Giles

Does the DVD special edition of "Dr. Strangelove" detail or talk about this deleted scene? I was curious since I have read about it in the past and would like to know more about this alternate ending.

ShagMan

it talks about it a whole bunch, and there's some clips of it during one of the documentaries.

obscurelabel

There are a number (not that many, five or six?) of production stills from the filming of the pie fight scene that are shown in the documentary, but not any actual film footage. I'm pretty sure it has been determined that this footage was not saved.

It is discussed in detail for a few minutes. They note that George C. Scott's character remarks, after the President has been hit with a pie, that "our president's been cut down in his prime!", which was probably too much in light of the recent Kennedy assasination (the previous year), and for that and other reasons Kubrick decided not to use the footage.

Giles

thanks guys.

ShagMan

Yeah, sorry, it was stills... my memory isn't the best

ThatGuamGuy

Terry Southern writes about the scene in a book of essays and stories which, I believe, was called [EDIT: I was wrong when I posted this earlier, it was actually "Now Dig This"]. (When Kubrick decided to make 'Strangelove' a comedy, he enlisted Terry Southern as a co-writer, based on a book Peter Sellers had given him a few years earlier; 'The Magic Christian', I think.) Anyway, Southern says that Kubrick hadn't told the actors (mostly extras) to play the pie-fight stone-faced and angry, because the pie fight was supposed to (in some way) represent the ongoing battle for funding between the various wings of the military, and the bad blood between them do to this. Unfortunately, because Kubrick hadn't told them what to do, they played it with a lot of smiles and laughing and whatnot, and the footage was unusable. They couldn't afford to shoot it again, so Kubrick opted not to use it. Since nobody cared for it, and Kubrick didn't bother to save it, the footage is pretty much written off as lost at this point. Even if it were found, it was never cut together and never filmed correctly.

Numanoid

Considering that Kubrick was notorious for filming almost EVERYTHING multiple times until it was absolutely perfect (his shooting ratio was usually around 100:1), I find that story a little uncharacteristic.

Cameron

i still think that the estate is holding on to this for some unforseen reason...it has to be around...

would love to see it...used to be a website with pics floating around...more than in the doc, but i can't find it now

Numanoid

http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip...8/piefight.htm

Cameron

thanks but...

Sorry, this site is temporarily unavailable!

victant

Wow!! Great link.

That's a whole lotta pie....

Bill Needle

'Not long afterward, we began shooting the famous eleven-minute "lost pie fight,"'

Eleven minutes of pie fight? I'm sorry, but after reading that description of the scene I am glad the footage was unusable. I am not even curious to see it as a deleted scene.

ThatGuamGuy

Considering that Kubrick was able to afford to be able to shoot that only after the success of films like 'Strangelove', and since Kubrick himself has gone on the record saying they didn't have enough money because studios didn't want to be involved in a film that might be (and, in fact, was by many) considered "Communist", and since Kubrick himself has also gone on record saying that the only reason they even had enough money to *finish* the film (forget "perfectly") was getting Peter Sellers to be in it, I tend to think it makes a lot of sense. 'Strangelove' does *not* have the perfectionist director he later turned in to; for evidence, watch any given scene in which Peter Bull appears. He laughs all the time, but they kept it in.

When you say "usually", you're actually talking about the second half of his career (and that's being generous, it was really the last few, not even a full half).

Do you have anything to point to which contradicts what Terry Southern describes from the set of 'Strangelove'? Because I've never heard Kubrick express any satisfaction with what was shot of the pie scene either.

Numanoid

Hey, all I said was that I found it uncharacteristic. But your point about him being able to do that only with later films makes sense.