Robert Shaye

Robert Shaye founded New Line Cinema, and the acting credits attached to his name are essentially a studio boss enjoying himself on his own sets. New Line's fortunes were built on horror and later on scale, most conspicuously when it distributed the Lord of the Rings trilogy adapted from J. R. R. Tolkien. Shaye stepped down in 2008 after the company was restructured as a unit of Warner Bros.

The cameos track the Elm Street franchise almost film by film. He is an uncredited bartender in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge, a lecturer in The Dream Master, a ticket seller in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, and, in Wes Craven's New Nightmare, himself, playing the studio executive inside a film about a studio's own franchise turning on the people who made it. Freddy vs. Jason gives him a school principal named Shaye, which is roughly the level of subtlety involved.

He directed as well: Book of Love in 1990 and The Last Mimzy in 2007, the latter a children's science fiction film made while he was still running the studio putting it out. As a performer he is a good sport rather than an actor, and the appearances are worth knowing mainly as the record of a man who liked being in the room where his films were made.