Bye, Bye Miss American Pi Edition

🥧 > π: Pi Day, Forgotten Pie Fights & Slicing Up Local Media

“Pie Counter” by Wayne Thiebard, 1963, courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Welcome to March 14 — a.ka., “3.14” — or “Pi Day.” Refresher: Pi is what you get when you divide the circumference of any circle by its diameter, which mysteriously (to me) is always about 3.14. Actually, the decimals goe on forever, but is often abbreviated like so: 3.148675309 — the latter seven numbers of inspired “867-5309/Jenny,” the ubiquitous early 80s pop song by Tommy Tutone. It remains a favorite among prank callers.*

Film Studies 3.14

When it comes to film history’s lost treasures, few sequences tantalize cinephiles like the fabled pie fight finale of Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Picture it: the War Room—production designer Ken Adams’ mid-century modern ode to nuclear brinkmanship—descends into a custard-coated free-for-all, a literal arms race of meringue and cream. Director Stanley Kubrick, ever the perfectionist, envisioned this scene as the ultimate send-up of Cold War absurdity. But the actors, overwhelmed by the sheer slapstick anarchy of it all, couldn’t keep straight faces. Add to this an unfortunate line—“Gentlemen, our gallant young President has been struck down in his prime!”—landing just weeks after JFK’s assassination, and the scene was shelved before the film was ultimately released. The footage? Lost to history. The lesson? Even Kubrick couldn’t outmaneuver the timing of a bad joke.

But wait, there’s more! Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders’ 1987 masterpiece, follows angels floating through Berlin, invisibly listening in on the internal monologs of the mortals surrounding them. The film is black and white for the angelic realm, color for the terrestrial. One angel, Damiel (played by Bruno Ganz, later recognized as cinema’s Best Hitler Ever for his turn in Downfall), decides he’s had enough of passive observation and takes the human plunge, choosing love, risk, and the simple pleasure of hot coffee over eternity. He also participates in a pie fight, which (mercifully) was cut from the film. Here’s an outtake:

Inasmuch as Wings of Desire is a poetic meditation on the meaning of life, Black Shampoo is a chainsaw-wielding counterpoint. This 1976 blaxploitation gem, a response to Warren Beatty’s Shampoo (1975), stars Jonathan Knight, a suave hairdresser who doesn’t just style hair—he takes down mobsters with a vengeance. The film may lack Kubrick’s precision or Wenders’ lyricism, but it makes up for it with sheer audacity. And like the other two films it too had a pie fight scene that someone had the wisdome to cut. According to a LiveJournal post from 16 years ago it…

… originally included a strange outdoor barbecue scene complete with a pie fight. All scenes of the barbecue were removed at the insistence of the film’s distributor, although they can be viewed, without sound, as extras on the DVD.

So, this Pi Day, slice yourself a piece of cinematic history—just be careful where you throw it. After all, whether it's math or movies, some things are irrational, infinite, and best served à la mode.

Junket

I’ve previously reported that Hearst Corp., the New York-based private media conglomerate (that owns the San Francisco Chronicle among other holdings), was in talks to acquire Santa Rosa’s Press Democrat (among Sonoma Media Investments’ (SMI) other media holdings, including the legacy newspapers Argus-Courier and Sonoma Index-Tribune) — well, a new player has entered the chat…