‘American Pie’ at 20: That Notorious Pie Scene, From Every Angle – The New York Times

CHRIS WEITZ In theaters, it was received with considerable glee. The internet was not at full-throttle yet, so neither the outrage machine nor the meme economy came into play. I recall Spike Lee saying something rather unkind about it; apparently the [pie] scene disqualified the movie from being a movie. Twenty years later, that’s what still stings!

BIGGS For a long time after, and still occasionally, I’ll get sent an apple pie at the restaurant. It’s definitely not as intense as it was when the movie first came out. That I think is just always going to happen. I’ve resigned myself to that. I got a lot of pies sent to me.

HERZ It was super surreal. I remember one night Jay Leno was doing pie jokes — you just knew it was entering the zeitgeist.

BIGGS I do remember there was a story after the movie had come out about a kid in Idaho that attempted to do this and got third-degree burns on his penis, because he didn’t wait for the pie to cool down after it got out of the oven, which is, of course, just a super amateur mistake. Dude, you got to let it sit for an hour after it gets out of the oven. Come on.

MOORE Jason deserves a lot of credit, and Eugene, for creating those characters in a way that they weren’t your stock dad and dumb kid. And I think that’s why it went on to make four theatrical and three straight-to-DVD movies: because people really liked the characters and the comedy stayed in the realm of reality — if there is such a thing where a guy’s going to see what it feels like to use an apple pie as a sex toy.

PAUL WEITZ The things I like most in the movie are conversations between Natasha Lyonne and Tara Reid about whether her character has had an orgasm and Natasha’s character’s advice that she has as much of a right to enjoy sex as the male character she’s with and that’s something that should be considered.