Audio By Carbonatix
Browse through the Christmas releases at your local video store and you’ll find all the usual chestnuts like It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and A Christmas Carol. You’ll also find fast-buck fruitcakes like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Ernest Saves Christmas and Silent Night, Deadly Night (Parts I through V).
But what you may not find–because it’s so popular–is the 1983 Yule grinner called A Christmas Story, a near-plotless string of anecdotes revolving around a 9-year-old boy’s campaign to receive “the Holy Grail of Christmas gifts,” a Daisy brand Red Ryder Repeating BB Carbine with a compass mounted in the stock.
“You’ll shoot your eye out” is the stock reply from every adult in the film. But there may be a few studio execs who’d like to shoot their own eyes out. Lightly regarded at its release, it’s now one of the holiday season’s heaviest hitters. Ralphie Parker, the film’s pint-size protagonist, is a famous character. But he’s actually Peter Billingsley, these days a mild-mannered 20-year-old college student in the Valley.
Based on the novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, humorist Jean Shepherd’s comic recollections about growing up in 1940s Indiana, A Christmas Story may even be more popular holiday fare than It’s a Wonderful Life.
So popular, in fact, that when Billingsley, who’s lived in Phoenix since 1980, recently dropped in to a fashionable Valley restaurant, a waiter gasped in disbelief, acting every bit as surprised as if he’d just discovered Mommy kissing Santa Claus.
“Wow, I know you,” sputtered the waiter. “You’re Ralphie from A Christmas Story! Man, I love that movie. I must have seen it four or five times.”
The boyish-looking Billingsley (who continues to wear glasses similar to the owlish specs he sported in the film) says he hears that story four or five times a day, particularly around this time of the year, when A Christmas Story seems to run on television nonstop. For those few who may not have seen it, Billingsley portrays a preteen Walter Mitty who alternately dreams about fending off thugs with a BB gun and contracting “soap poisoning” after having his mouth washed out by an angry mom.
“A Christmas Story has got something for everyone,” says Billingsley. “Every age group can find something in the film. It has a lot of face-value humor, MD120 Col 1, Depth P54.02 I9.03 which I think the kids can relate to. It also has a lot of qualities that adults can relate to. So many people who’ve seen the movie tell me, `You were exactly like I was when I was a boy. I wanted a BB gun and I heard the same things from my parents.’ It’s these sorts of things that make A Christmas Story so accessible and enduring.”
Still, the quirky comedy scarcely survived the winter of 1983. Released in mid-November of that year, the movie almost didn’t live to see Thanksgiving.
The cast certainly wasn’t in danger of being trampled by autograph hounds–Darren McGavin, the film’s biggest “name,” was best known for starring in a string of failed TV detective series dating back to the Fifties.
The film’s misleading advertising campaign didn’t help much, either. Frantic poster art suggested that audiences were in for a live-action cartoon filled with lowbrow holiday havoc, a pratfall-ridden precursor of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
And those discriminating moviegoers who already were familiar with Jean Shepherd’s droll humor may have been turned off by the film’s director, Bob Clark. Although A Christmas Story’s ad campaign wisely made no mention of the fact, writer/director Clark had just helmed Porky’s, a beer-and-babes raunchathon about a bunch of horny teens.
Yes, Virginia, this was the same Bob Clark who also directed 1975’s Black Christmas, a holiday heartwarmer about a sorority-house slasher who takes a group of co-eds on a one-way slay ride.
In view of Clark’s track record, who could blame potential audiences for suspecting this was a cinematic lump of coal?
MGM/UA, apparently having little faith in the film itself, dumped A Christmas Story into theatres with little fanfare and even less advertising. (The studio, which has since sold A Christmas Story to mogul Ted Turner, now refuses to discuss the movie.)
Although the picture did have its fans (New Times likened the film’s offbeat comedy to “a Norman Rockwell painting that’s been knocked slightly askew”), the picture went largely ignored by the national press. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby, one of the few national critics who did get around to seeing the picture, checked in with a particularly Scroogelike notice. “There are a number of small, unexpectedly funny moments in A Christmas Story,” he wrote, “but you have to possess the Col 3, Depth P54.02 I9.03 The film was shot over 11 weeks in early ’83. Cleveland, Ohio, doubled as Hammond, Indiana, in the exterior scenes, while all interiors (with the exception of the visit-to-Santa sequence, shot in Higbee’s Department Store in Cleveland) were filmed on a Toronto sound stage.
To audiences numbed by Hollywood’s obsession with high-tech trickery, A Christmas Story is refreshingly different. This is, after all, a movie in which the closest thing to a spectacular car wreck is a scene involving a flat tire–and a spectacular four-letter word. Still, Billingsley reports that A Christmas Story was not without its own low-key cinematic wizardry.
In one key sequence, Ralphie and his pals learn the hard way whether it’s true that a person’s tongue will stick to a frozen lamppost. No stunt licker needed here. Instead, Billingsley explains that the lamppost used in the scene was actually made of hollow wood. To ensure that the actor’s tongue would actually stick to the lamppost, the special-effects crew drilled a hole in the pole and attached a small air-suction hose, similar to those used by a dentist.
And what about the bar of soap that Ralphie’s mother sticks in his mouth after he utters “the Queen Mother of swear words”? A piece of wax.
The winter wonderland that greets Ralphie and Randy when they spring from bed Christmas morning? “That was half real and half fake,” says Billingsley. “It would snow, and then it would melt. We used a lot of foam in that movie.” Snow or no snow, Billingsley recalls that most of the location shooting was “bitterly” cold. Required to run around in the snow wearing nothing but pajamas in one scene, he recalls, “I was wearing long underwear underneath with the collar cut down. Still, I was freezing.”
His friendships on the set were considerably warmer. So warm, in fact, that before A Christmas Story was released, there was talk of reuniting the cast for a sequel that would send Ralphie and family on a summer vacation.
(In 1988, that sequel finally came to fruition–of sorts–in the made-for-cable feature Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss. Co-produced by the Disney Channel and PBS, the 90-minute comedy, also based on Jean Shepherd material, featured an entirely different cast.) “We all got too old to do the sequel
