10 Small Movie Roles You Didn't Know Held Signifigance

It's not uncommon for films based on true stories to feature cameos for their real-life counterparts. In most cases, it's almost expected. But it's always interesting to see how filmmakers use their sources. Take Hunter Thompson, who had shepherded the adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas through several different filmmakers. In the finished work, he appears as a hallucination of himself, a playful acknowledgment that not everything in the book is necessarily factual.

Oliver Stone similarly played with Jim Garrison, though his intent was probably nothing more than an in-joke. Based on Stone's many outspoken defenses of the film, he wholeheartedly believes most if not all of former D.A. Jim Garrison's case that New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw was somehow involved in the JFK assassination.

It's curious, then, that Garrison is cast as his public nemesis Earl Warren, whose report he sought to gut. Garrison appears as Warren twice, once talking to reporters affirming that the Warren Report will get the bottom of what occurred on November 22, 1963 and again talking to Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle Murray) in prison.

It's heavily implied, though not stated, that Warren knew or at least did nothing to stop Ruby's murder via needle of cancer. Nevertheless, the real Garrison was a notorious showboater whose antics eventually led to a not guilty verdict for accepting bribes from illegal pinball operations. More importantly, it led to Shaw's absolution, too.