John Boston | ‘Great Race’ Isn’t About the Irish … |
I’m lucky to possess the cutest button of a niece. She turned 4 last week. Remember 4? I don’t. In a blink after birth, we somehow make it from precious and helpless bundles of joy and wonder, drifting into Life profoundly mundane and magical. It’s all, quite holy. Soon comes mobility, laughing and sobbing within the same three minutes, expressing anger, giddiness, terror, taking first steps and surviving our first butt-tumble onto our diapers. From somewhere, perhaps a thousand lifetimes of experience, surfaces that dark, familiar conviction that, somehow, we’re getting gypped. And then, we get to meet comedy. I emailed my niece-like substance a five-minute video, which should be required viewing in elementary school. It was from the movie, “The Great Race.”
No matter how passionately they tell you, it’s not the Irish.
The clip I sent her parents was of the famous pie fight, the greatest exchange of airborne pastry ever captured on film. Easily one of the greatest comedies of all time, I’ve seen this 1965 slapstick classic maybe 70 times. “The Great Race” used 4,000 real, actual, yummy and calorie-rich pies. The scene cost $200,000, or, about $1.5 million in today’s money.
Neat trivia? For five long days, the cast endured the goo and gore of getting pie pelted. There are harder jobs. However — a darn cream pie can weigh 2 pounds. If the scene doesn’t go quite right, the actors must get hosed off and shoot it again, sometimes several times. The crew had hidden away 400 of the high-caloric weapons. After the final,........