Anatomy of a Scene: American Pie

HOW A PROPERTY MASTER BREAKS DOWN A SCRIPTED SCENE

By Chris Call

As filmmakers, we all know that the screenplay is the blueprint from which we all begin to determine what will appear on screen. Every department has a unique focus, and many elements of a scene have crossovers. This is why collaboration is key to a successful project. 

To better understand every aspect of a Property Master’s responsibility, here is a famous scene from a renowned movie I had the pleasure of working on as Property Master. I detailed everything that went into bringing it from the page to the screen. The film is American Pie. If you’ve seen the movie, you most definitely know the scene.

The first thing I did after reading the script was to go back and highlight the props, which I have already done here.

I started with the characters. Jim was a high school senior, and his backpack needed to reflect that. I first consulted with the costume department to color coordinate the backpack and then showed several choices to the director and writer, and lastly to Jason Biggs himself. Once we had a winner, we needed a second one because in the property world, one is as good as none. We always need a backup in case anything happens to it.

After that, the backpack had to be aged to make it look like Jim had it for a while. This process can be simple or complicated depending on how beat-up the prop should look. We also had to match the exact aging to the backup backpack. Finally, we added content to the backpack to give it the proper weight, and to help the actor feel like it was their character’s backpack. Sometimes this means adding patches and pins or anything needed to help define the character.

Next, Jim’s dad wears glasses. Fortunately, Eugene Levy is an actor whose glasses are signature to him, so he already owned them. If he hadn’t, I would have had to ensure several details were completed. Once we determined the style of the frame, with all the same creatives as the backpack, we then had to find out if the actor’s glasses were prescription or just clear glass.

If they were prescription, we would work with the actor’s ophthalmologist to get their prescription or schedule an exam to create one.

We also needed to address the reflection issues any hard glass surface inherently has, which is something the director of photography (DP) would want corrected. Our job was to have lenses made with an anti-reflective coating with special consideration to the color tint the coating has.

For the “stunt” pie that had to stick to the front of his pants, a lightweight foam rubber pie was built and painted to look like a real pie. Of course, we had two made and for the hands-free shot, we simply Velcroed the pie to his groin area.

In this scene, Jim’s dad also carried a briefcase. All the considerations applied to the backpack worked here as well. Finally, as Jim’s dad was married, he needed to be fitted for a wedding ring. Sometimes an actor who is married wants to wear their own wedding band, and if it is approved by the director, we are good to go. On occasions when an actor’s ring doesn’t fit the character, such as a female character with a diamond that is too big, we must take their wedding ring off and put it in our safe until the day is over.

Now the scene can start. Jim walked into the kitchen, dropped his backpack, stepped up to the counter, and discovered several things. The first thing he noticed was the pie, then the note from his mother, and finally, several support items like a plate, a pie knife, and potholders. None of these support items were scripted, but they help in telling the story and defining character.

The most important elements of the pie, besides being scripted as apple, were that it needed to be large enough to conceivably accept Jim’s ... well, you get what I mean. Next, the pie needed to stick to the front of his pants when his dad walked in. This was originally not scripted but came out of discussions with the director. In the scene, Jim holds the pie to his groin, but the other complication was that he needed to go hands-free.

This would be a good time to mention that what is on the page or even decided later in meetings, or even shot on the day, often doesn’t make the final cut. Such is the life of a Property Master. After much discussion and pie auditions, we decided to go with an apple pie from Costco for two reasons: first, it was very large and second, I could get multiples of the exact same pie. On the day of shooting, I had more than 30 pies ready to go. We would need every one of those pies. In the opening scene, Jim stuck two fingers into the pie, which motivated him to then get on top of the island with his pants down and violate the pie. We thrashed a lot of pies that day, enough for the final scene of the “mushed” pie close-up.

For this prop, we had several conversations and a “show and tell,” about what the note should be written on. We took the character of the mother into consideration and came up with a pink stationery note card. At that time, my crew was all 30-something- year-old men, and none of our handwriting remotely resembled that of a mom’s. My bright idea was to have the note written by Molly Cheek, who played Jim’s mom, to write the note with a black felt tip marker so the audience could clearly read it. She gladly obliged and wrote the note in cursive. It was beautiful.

Of course, we shot a close-up of the card and it played 20 feet tall on the theater screen. Let me say right now that when we shot this scene, there were a whole host of people who saw this note as it was written well before it was aired in theaters. Stay with me. Here is the rundown of all the people who saw the note: the actor who wrote it, myself, my crew, the director, the camera operator, the director of photography, the script supervisor, the film’s writer, all the producers sitting at the playback monitors, and finally, the editors and any studio executives who may have previewed the final edited version of the film. After all of that, here is the shot from the movie.

The final piece of the scripted props was the note from Jim’s mom that accompanied the pie. As scripted it read: “Jimmy – Apple, your favorite. I’ll be home late. Enjoy! Love, Mom.”

Sigh. All that work and attention to the pie and then this, which proved to be the biggest gaff of my career. Proofreading is one more task that Property Masters must add to our toolbox.

What appeared on the page to be a very simple scene is actually a complicated amount of planning and detail that is far more labor-intensive than the untrained eye would ever imagine. When you consider all the work that went into this one single scene, which took up just one single page of a script consisting of 110 pages, an appreciation for the amount of work and detail a Property Master must do is put into perspective.

View the rest of this issue of Prop Culture Magazine here.