427 Cobra, I thought of this thread while watching NCIS tonite...

Tony

Not the "big screen", but in the "re-visioned" series of Battlestar Galactica, Adama is sometimes seen working on a sailing ship in his quarters.

Interestingly,

The model ship Adama was building over the course of the series was a very expensive rental prop which Edward James Olmos destroyed in an ad-lib expression of Adama's grief over the loss of Thrace, much to the props crew's dismay. Thankfully, the ship was insured.

Not cinema, but in an episode of 'Star Trek: The Next generation', Geordi LaForge (Lavar Burton) builds a model of the sailing ship 'Enterprise'.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, perhaps he was building another ship to present as a gift for the Captain of another ship.

I think Geordi was building the HMS Victory for his previous Captain on the Starship Victory.

Well in 'Bubba-Ho-Tep'  when 'Elvis' visits 'JFK' in his room at the retirement home in the background you can see several dioramas of the JFK assassination...

And in 'Close Encounters' I loved it when the main character kept trying to recreate his vision of the mesa in everything from his mashed potatoes to the model railroad layout to the giant one made out of half of his lawn.

"The Butterfly Effect"- one of the kids has a bunch of planes displayed around the room.

"The Lovely Bones"- Mark-E-Mark does ships in a bottle.