Pie Fight 69

Closer Studios, Howard Street, San Francisco

For me, the story of "Pie Fight 69" started one evening years ago (2008? 2009?) as I was walking home from my so called “office” down on Howard Street and ducked into the Harvest Market. At the time, “The Harvest" was one of those organic friendly places with a salad bar and twenty-seven different kinds of peanut butter. This was before Jeff Bezos co-opted these places and flew blueberries in from Mars round the clock. I was probably grabbing a coffee on my way home. I usually didn’t hang around that place. It probably had something to do with the fact that it piped in the most wretched Muzak I never understood. Disco but none of the good songs. Don’t get me wrong. I'm no purest weirdo. I can dig disco. I can dig Giorgio Moroder, the Bee Gees, Chic, Ring My Bell, Bette Davis, James Brown. But this stuff was weak. Hang around in there long enough and you couldn’t help but get a little cranky. It would get to the point where if something like "Listen to the Music" by the Doobie Brothers came on you'd almost feel grateful. 

I digress.

Where am I going with this? Well, I want to tell you a story about "Pie Fight 69" this eight-minute film I saw. What kind of film? Where do I start? It’s a mystery. It’s a documentary. It’s a prank. It’s all those things.

Anyhoodles… that evening at the Harvest Market, I ran into Christian Bruno and some guys hanging out in the table area, and we exchanged “don’t I know you?” looks. Christian is a filmmaker. Camera guy. Lighting guy. Cinematographer. I don’t know. He’s in the scene. I hadn’t seen him in ages.

[Yeah, the “scene.” It seems like SF used to be that kind of town. It might still be. There was definitely a film scene. A community. And people were, as my friend Mike Ryan used to say, “taking the vow of poverty” and putting it all on the line to make movies. It seemed like if you were in any way involved with an indie film in San Francisco at a certain point, no matter how small the role, you would know half the players in the scene. It was kind of like the early days of punk rock, when there were like 175 punks in the whole city and they all knew each other.]

I recognized Christian from a film we worked on together. I asked him what was going on, what he’d been up to, and what the latest was with Glen and Lucy, Peter Mac and the crowd who had been part of that film I incidentally did some acting in. (Yep, acting. And no, that’s not a typo. And good luck finding it!) 

Christian said, “I’m screening a film around the corner that I made. Do you want to come?”

“You’re screening a movie? When? Like now?"

And he said, “It's eight minutes long.”

Hell, I didn’t have anywhere to be. “Count me in”, I said. 

What I saw is hard to explain. It’s a documentary about a band of radicals who called themselves Grand Central Station. It’s a film about how these guys were desperate to make movies, so desperate they thought it a good idea to protest the puffed-up elitist bourgeois affair the San Francisco Film Festival had become by 1969. Their plan was that by staging their genius stunt pie fight, they’d make so much noise and get so much attention that investors would be tripping over themselves to fund their projects. It didn’t really work out for the Grand Central Station guys. But then again, there I was in a dusty warehouse off Folsom Street, watching this film forty years later. Even now I get a kick out of the fact that they somehow thought their stunt was a good idea. It did make The 11 O'clock News. Oh, and the local news crew? They treat it like they are on the scene of the Kennedy assassination.

It such a weird story, but if I was making a movie of it, my film would open sometime in the 2000’s, with film buff Bill Daniel strolling the aisles of a flea market at the moment his eye catches the sight of a few dusty dented-up film canisters on a blanket. 

“How much for the film canisters?"

“Everything on the blanket is five dollars.”

"Would you take three dollars?”

My film would be a film of a film of a film. A funhouse mirror of a movie. The opening scene would be the flea market sequence and then cut to Bill and a couple film nerd pals watching the contents of the reels projected on a screen (or better yet, a sheet or drywall) in a dusty warehouse, trying to make sense of it. The footage discovered in those canisters were 16-millimeter films of some crazy red carpet shenanigans at the 1969 San Francisco film festival opening gala: a nun, a football player and some go-go dancers throwing pies at each other on the steps of the Masonic Auditorium amidst tuxedo-clad gentlemen and some well-flustered socialites in pearls. 500 pies!

I picture Bill and his friends looking at each other like, what the hell is this?   

It was Grand Central Station trying to make something happen. And maybe they did. In the end, the photobomb stunt wasn’t considered a great success. And they all went their separate ways. Somewhere along the line someone must have tossed those reels out and eventually they found their way onto that blanket at the flea market. Enter Bill Daniel. Enter Christian Bruno.

If it wasn’t for Christian Bruno and his cohorts, this story would remain in the dust bins of time. But they did some detective work and found a couple of the original members of Grand Central Station. And let them tell the story. Mystery solved!

I still get a kick out of the thought of the Grand Central guys opening up an office in 1969 and having some business cards made and deciding they were a film company. And how they could only sit there waiting for the phone to ring for so long. At some point, they were like, “We’ve got to do something!”

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that a couple of these Grand Central Station guys ended up making films. Legit films. And one of them turned out turned out to be the famous experimental musician PDQ Bach.

A little confused? I don’t blame you. I’d probably better just let them tell the story. 

I haven’t thought about any of this in ages. Until today when I googled Pie Fight 69. 

You can check out the movie yourself here: