Ever wonder if, in your favorite TV/movie pie scenes, how many pies did the actress(es) really take?

Do they use real pies in rehearsal? Were there multiple takes?

I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall for some of the great scenes and the rehearsals thereof.

I think about stuff like this too! But I bet they do it in one take because starting over requires hours of make-up and what not. If they do it twice, its not because the pie didn't hit just right or whatever, but because the line of dialogue was screwed up. Or some other non-WAM element messed up the scene.

I have always wondered if the pie fight from Threes Company was rehearsed once or twice before the actual one was filmed. The timing and aim is so spot on in that scene.

In "The Great Race," there was definitely more than one take of Natalie Wood's initial entrance in the pie fight. Some years ago, stills appeared on eBay showing an obviously different pie hit (more off-target) than the one in the final film.

Not just pies, but other WAM scenes.
How long was the filming of the soap suds/beans/chocolate scene in Tommy? I've read that it went for at least a couple days, and the soap suds part was filmed seperately. Does any extra film footage exist of it?

I seem to recall someone on here mentioning that there were multiple takes of the pie fight in Carry On Loving. Most of the time though it seems mainstream pie fights are one takes (takes a lot of time to smarten someone back up even if they've got slightly messy from an off target hit) cos I don't recall too many pie fights where all the hits are direct (the music video to sing by Travis springs to mind, few missed opportunities in that like).

Personally mind while it would be entertaining to think me favourite mainstream scene of Cybill shepherd getting pied took multiple takes, in reality I'm pretty sure it didn't and also he reaction of being pied for the first time is classic

Well, the "Three's Company" pie fight was definitely shot in one take, as is shown by this amateur behind the scenes audience footage of that pie fight ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFUWNE02QbY

As you can see, some extra pies were thrown at the girls but were not included in the edited version because the director had already called a "cut" to the scene but the cast carried on larking about with the pies to the studio audience after the scene had officially ended.

The Great Race pie fight was definitely NOT shot in one take. It was shot over 5 days, and they halted the shoot midway to take the weekend off and then resumed the shoot the following Monday....as this Wiki article says...


QUOTE

"The Technicolor pie fight scene in the royal bakery was filmed over five days.[2] The first pastry thrown was part of a large cake decorated for the king's coronation. Following this was the throwing of 4,000 pies,[2] the most pies ever filmed in a pie fight.[4] The scene lasts four minutes and twenty seconds and cost US$200,000 to shoot; US$18,000 just for the pastry.[2]

Colorful cream pies with fillings such as raspberry, strawberry, blueberry and lemon were used.[4] For continuity between days of shooting, the actors were photographed at the end of each day and then made up the following morning to have the same colorful appearance, the same smears of pie crust and filling.[4]

Edwards told the cast that a pie fight by itself is not funny, so to make it funny they would build tension by having the hero, dressed all in white, fail to get hit with any pies. He said, "The audience will start yearning for him to get it".[4] Finally, the hero was to take a pie in the face at "just the right moment".[4]

Shooting was halted while the actors took the weekend off. Over the weekend, the pie residue spoiled all over the scenery. When the actors returned Monday morning, the set reeked so badly that the building required a thorough cleaning and large fans to blow out the sour air. The missing pie residue was carefully recreated with more pies, and shooting resumed.[4]

At first, the actors had fun with the pie fight assignment, but eventually the process grew wearisome and dangerous. Wood choked briefly on pie filling which hit her open mouth. Lemmon reported that he got knocked out a few times; he said, "a pie hitting you in the face feels like a ton of cement".[4] At the end of shooting, when Edwards called "cut!", he was barraged with several hundred pies that members of the cast had hidden, waiting for the moment."

UNQUOTE

The infamous pie fight from "The Nutty Nut" (aka Nut House) was staged and re-staged and re-staged over 10 days of shootings. Nothing spontaneous resulted, it was stilted and very pedantic.

The producer/editor of The 3 Stooges pie fights used a different tactic ..i.e. they recycled old footage together with new footage and often used cuts from earlier pie fights mixed in with new pie footage.

As to whether the cast of Three's Company rehearsed their pie fight beforehand. I am sure they did because their timing was spot on perfect and nothing went awry, so I am sure they rehearsed and choreographed things very well beforehand....but NOT with pies. I am pretty sure they did what Rob Blaine, Hurley Coward and Lenny used to do and they taught me how to rehearse a pie fight without actually using pies....i.e. you rehearse a pie fight using sponges or dish cloths and to teach your models to hit their floor marks and timing and to stage your camera positions. So basically pie fight rehearsals are a "dry run".

The Three's Company pie fight is largely responsible for turning me onto WAM. YCDTOTV did it for the slime/water, but this was what got me into pies. It's a crazy good pie fight!

Well, it was a scene with lots of separate shots, so it wasn't ever designed as a one-take thing. You've only got to look at Jacki Piper to see that she had a lot more on her face at the end than she got during the scene.

Kenneth Williams in his diary wrote that when it was his turn to take a pie everyone lined up to do it, and they all missed...in the end they got one half-shot which they used.

Sometimes the pie thrower and the pie recipient aren't even in the same shot. The obvious example would be in an episode of "Bewitched" where Elizabeth Montgomery (as Samantha) throws a pie at Elizabeth Montgomery (as Serena). I always wondered: when she is throwing the pie (as Sam) is she just throwing it into thin air? Against a wall? Or did they recruit a stand-in about the same height to take the pie and give her an aiming point?

This will be a good thread for me to disseminate my knowledge that is similar to what OP mentioned.

When Tina Fey got Pied in the Face on 30 Rock, they only did one take. After the initial pie however, they had to smear and adjust the cream on her face which resulted in a different consistency between the time of the pie and the talking part afterwards (First pic below)

Australian Newsreader Jacinta Tynan got slimed in a television promotion. They had to do 2 takes in order to get different angles, so she ended up getting slimed twice. (Second Pic below)

Australian TV Host Maude Garrett was regularly pied, slimed and gunged on TV. Again, she sometimes had to do a few takes for angles etc. (Third Pic Below)

Similar to the above and a personal story I've never posted before but given the thread I think it's a good time, Maude came to my school once when I was a young-un for a segment where some of us (Including me!) got to pie our (female) teacher in the face! I was part of the lucky few of about 5 or so who got to do the honours and I was actually the first one up (So I got to give my teacher her first known pie in the face experience)! After the pieings, one of the producer guys told us we were going to do another take "just to be sure" so they cleaned my teacher up and we got to do it all again! My teacher got some revenge by pouring slime over one of my classmates (Think it might have been the one who requested the whole thing in the first place). Not a bad way to spend half a day at school!

My reflections begin at an earlier stage of how a pie scene gets written into the script how the camera angles are planned and how the actress or actor is persuaded by their agent to assent to being pied on camera

In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the actress or actor had no choice, because they were under contract to the Studio and they had to do what they were TOLD. Good examples of that being Natalie Wood and Joe Besser. Neither of them wanted to get pied, but they were forced to do it because they were under contract. Joe Besser was not thrilled at all when he was forced to replace Shemp after Shemp died. Moe wanted to continue with Larry as a duo but studio head Harry Cohn insisted that contract player Joe Besser be brought in to replace Shemp.....much to the chagrin of Joe Besser because he did not want to do pie slapstick.

In the past contract actors and actresses had no choice....they were told what to do or face being sued by the studio for breach of contract.

These days it is entirely different and there are no contract players any more, and each actor/actress decides what they will and will not do....it's "all about the Benjamins"

Some big name actors these days are basically whores to the Benjamins and they will do just about anything for a big paycheck. Just look at the dozens of films Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage have made in the last 12 years. 80% of the films they have made in recent years are totally crap films where they were either falsely promoted as leading actors, when they only appeared briefly in the film. or they appeared to be coasting thru the film without even bothering to act. I happen to like the GOOD films Cage and Willis make, but these days all they do is act like whores collecting a paycheck in a lousy film.

No actor "wants" to be pied, it is all about the Benjamins...or getting publicity for themselves by appearing in charity events.

In the aforementioned cybil shepered scene apparently she wanted to get pied with Bruce cos she digs that humour (what a good sport)

"As I was reading the script, I went to Glenn and said: "Bruce and I have to have a pie in the face. I mean that would be just the funniest, most hysterical thing." And Glenn said, "I totally agree with you, but I'm not asking him." So what I did was, I went to Bruce, and I said, "We have to have a pie in the face. It will be so hysterical." He said, "Okay, well, who's going to throw it?" And we had the stunt coordinator Chris Howell throw the pies at us or maybe somebody else too. That was one of my favourite moments. Yes, pies in the face. I like that."

http://www.davidandmaddie.com/exclusives/shepherd.htm

Interesting, but money is still a big factor that determines whether an actress is amenable to doing pies. Suzanne Somers was perfectly happy with getting $30,000 per episode when she filmed the pie fight on Three's Company, but was not happy later on when she found out that John Ritter was getting $150,000 per episode for playing an equal role....so she walked off the show 2 years later. Likewise Cybill Shepherd was getting $35,000 per episode when she was making "Moonlighting" and was happy until she found out her male co star was getting 4 times more salary than she was. Same thing with "Remington Steele"....they were co stars but the male actor was being paid 3-4 times more.

The reality is.....pie fights in movies and tv shows are just like horse racing....nobody would be interested if there was no money involved. The only people who do pie fights purely for fun and pleasure are amateur wam fans and film makers or folks who seek attention in order to get eyeballs on Youtube.

I did meet one person who did pie scenes purely for personal pleasure. That was when I did several shoots with San Francisco performance artist "Mike the Pie Man" in 1994. Mike was game for anything where a pretty lady would pie him. He did pie scenes in order to get sexually aroused. I sometimes wonder whether Soupy Sales had the same reason for doing all the thousands of pie scenes he did.

Well, except for Sara Shahi (and no doubt other secret slapstick fans [celebrities] who find it great fun.

I'm not sure it is accurate to say that there are no more "contract players" -- maybe of the big Hollywood studio variety of yore, Ok, but unknown or emerging actors who sign contracts with Nickelodeon or Disney certainly have to get messy (if the script calls for it, and they often do), for example, the 'Haunted Hathaways' show regularly featured messy scenes for all the female actors...I'm pretty sure that when each auditioned for the role they knew that "a pie in the face comes with the job" (an ethos still accepted by most actors)...once they signed on, they had little control over the scripts (which are partly based upon audience feedback).

So, if you are an A list actor, sure, these days you can dictate what you will and will not do...but, if you are like the vast majority of actors -- desperate for that 'big break' -- you will do whatever you are asked to do...otherwise, one risks being labeled a 'diva' or 'difficult to work with' (word gets around Hollywood FAST) and the offers trickle to a slow drip, or just stop.

Regarding the Bewitched pie fight, according to an interview with star Elizabeth Montgomery, her co-star Agnes Moorehead was very unhappy to have to take a pie in the puss, considering it a great indignity. (She was a pretty distinguished actress before taking on the very broad character Endora; her first film appearance was in Citizen Kane, for instance.) In any event, she was eventually talked into participating in the pie fight, partially appeased by the fact that her co-stars had to do it too. But I don't feel too certain that, if she'd really put her foot down, the producers or studio would've actually forced her to do it by dint of her contract. (It's said that the reason Bob Reed doesn't appear in the Brady Bunch pie fight is that he strenuously objected to such silliness; he's said to have gotten into many arguments with the producer over logical consistencies in various Brady plotlines! And to be fair, he'd already taken a large wedding cake to the face and chest in the pilot episode of the show.)

For what it's worth, by the point the Bewitched pie fight was filmed, Elizabeth Montgomery was married to the show's producer, so she presumably could've worked some "real life magic" to get rid of the pie fight if she'd been seriously unhappy about it herself, but she seems to have actually enjoyed it to some degree (she actually did a fair amount of wet and messy slapstick over the course of the show's nine seasons). If you watch closely, you will see one of Samantha's lines is dubbed in shortly after she's been pied, because she was apparently laughing while she said the line during the live take. (Her character is supposed to be angry and confused to have just been pied by her husband, so the laughing would have been all wrong.)

It's also said that if you slow-mo Serena's pie hit, there's a split-second where you can see her dark wig get knocked back enough by the impact of the pie that you can see a bit of Elizabeth's blonde hair underneath. It's a bit hard to make out for sure, though, because the pie's yellow lemon filling confuses matters a bit. I have to say that lemon filling sticks better to Serena's face than was the case with any lemon meringue pie hit I've ever seen, perhaps because of the great force of that throw.

Always fun to see the behind the scenes footage.
Disney/Nick usually do only one take from what I've seen.

Actors take it as a part of the job. Sure, some may not take a job... but for most it's a part of it and actors on the theater will do it day after day and will be happy to perform. Even for free.
That's real actors and other people who get real encouragement.

Elizabeth Banks did plenty.
But some on Family Matters, GoT... got away when they could.

A real production consists of putting on make up, and sometimes getting messy either way.
Most serious actors will be happy with the experience if the script requires it (can't remember where, but there are plenty of mess that is not justified... and just happens).

Commercials will let actors get away, but they will lose the job.

I find it fascinating that Sara Shahi is always cited as the "real life female WAMmer" (and yes, I know she said so herself), and yet has never had anything remotely resembling a messy scene in her acting career. (Appearing on a talk show with that joke-stealing comedian doesn't count.)

Either her love of pies doesn't extend to petitioning for them in scripts, or we're just getting incredibly unlucky that current TV writers refuse to write any kind of messy slapstick into a script anymore. (Probably the latter.)

Also, considering all the gorgeous female contract players over the decades of the studio system, it's amazing how few female hits we actually got. (Again, thank the social mores of the time that decided it wasn't "funny" for a woman to be pied, just dudes.)

Anyway, someone mentioned the words Disney and NICK and this thread didn't get nuked (yet), so that's progress!

Robert Reed was beloved by the rest of the cast, but producer Sherwood Schwartz and the writers...eh, not so much. He was always sending them memos complaining about the scripts. Schwartz said that Reed could be doing Shakespeare on stage, and if he got booed, his reaction would be "Hey, don't blame me...I didn't write this shit!"

The pie fight episode (near the end of the series) wasn't the first time Reed had refused to participate. Among others, most notable was the episode in which a hair treatment turns Greg's hair green. Reed had some colorful metaphors to describe what he thought of that script, and he boycotted the episode entirely.

So much for anti-communist free market anarchy (capitalism) that capitalists (studios) preach about. Free market anarchy says anyone may quit or end business relations with anyone at any time for any good reason or dumbass reason. Anyone = any individual or corporation.


ALL forms of entertainment, whether you are consider them "good" or "bad", are done just for the money. But, I think that was your point. NO form of entertainment is "necessary".

A scene that I would have liked to have been a 'fly on the wall'(provided a random splatter doesn't suffocate me), is the 3 Stooges 'In the Sweet Pie and Pie'. Two of the 3 main actresses didn't get exactly good coverage on their first pie hits, but were subjected to a second pieing including the first pie sandwich ever (IIRC).
Was another WAM force at work here?

As far as "the social mores of the time that decided it wasn't "funny" for a woman to be pied"...The social mores according to whom? The 'Hollywood Censors" ? There were no surveys being conducted asking folks what their preferences were for gender types in messy slapstick scenes. And, there had already been established a messy female slapstick standard: Mabel Normand....then the 3 Stooges, who routinely featured messy female slapstick scenes..then, of course, Lucille Ball who took several pies in the kisser (one, famously, from Harpo Marx)...Hell, even Annette Funicello took a pie in the face (a bad one, but still a pie, and, she should have taken some messy treatment from Buster Keaton in one of his last film appearances: 'How to stuff a Wild Bikini')...so, maybe there's a 10 - 20 yer cycle in messy female acceptability...but I don't think it breaks down that neatly; it's all about what screenwriter's are writing, producers are producing, and director are allowing in their films.

Remember Ernie Kovac's ethos: It's always funnier when a pretty girl gets a pie in her face instead of a fat cop.

I remember that she took cocaine to the face in an early episode of "Life".

The old rule of "pretty women are not funny" dates back to the 1890's era of Vaudeville and was something widely preached by Milton Berle, but I think that had more to do with the ego and insecurities of certain male comedians like Milton Berle and Jerry Lewis because the one thing they feared the most was being upstaged by a pretty woman on stage so they would not allow anyone else to get the laughs and be the center of attraction.

I am not so sure it was the scriptwriters or directors determined whether a pretty girl would be pied, but rather the leading male star who controlled what would happen ...i.e. in the old days of Hollywood if a script was written by a screenwriter that called for a woman to get pied or get some slapstick in a Milton Berle or Jerry Lewis film, and that script was presented to Berle or Lewis, I am pretty sure they would have re-written that scripted and diverted the comedic attention to themselves, because they would not allow a female actress to get more laughs than they did.

In the old days of Hollywood actresses who wanted to be funny either had to be plain looking, or they had to act "goofy" ...e.g. Judy Canova, Joan Davis, Zasu Pitts, Martha Raye.

Even Lucille Ball, who was a former glamour queen and Goldwyn Girl in her younger years, she did not do slapstick when she was young and pretty and she only became a slapstick queen when she was middle aged.

MK

The odd thing is that a bully getting their comeuppance works better with men when the revenge is physical pain (c.f. Roadrunner). Whereas that wouldn't be funny for a woman. What's funnier for a woman is humiliation rather than pain.

So logically the slapstick victims should be women. And, indeed, pretty women, from the comedic structure that you punch up, not down. An ugly woman being pied is tragic as it is making a bad situation worse. A pretty woman being pied is egalitarian and populist. Brings her down to the everyday level.

The Joe Besser Stooges shorts were released to home video much, much later than the others because he and then his family wouldn't give permission.

This was kinda my point. I personally don't know "who" or "what" was responsible for the gender disparity in slapstick, but acting like females were remotely equal in this respect during the golden age of the studio system is just revisionist history.
The pie hits you remember (like the Three Stooges) were mostly incidental, going to secondary players on the sidelines while the leads (the Stooges, Laurel & Hardy, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, etc etc) got the brunt of it. Not sure I can remember a comic actress before Lucille Ball who was a regular lead. (And that was TV, not movies.)

One correction: According to her bio, Lucille Ball DID do some slapstick scenes in her younger days, as they'd pay the background girls (or guys) extra to take a pie in the face or whatever. But most of those films are lost to time, to the point that it's easier to find the recreations of said scenes in the "Lucy" biopic (starring Rachel York) than the original scenes themselves.
https://youtu.be/HWePuJvE5x4?t=1307

Rich: no one is claiming there was "equality" between female and male comedians (in terms of being the targets of messy slapstick, or otherwise)...only that female recipients of messy sight gags were NOT uncommon (and consider how many comedic shorts have been lost over time, like several of Jean Harlow's, and most of Mabel Normand's...how many others we don't recall now?)...not sure where the "equality" idea came from.

Mark: I will defer to your scholarship of much of these matters, but, I am not sure that your point about LB being 'middle age' is valid -- she was still quite pretty, imo, at age 40 when ILL premiered on TV. AS for young and pretty girls not getting pied, I would argue the opposite; that is precisely the time when an actress is likely to be in a messy slapstick scene (when she is young, ambitious/desperate, and pretty)...consider Jean Harlow (as noted above) and many, many other would-be 'starlets' , showgirls, or extras.

Do people think this community's members were the first to get a thrill out of attractive women in messy slapstick scenes? Salirophilia is old as Comedia de L'Arte and the Roman circus. I'm guessing messy paraphilia is too. I find it impossible to believe that the men of Hollywood/Vaudeville -- in their positions of power and control back in the day -- never indulged their female fantasies? I suspect that many/most did at some point -- especially in the 'silent era' of cinema. And jumping ahead to modern times, there is hardly a TV show or film featuring a group of female friends, or rivals, that has NOT included one or more messy scenes (examples are too numerous to list here).