No one could have predicted that a teenage boy sticking his dick in a pie would become one of the most iconic cinematic images of the late 1990s, but that’s precisely what happened when American Pie was released in theaters 25 years ago on July 9, 1999.
After a friend tells him third base feels like “warm apple pie,” horny high schooler Jim Levenstein (Jason Biggs) tries to replicate the experience with a freshly baked pie that’s cooling in his kitchen. Unfortunately, his dad (Eugene Levy) walks in just as Jim is fully “inside” the pie.
In all, the pie sequence only lasts about two minutes — or about twice as long as Jim lasts with Nadia; premature ejaculation is also very much on the menu in American Pie — but it was funny enough to launch a whole cinematic universe.
None of that could have happened, though, without the original apple pie, which was supplied by veteran prop master Chris Call. As for how it all happened, here’s what he baked up for us…
The Foam Pie
“American Pie was a very small movie when we first started. We had no idea what we were going to make. All the sequels would have much bigger budgets, but we had a very small budget and a very small crew,” says Call.
“When I read the pie scene, I laughed and thought it was hilarious,” he continues. “The first thing that caught my attention was that he stands up, takes his hands away and the pie is still there. So, that was my first challenge. No pie would just stay there, so that’s where the foam pie came in. It was a matter of talking to the director and finding out how much we wanted to see. Is the shot going to be straight on, or is he going to turn to the side? Obviously, we had to take precautions not to show too much.
“Knowing that the pie would only be seen straight on, it made my job a lot easier because I was able to create a pie carved out of foam rubber in the same shape and diameter of the real pies. I then put velcro on the front and a strip of velcro on Jason Biggs’ underwear and just stuck it on. It was as simple as that. We even used the same pie tin from the real pies.”
The Apple Pies
“I auditioned a bunch of apple pies for the directors,” explains Call. “I went to Costco and Ralph’s and a few other places like Marie Callender’s and got three or four different choices of pies. They picked the Costco pie because it was the biggest — it was huge. Then I went back to Costco and bought like 20 pies. The people there were like, ‘What are you doing?’ I just said, ‘You don’t want to know.’ Back when the movie came out, Entertainment Weekly did a story about the pies, and they said they came from Ralph’s. I had to write them a letter and correct them. They actually printed a correction over it.
“The directors wanted the biggest pie because they wanted to make sure you saw part of the pie when he was on top of it, even though that wasn’t in the original cut. In an alternate version, he got on top of the counter and humped the pie — that was all real pie. I think that made it into the unrated cut. We ended up using seven or eight pies because Jason Biggs and Eugene Levy kept doing different versions. They’re both great comedic actors, and they were willing to do anything.”
The Pie of Shame
“In the follow-up scene, where Eugene and Jason have the pie on the table between them, we just used the mangled pies we’d used in the previous scene,” Call tells me. “We didn’t have to do anything to them because he pretty much destroyed them by humping them. The unused pies all went to craft services. As for the foam rubber pie, it probably got tossed. Had we known what a hit the movie would be, it’d probably be in the Smithsonian.”