Editing Story within a story (section)

=== Nested films ===
{{Unreferenced section|date=March 2022}}
The 1946 film noir [[The Locket (1946 film)|''The Locket'']] contains a nested [[Flashback (narrative)|flashback]] structure, with a screenplay by [[Sheridan Gibney]] based on the story "What Nancy Wanted" by Norma Barzman.

The [[François Truffaut]] film [[Day for Night (film)|''Day for Night'']] is about the making of a fictitious movie called ''Meet Pamela'' ({{lang|fr|Je vous présente Pamela}}) and shows the interactions of the actors as they are making this movie about a woman who falls for her husband's father. The story of ''Pamela'' involves lust, betrayal, death, sorrow, and change, events that are mirrored in the experiences of the actors portrayed in ''Day for Night''. There are a wealth of other movies that revolve around the film industry itself, even if not centering exclusively on one nested film. These include the darkly satirical classic [[Sunset Boulevard (film)|''Sunset Boulevard'']] about an aging star and her parasitic victim, and the Coen Brothers' farce ''[[Hail, Caesar!]]''

The script to [[Karel Reisz]]'s movie [[The French Lieutenant's Woman (film)|''The French Lieutenant's Woman'']] (1981), written by [[Harold Pinter]], is a film-within-a-film adaptation of [[John Fowles]]'s book. In addition to the Victorian love story of the book, Pinter creates a present-day background story that shows a love affair between the main actors.

''[[The Muppet Movie]]'' begins with [[the Muppets]] sitting down in a theater to watch the eponymous movie, which [[Kermit the Frog]] claims to be a semi-biographical account of how they all met.

In [[Buster Keaton]]'s ''[[Sherlock Jr.]]'', Keaton's protagonist actually enters into a film while it is playing in a cinema, as does the main character in the [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]] film ''[[The Last Action Hero]]''. A similar device is used in the music video for the song "[[Take On Me]]" by [[A-ha]], which features a woman entering a pencil sketch. Conversely, [[Woody Allen]]'s ''[[Purple Rose of Cairo]]'' is about a film character exiting the film to interact with the real world. Allen's earlier film [[Play It Again, Sam (film)|''Play it Again, Sam'']] featured liberal use of characters, dialogue and clips from the film classic [[Casablanca (film)|''Casablanca'']] as a central device.

The 2002 [[Pedro Almodóvar]] film ''[[Talk to Her]]'' ({{lang|es|Hable con ella}}) has the chief character Benigno tell a story called ''The Shrinking Lover'' to Alicia, a long-term comatose patient whom Benigno, a male nurse, is assigned to care for. The film presents ''The Shrinking Lover'' in the form of a black-and-white silent melodrama. To prove his love to a scientist girlfriend, ''The Shrinking Lover'' protagonist drinks a potion that makes him progressively smaller. The resulting seven-minute scene, which is readily intelligible and enjoyable as a stand-alone short subject, is considerably more overtly comic than the rest of ''Talk to Her''—the protagonist climbs giant breasts as if they were rock formations and even ventures his way inside a (compared to him) gigantic vagina. Critics have noted that ''The Shrinking Lover'' essentially is a sex metaphor. Later in ''Talk to Her'', the comatose Alicia is discovered to be pregnant and Benigno is sentenced to jail for rape. ''The Shrinking Lover'' was named Best Scene of 2002 in the ''Skandies'', an annual survey of online cinephiles and critics invited each year by critic Mike D'Angelo.<ref>{{Cite web |date= |title=Skandies 2002 - results |url=http://skandies.org/skandies02.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110728025551/http://skandies.org/skandies02.html |archive-date=2011-07-28 |access-date= |website=skandies.org}}</ref>

''[[Tropic Thunder]]'' (2008) is a [[comedy film]] revolving around a group of [[prima donna]] actors making a [[Vietnam War]] film (itself also named ''Tropic Thunder'') when their fed-up writer and director decide to abandon them in the middle of the jungle, forcing them to fight their way out. The concept was perhaps{{or inline|date=January 2025}} inspired by the 1986 comedy ''[[Three Amigos]]'', where three washed-up silent film stars are expected to live out a real-life version of their old hit movies. The same idea of life being forced to imitate art is also reprised in the ''[[Star Trek]]'' parody ''[[Galaxy Quest]]''.

The first episode of the [[anime]] series [[The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (anime)|''The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya'']] consists almost entirely of a poorly made film that the protagonists created, complete with [[Kyon]]'s typical, sarcastic commentary.

[[Chuck Jones]]'s 1953 [[cartoon]] ''[[Duck Amuck]]'' shows [[Daffy Duck]] trapped in a cartoon that an unseen animator repeatedly manipulates. At the end, it is revealed that the whole cartoon was being controlled by [[Bugs Bunny]]. The ''Duck Amuck'' plot was essentially replicated in one of Jones' later cartoons, ''[[Rabbit Rampage]]'' (1955), in which Bugs Bunny turns out to be the victim of the sadistic animator ([[Elmer Fudd]]). A similar plot was also included in an episode of ''[[New Looney Tunes]]'', in which Bugs is the victim, Daffy is the animator, and it was made on a computer instead of a pencil and paper. In 2007, the ''Duck Amuck'' sequence was parodied on ''[[Drawn Together]]'' ("Nipple Ring-Ring Goes to Foster Care").

All feature-length films by [[Jörg Buttgereit]] except {{lang|de|[[Schramm (film)|Schramm]]}} feature a film within the film. In {{lang|de|[[Nekromantik]]}}, the protagonist goes to the cinema to see the fictional slasher film ''Vera''. In {{lang|de|[[Der Todesking]]}}, one of the character watches a video of the fictional Nazi exploitation film {{lang|de|Vera – Todesengel der Gestapo}} and in {{lang|de|[[Nekromantik 2]]}}, the characters go to see a film called {{lang|fr|Mon déjeuner avec Vera}}, which is a parody of [[Louis Malle]]'s ''[[My Dinner with André]]''.

[[Quentin Tarantino]]'s ''[[Inglourious Basterds]]'' depicts a [[Nazi propaganda]] film called ''[[Nation's Pride]]'', which glorifies a soldier in the German army. ''Nation's Pride'' is directed by [[Eli Roth]].

[[Joe Dante]]'s [[Matinee (1993 film)|''Matinee'']] depicts ''Mant'', an early-1960s sci-fi/horror movie about a man who turns into an [[ant]]. In one scene, the protagonists see a [[Disney]]-style family movie called ''The Shook-Up Shopping Cart''.

==== Story within a film ====
The 2002 martial arts epic [[Hero (2002 film)|''Hero'']] presented the same narrative several different times, as recounted by different storytellers, but with both factual and aesthetic differences. Similarly, in the whimsical 1988 [[Terry Gilliam]] film ''[[The Adventures of Baron Munchausen]]'', and the 2003 [[Tim Burton]] film ''[[Big Fish]]'', the bulk of the film is a series of stories told by an (extremely) unreliable narrator. In the 2006 Tarsem film [[The Fall (2006 film)|''The Fall'']], an injured silent-movie stuntman tells [[heroic fantasy]] stories to a little girl with a broken arm to pass time in the hospital, which the film visualizes and presents with the stuntman's voice becoming voiceover narration. The fantasy tale bleeds back into and comments on the film's "present-tense" story. There are often incongruities based on the fact that the stuntman is an American and the girl Persian—the stuntman's voiceover refers to "Indians", "a squaw" and "a teepee", but the visuals show a Bollywood-style devi and a Taj Mahal-like castle. The same conceit of an unreliable narrator was used to very different effect in the 1995 crime drama ''[[The Usual Suspects]]'' (which garnered an Oscar for [[Kevin Spacey]]'s performance).

[[Walt Disney]]'s 1946 live-action drama film ''[[Song of the South]]'' has three animated sequences, all based on the [[Br'er Rabbit]] stories, told as moral fables by [[Uncle Remus]] ([[James Baskett]]) to seven-year-old Johnny ([[Bobby Driscoll]]) and his friends Ginny ([[Luana Patten]]) and Toby (Glenn Leedy).

The seminal 1950 Japanese film [[Rashomon (film)|''Rashomon'']], based on the Japanese short story "[[In a Grove]]" (1921), utilizes the [[Flashback (narrative)|flashback]]-within-a-flashback technique. The story unfolds in flashback as the four witnesses in the story—the bandit, the murdered [[samurai]], his wife, and the nameless woodcutter—recount the events of one afternoon in a grove. But it is also a flashback within a flashback, because the accounts of the witnesses are being retold by a woodcutter and a priest to a ribald commoner as they wait out a rainstorm in a ruined gatehouse.

The film ''[[Inception]]'' has a deeply nested structure that is itself part of the setting, as the characters travel deeper and deeper into layers of dreams within dreams. Similarly, in the beginning of the music video for the [[Michael Jackson]] song "[[Michael Jackson's Thriller (music video)|Thriller]]", the heroine is terrorized by her monster boyfriend in what turns out to be a film within a dream. The film ''[[The Grand Budapest Hotel]]'' has four layers of narration: starting with a young girl at the author's memorial reading his book, it cuts to the old author in 1985 telling of an incident in 1968 when he, as a young author, stayed at the hotel and met the owner, old Zero. He was then told the story of young Zero and M. Gustave, from 1932, which makes up most of the narrative.
Then in 2025, The film [[Dog Man_(film)|Dog Man]] is a flim in a comic for the [[Dog Man]] series.

==== Play within a film ====
The 2001 film ''[[Moulin Rouge!]]'' features a fictitious musical within a film, called "Spectacular Spectacular". The 1942 [[Ernst Lubitsch]] comedy [[To Be or Not to Be (1942 film)|''To Be or Not to Be'']] confuses the audience in the opening scenes with a play, "The Naughty Nazis", about Adolf Hitler which appears to be taking place within the actual plot of the film. Thereafter, the acting company players serve as the protagonists of the film and frequently use acting/costumes to deceive various characters in the film. ''[[Hamlet]]'' also serves as an important throughline in the film, as suggested by the title. [[Laurence Olivier]] sets the opening scene of his 1944 film of [[Henry V (1944 film)|''Henry V'']] in the [[Green room|tiring room]] of the old [[Globe Theatre]] as the actors prepare for their roles on stage. The early part of the film follows the actors in these "stage" performances and only later does the action almost imperceptibly expand to the full realism of the [[Battle of Agincourt]]. By way of increasingly more artificial sets (based on mediaeval paintings) the film finally returns to The Globe.

[[Mel Brooks]]' film [[The Producers (1968 film)|''The Producers'']] revolves around a scheme to make money by producing a disastrously bad Broadway musical, ''Springtime for Hitler.''  Ironically the film itself was later made into its own Broadway musical (although a more intentionally successful one). The [[Outkast]] music video for the song "Roses" is a short film about a high school musical. In [[Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010 film)|''Diary of a Wimpy Kid'']], the middle-schoolers put on a play of [[The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)|''The Wizard of Oz'']], while ''[[High School Musical]]'' is a romantic comedy about the eponymous musical itself. A high school production is also featured in the gay teen romantic comedy ''[[Love, Simon]]''.

A 2012 Italian film, ''[[Caesar Must Die]]'', stars real-life Italian prisoners who rehearse Shakespeare's [[Julius Caesar (play)|''Julius Caesar'']] in [[Rebibbia]] prison playing ''fictional'' Italian prisoners rehearsing the same play in the same prison. In addition, the film itself becomes a ''Julius Caesar'' adaption of sorts as the scenes are frequently acted all around the prison, outside of rehearsals, and the prison life becomes indistinguishable from the play.<ref>{{Cite news | url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/mar/03/caesar-must-die-review-philip-french | title=Caesar Must die – review| newspaper=The Guardian| date=2013-03-03| last1=French| first1=Philip}}</ref>

The main plot device in ''[[Repo! The Genetic Opera]]'' is an opera which is going to be held the night of the events of the film. All of the principal characters of the film play a role in the opera, though the audience watching the opera is unaware that some of the events portrayed are more than drama. The 1990 biopic [[Korczak (film)|''Korczak'']], about the last days of a Jewish children's orphanage in Nazi occupied Poland, features an amateur production of [[Rabindranath Tagore]]'s ''The Post Office'', which was selected by the orphanage's visionary leader as a way of preparing his charges for their own impending death. That same production is also featured in the stage play ''Korczak's Children,'' also inspired by the same historical events.

==== TV show within a film ====
The 1973 film [[The National Health (film)|''The National Health'']], an adaptation of the 1969 play [[The National Health (play)|''The National Health'']] by [[Peter Nichols (playwright)|Peter Nichols]], features a send-up of a typical American hospital [[soap opera]] being shown on a television situated in an underfunded, unmistakably British [[NHS]] hospital.

The [[Jim Carrey]] film ''[[The Truman Show]]'' is about a person who grows to adulthood without ever realizing that he is the unwitting hero of the immersive eponymous television show.

In ''[[Toy Story 2]]'', the lead character [[Sheriff Woody|Woody]] learns that he is based on the lead character of the same name of a 1950s [[Western (genre)|Western]] show known as ''Woody's Roundup'', which was seemingly cancelled due to the rise of [[science fiction]], though this is eventually debunked after the final episode of the show can be seen playing.