carol. But you'd have to be a pretty die-hard film buff to get that several character names in Dante’s The Howling are the names of directors with werewolf films among their credits. Sam Newfield directed The Mad Monster (1942) and Charlie Barton helmed Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which featured the Wolf Man.
Perversely, when it comes to movie in-jokes, the more obscure, the better. What have you caught the rest of us missed? Leave them in the comments section.
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based film and entertainment writer. He has been published in The Chicago Tribune, Roger Ebert.com, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post and other outlets.
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