Oh, pie goodness, do they make it look real

The pies in "Waitress" may look delicious, but much of what you see is Hollywood smoke and mirrors. During the 30 days of shooting, two "pie wranglers" and a "pie mistress" made 250 pies -- everything from cherry pie to spaghetti pie to Mermaid Marshmallow Pie, whatever that is .

The late Adrienne Shelly , who wrote, directed, and acted in the film, was not a baker herself, but she knew pie. "Adrienne was more of a pie eater than a pie baker," says Michael Roiff , the film's producer. "But she invented all these fantasy pies. I think that she even had a vision for the impossible pies like Lonely Chicago Pie and Car Radio Pie. I would like to have seen those."

In the film, Jenna (Keri Russell ) is a pregnant diner waitress, squirreling away money to enter a pie contest so she can take the $25,000 prize money and leave her jealous, overbearing husband, Earl . Meanwhile she bakes and waits tables at Joe's Pie Diner and listens to diner owner Old Joe (Andy Griffith ) spout his curmudgeonly wisdom. Jenna finds contentment in the crimp, flake, and sweet fruit of the pie kitchen.

She dreams up the I Don't Want Earl's Baby Pie (a quiche with brie and smoked ham); the I Hate My Husband Pie ("bittersweet chocolate and don't sweeten it"); the Baby Screaming It s Head Off in the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Life Pie (New York style cheesecake, brandy-brushed pecans, and nutmeg); the Earl Murders Me Because I'm Having an Affair Pie (blackberries and raspberries smashed into a chocolate crust); the I Can't Have No Affair Because It's Wrong and I Don't Want Earl to Kill Me Pie ("Vanilla custard with banana. Hold the banana "); and the Pregnant Miserable Self-Pitying Loser Pie (lumpy oatmeal with fruitcake mashed in , "Flambe, of course . . .")

Pie wranglers Erin Eagleton , a freelance production designer, and his assistant, Sarah Osborne, ran the props department, which quickly became the pie department; Osborne served as Russell's crimping hand double. The wranglers worked 20-hour days, grocery shopping in LA, baking crusts at home, prepping pies for travel, baking more pies on set in a Coleman portable camp oven, and touching them up with a propane torch. "It was so many pies," says Eagleton on the phone from California. "And the funny thing is that I'm not much of a pie fan, and Sarah doesn't eat sweets or chocolate at all."

Pie mistress Laura Donnelly , former pastry chef at The Laundry Restaurant in East Hampton, N.Y., and now food editor at The East Hampton Star , was the only experienced baker on the set. For the film's final scenes Donnelly made the dozens of Technicolor custard pies that twirled around the table. "That was our Busby Berkeley sequence," says the baker. "It was all Dr. Seuss and crazy colors. I whipped up the custard and broke out the food coloring. They were all edible but not necessarily good. But it's a movie, no one will know how the pies actually taste."

Before "Waitress," Russell had never made a pie, but with Osborne's graceful hands and Donnelly's rolling, crimping, and lattice weaving, she makes Jenna believable. When Old Joe gets misty-eyed thinking about her chocolate cream pie with fresh strawberries and tells her that what she does with food is unearthly and sensual, we wish we were there to dig into a slice of our own.

"It was all an illusion," says Eagleton. "But that's the movies. It's the magic of making people believe."