The idea of the greatest pie fight belongs to comic duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their silent film Battle of the Century, released on Dec. 31, 1927.
At that time, pies in the face were already a classic gag in a new medium, and were starting to grow stale. So Laurel decided to go big. "Let's give them so many pies that there never will be room for any more pie pictures in the whole history of movies," he recounted to a biographer. So they gathered 3,000 pies and the fight was on. But the film was eventually lost, and only the memory of the pie fight remained. At least until 2013, when a collector found a reel containing the fight. Now you can easily find it on YouTube.
But as it turns out, that wasn't the biggest pie fight of all time.
Baby boomers will recall the stunning lure of the 1965 movie, The Great Race. This was a must-see for all kids of the era because it contained the biggest pie fight ever.
The story follows an international auto race between two daredevils: Jack Lemmon (playing the villainous Professor Fate) and Tony Curtis (playing the classic white-clad hero, The Great Leslie). Lemmon kicks off the pie fight by falling into a two-story cake. Tony Curtis miraculously stays un-pied until his love interest Natalie Wood scores a direct hit at the end.
This four-minute fight took 4,000 pies thrown over five days of filming and a sweet $1.5 million in 2023 dollars. When director Blake Edwards yelled out the final cut, the cast promptly hit him with several hundred pies.
The expense and the number of pies make it the greatest pie fight of all time, but in the history of pie fight cinema, The Three Stooges also rank with the 1941 slapstick comedy, In The Sweet Pie and Pie, in which the stooges make a mess throwing pies at society people.