Insignificance is a 1985 British alternative history drama film directed by Nicolas Roeg, and starring Gary Busey, Michael Emil, Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis, and Will Sampson.

Adapted by Terry Johnson from his 1982 play of the same name, the film follows four famous characters who converge in a New York City hotel one night in 1954: Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and Joseph McCarthy—billed as The Ballplayer, The Professor, The Actress and The Senator, respectively.

On a crowded New York City street, people have gathered to watch a film crew shoot a sequence where The Actress in a white dress is standing on a grate while the rush of wind caused by a huge fan to imitate the subway going by below blows her skirt up around her waist.

He mistakes her for a call girl and threatens to use her to expose and embarrass The Professor, then punches her hard in the abdomen, causing her to collapse in pain.

The Ballplayer returns and talks about his fame in the baseball world, and confides in him about his marital problems while The Actress is in the bathroom, possibly suffering a miscarriage.

He is sitting on the bed with his watch, which has stopped at 8:15, in one hand, and the alarm clock in the other as the hour approaches 8:15 (the time that "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima).

[2] Insignificance was originally a play, written by Terry Johnson and performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1982, with Judy Davis as The Actress.

Johnson acknowledges that there are "lots of little cheats" in the play, mostly to do with exactly where and when The Seven Year Itch was filmed, and the timing of Monroe's marriage to Joe DiMaggio.

Roeg notes that Insignificance is usually talked about as a meeting between Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, but what moved him was the pain of the problems between The Actress and The Ballplayer, who are married but seem to know nothing about each other.

His suggestions inspired Johnson to focus on a deeper development of the characters, while Roeg himself began to imagine how the film could open the play spatially as well as laterally.

Created by photographer-collagist David Hockney, the image is, according to film critic Chuck Stephens, "a pinup in a hundred pieces, a centerfold sent through a centrifuge..." and is a reflection of The Actress.

With "her much-exposed and famously exploited psyche already splintered into jagged, mingled shards of kittenish innocence, movie business cunning, overwhelming erotic appeal, and abject inner terror, Monroe was post-cubism's quintessential glittering star...perfectly pieced together and seen prismatically all at once..."[7] The image is also a metaphor for Roeg's non-linear filmmaking, Stephens notes that "for a cine-cubist like Roeg, two entirely disparate spatial and temporal dimensions are never more than a splice apart, and in Insignificance, the past is always present, and never goes away.

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat write: "Insignificance shines with some incandescent moments of acting bravado delivered by Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis, and Gary Busey.

As a weird meditation on sex, power, knowledge, and fame, this is a four-star treat for those who savor exotic movie fare...Nicolas Roeg (Don't Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth) draws out the inner psychological nuances of the drama and delivers the philosophical freight in Terry Johnson's screenplay.