Getting in the Act: 11 Novelists Who Found Their Way Into the Script

Everyone from Stephenie Meyer to Stephen King has gotten screen time.

Film: “Maximum Overdrive” (1986)
Author Appearance: Stephen King

Stephen King is not yet the Hitchcock of vanity cameos, but he’s getting there. King’s cameos are much “bigger” than Hitchcock, and actually show a real talent for the genre. In the opening of “Maximum Overdrive,” the 1986 film which marked King’s only directorial outing, he has a short, salty bit as a white-suited, brown-hatted man using the ATM at the First Bank of Wilmington. “You are an asshole,” the ATM screen reads. Calling his companion to his side, there’s a close-up of King flipping up some truly hideous sunglasses as the screen fills with the word “asshole.” “Come over here, sugar bun!” he yells. “This machine just called me an asshole!” King is actually a total ham, perfectly at home playing toothpick-chomping, sunglasses-flipping yahoos and the somber, bible-wielding ministers. By far the most game member of the literary circle, it’s only a shame that King confines himself to films based on his own work.

Film: “Jellyfish” (2007)
Author Appearance: Etgar Keret

Israeli author Etgar Keret’s 2008 directorial debut, “Jellyfish,” was altogether homegrown. Shot in Tel Aviv, it was written by his wife and featured cameos by his father and his newborn son. Keret, while well-known in Israel, has been building a reputation here with books like “The Nim-Rod Flipout” and last year’s story collection, “The Girl on the Fridge,” on the sly, that is to say, without yet having to attach his face to his name. So it would be easy to miss his own cameo as the video game-playing temp agency dispatcher who brushes off of one of “Jellyfish’s” three female leads. Wearing a green and yellow “Pirates” shirt, he can barely take his eyes off the screen when Joy, a Filipino home care nurse, enters his office to get her assignment. Joy asks if her new client is a baby: “A very old baby,” Keret replies. “85.” When she complains that she prefers an infant because she can’t speak Hebrew, Keret says, “It’s OK, she can’t hear.” Problem solved; scene over.

Film: “Gattaca” (1997)
Author Appearance: Gore Vidal

Many of essayist and novelist Gore Vidal’s on-screen appearances belie the author’s keen sense of irony. For example, there’s a hefty wink behind the lifelong “radical reform” proponent embodying the ruling totalitarian figure in “Gattaca,” the 1997 film starring Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. In the film, which is set in the “not-so-distant future,” Vidal plays the director of Gattaca Corp., a space program where human beings of only the purest genetic strains are recruited and trained. Vidal hoists his patrician brow in a few brief scenes, eyeing his perfect, tank-topped specimens and saying things like, “Tragic as this event may be, it hasn’t stopped the planets turning” and “No one exceeds his potential.” Although he is wonderful in “Igby Goes Down,” where he plays a private school headmaster, and “Bob Roberts,” where he is a Democratic senator, Vidal’s natural screen presence has perhaps never been put to better and more economical use than in “Gattaca.”

Film: “Good Will Hunting” (1997)
Author Appearance: George Plimpton

Though he became the undisputed granddaddy of author cameos, the late writer and editor George Plimpton’s first appearance on film — as a Bedouin in 1962′s “Lawrence of Arabia” — is probably more the work of an extra than being a bonafide cameo. He spent the next four decades perfecting the form, appearing in “Reds,” “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” “L.A. Story,” “Nixon” and “The Last Days of Disco” in cameos that made the most of his intellectual bon vivant persona. One of his last and most memorable cameos was as a psychologist who briefly treats Matt Damon’s character in “Good Will Hunting.” Plimpton didn’t expect much from the role, or the film: “I didn’t know it was going to be anywhere near as popular,” he said. “I’d gone up to Toronto where they filmed part of the movie and spent two hours up there doing the scene, meeting Matt Damon for the first time, and then going back to New York, thinking I would hear very little about the movie afterwards.” And yet despite his reputation as a clutch cameo presence, Plimpton was never really considered for larger roles, a predicament the author addressed with typical forthrightness: “One of the reasons I think I’m asked to perform these roles is that the director assumes that being a participatory journalist, I might write about the film, and I don’t. So they keep asking me back.”

[Additional photos: "Twilight," Summit Entertainment, 2008; "Annie Hall," United Artists, 1977; "Back to School," Orion Pictures, 1986; "Ragtime," Paramount, 1981; "Saboteur," Universal Pictures, 1942; Etgar Keret in "Jellyfish," Zeitgeist Films, 2007; "Gattaca," Columbia Pictures, 1997; "Good Will Hunting," Miramax Films, 1997]

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