Story found on ‘Fascinating’ on X here.
Nathalie Wood after a pie fight while filming The Great Race, 1961
The pie fight scene in the royal bakery was filmed over five days in 1964. 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, the most pies ever filmed in a pie fight. The scene lasts four minutes and twenty seconds and cost $200,000 to shoot; $18,000 just for the pastry.
Colorful cream pies with fillings such as raspberry, strawberry, blueberry and lemon were used. 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.
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”. Finally, the hero was to take a pie in the face at “just the right moment”.
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.
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”. 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.
