Based on the success of In God We Trust, in 1971 Shepherd released a second short story anthology entitled Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories: And Other Disasters. It is in that collection that “The Grandstand Passion Play of Delbert and the Bumpus Hounds” appears. There are noticeable influences from “Passion Play” on the final script, but fans of the film will notice some substantial differences. For example, in A Christmas Story, the meal that is taken from the Parker home isn’t ham, but turkey. More importantly, the original short story isn’t even set around Christmastime, but Easter. Very little of the story actually materializes in the film, except for the Old Man’s adverse relationship with the redneck family which, in the movie, is only referenced.
It’s safe to say that when the narratives were raided for stories that would be a perfect fit for the silver screen, even Jean Shepherd himself couldn’t have anticipated the importance of including “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art,” which appeared for the first time in In God We Trust. The now all-too-familiar story is the tale of Ralphie’s father, who wins a “major award” in the form of a distinctive lamp, “. . . a silk-stockinged lady’s leg, realistically flesh-colored, wearing a black spike-heeled slipper,” Shepherd wrote. “The knee was crooked slightly and the leg was shown to the middle of the thigh. That was all. No face; no torso; no dress — just a stark, disembodied, provocative leg.”
It is here that Shep’s unique storytelling ability is best displayed. After the mother breaks her husband’s prized possession, the patriarch’s response is not only completely in line with what we would expect from the character but also the kind of resolution longtime fans of the raconteur came to love from his undeniably humorous stories.
“My father always was a superb user of profanity,” Shepherd wrote in the story. “But now he came out with just one word, a real Father word, bitter and hard.
“‘Dammit.’”
Molded in the pre-television era of radio serials, Jean Shepherd was a walking, talking, and almost always monologuing relic. He had made a name for himself by speaking for hours on end into a radio microphone, virtually isolating himself. When callers were encouraged to call his radio broadcast, Shep would often refuse to pick up the phone. Instead, he would talk to himself, making up voices and pretending he was arguing with real callers. While touring the college circuit on speaking engagements, he would berate students who called out from the crowd and remind them that he was performing a solo act and shouldn’t be disturbed. Those who interviewed him on television and radio found him to be an enigma. His stories contradicted anecdotes he had previously told and he would claim that he was telling the truth both times, while also laughing at the suggestion that anyone actually believed him.
Although Shepherd regularly used the phrase “I’ll never forget the time” to begin a story, an obvious attempt to lend some truth to his wildly exaggerated, or downright fabricated, stories, he simultaneously maintained that his tales were simply a work of fiction and nothing more. That is, unless he was saying the opposite.
“I take people out of my past or I put them and use them as composite characters just as any good writer would,” Shep said at Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1967. “You don’t write out of a vacuum. I used real names, but they’re not exactly like they are in the stories.”
“None of these stories, by the way, are based on any of my own memories,” he stated in a 1975 interview with Barry Farber on WOR. “None of them are based on any — the families are all — I’ve created a mythical family, like Faulkner created a mythical county.”
So, which is true? Are Flick and Schwartz actual people, or merely creations of Jean Shepherd’s imagination? The question seems to be one that Shep not only invited but relished.
“Although he told hundreds of stories about his kidhood, the extent to which the tales were true to the ‘real’ Jean Shepherd is difficult to discern,” author Eugene B. Bergmann writes in his book on Shepherd. “His adolescence is almost a blank record.”
Despite his repeated declarations that his stories were all made up, there was a real Flick — Jack Flickinger — who lived just a few blocks away from the Shepherds. Miss Ruth Shields was really one of young Jean’s teachers, and there was even a family from Kentucky who lived next door.
Melinda Dillon © Ian Petrella
At best, Shep’s claims to have fabricated all the stories about his friends and family seem to be a gross misremembering of the truth. Shep did have a younger brother named Randall. In his stories, Randy was a fairly boilerplate younger brother: there were the occasional displays of sibling rivalry that would result in a play-fight, or the younger would be engaged in some display of immaturity, like refusing to eat his food at the dinner table, making a mess and refusing to clean it up, or hiding in kitchen cupboards. When Shep moved away from Hammond, the real Randy stayed behind, working for the Borden Milk Company until his adulthood.
There is no evidence to suggest that Randy was as annoying as Shepherd wrote, but in a way, this potential inconsistency hits at the heart of what made his writing such a success. Through his alter ego of Ralphie Parker, the adult Shepherd wrote about his kid brother in the way that he viewed Randy when he was younger. What pair of brothers, as youngsters, especially those as close in age as the Parker/Shepherd pair, would take the time to get to know the other as a person and not just “my older brother” or “my kid brother”? In Randy’s ambiguity there is a truth that resonates strongly with Shep’s audience, mostly because it allows for the nondescript younger brother to serve as a blank slate for the immature and annoying elementary school–aged family member in each of our lives.
In his stories, the mother is always portrayed as a plain-looking and slightly pathetic character, certainly not quite ready for someone to drop by unexpectedly, for she was likely to be in her chenille bathrobe with some stain on it that she had chosen to ignore because she had no one to impress. The mother meant well, as most do, but wouldn’t parent in the traditional sense. Shep would often tell a story of his mother sitting him on her knee, extolling about the virtues of money making as the key to success in life. Having an honest job that enables you to pay your way in life is a valuable thing to aspire to, but most mothers wouldn’t consider that the best lesson to teach a child at an early age. In her eyes, money wasn’t the root of all evil; it was the ticket to happiness. The child Shepherd accepted his mother’s wisdom, but as an adult, he recognized that his mother’s advice prematurely turned him into a somewhat hardened cynic who rejected that anyone should sacrifice making money to create art.
“Jean, you got to make dough,” Shepherd claims his mother would tell him when he was five years old. “You got to make dough.”
So, throughout his life, that’s what he set out to do.
And what of his father, the one that audiences remember as the inaccessible, yet good-at-heart white knight that ultimately gets Ralphie the Red Ryder BB gun he so desired? How accurate is his portrayal in the film to Jean Shepherd’s real Old Man?
While the script written by the trio of collaborators portrays the father, the Old Man, as a blue-collar family man with a hard exterior, it seems that this was a departure from not only the father Shep often wrote about in his stories but also the man he lived with until adulthood.
First off, the Shepherds weren’t blue-collar. The real-life Old Man worked for a milk company as a cashier, the same company where the real-life Randy worked. While the film suggests that the Parkers are working class, a lot of the original stories that inspired the movie actually deal with the juxtaposition of being a family of modest means living in a steel mill city in industrial Indiana.
Additionally, the softer side of the father that appears at moments like when he buys Ralphie the Red Ryder BB gun may not have actually existed. If it did, it certainly isn’t how Shepherd actually remembered his father.
Darren McGavin, Melinda Dillon, and Ian Petrella © Ian Petrella
“He never offered much advice, my father,” he recalled in April 1960. “He never really offered any advice that I can pull out of the great — I’m always amused — not only amused, I’m always a little bit — I feel a little inferior. These guys I read all the time who write autobiographies and it seems that people were always saying great things to them that affected their lives.”
In his book on Jean Shepherd, Eugene B. Bergmann cites the source of what Shep himself described as hatred for his father. Shep had asked actor James Broderick, who played the Old Man in the 1976 television movie The Phantom of the Open Hearth, to predict what happened after the events of the film ended, and then let the actor in on the answer.
“Okay,” Shep began. “One year to the day after Ralph’s prom, in fact the week of Ralph’s high school graduation, the Old Man comes home, announces he’s leaving the family, and takes off for Palm Beach with a twenty-year-old stenographer with long blond hair and a Ford convertible. They never hear from him again.”
This wasn’t just Shepherd trying to convince the actor to delve deeper into the part; it was his art imitating life. “I think it was one of the major blows in Shepherd’s life, why he had such a damaged ego in many ways,” producer Fred Barzyk says. “Everybody reacts differently to different kinds of losses. When his father sat him down and said he’s [sic] leaving his mother, it really — it was real pain for Shepherd.”
Characteristic of Jean Shepherd’s usual frankness but somewhat surprising for promotional materials in advance of a film’s release, MGM’s production notes for the film provided some insight into the raconteur’s true feelings about not only his real parents but also the way Ralphie’s parents appear in the film.
“I saw the Old Man in A Christmas Story as a guy who grew up hustling pool games at the age of twelve and was supporting himself by the age of fourteen,” Shepherd was reported as saying in 1983. “And Darren McGavin’s sardonic attitude was exactly the characterization I had in mind. Ralphie’s mother is the kind of woman I figure grew up in a family of four or five sisters and married young. She digs the Old Man, but also knows he’s as dangerous as a snake. In a way, the movie is really about these people, not Christmas or Santa Claus.”
According to Scott Schwartz, the actor cast as Flick in the film, the screenwriting process consisted primarily of taking Shepherd’s stories and making them more simplistic for a general audience. “Jean Shepherd had a vocabulary second to none,” Schwartz says. “You could hand him a ballpoint pen and he could describe you for a half an hour. His vocabulary was out of this world. When they wrote A Christmas Story, they really had to tone down a lot of his vocabulary to more laymen’s terms so that everybody could understand it.”
The script was completed six months after they began working on it and, to the disappointment of all involved in the writing process, nothing else happened with it. Clark attempted to drum up some interest from movie studios to produce the film, but because he was a director with some modest B-movie hits underneath his belt, no executives were very warm to the idea of having him spearhead a quaint Christmas movie set in the Depression era. The idea, they were sure, wouldn’t resonate with audiences, and there was nothing in Clark’s resumé that suggested to them that he could take a film that sounded like it had a snowball’s chance in hell of being successful.
And then he directed a little film called Porky’s. In 1982, you were hard pressed to find a film critic of significance saying anything kind about the raunchy teen comedy. Celebrated movie appraiser Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film one-and-a-half stars, easily one of the more positive reviews, and stated that Bob Clark “blew it” when it came to making a good film. He concluded his review with one final dig: “I see that I have neglected to summarize the plot of Porky’s. And I don’t think I will,” he wrote. “I don’t feel like writing one more sentence (which is, to be sure, all it would take).”
As Ebert’s review, which uses three sentences to state that it won’t waste one more on providing context to his opinion piece, demonstrated, Bob Clark’s film was one that critics loved to hate. However, despite the vitriol from the chattering class, or perhaps because of it, teenagers lined up around the block to see it. The movie, which was produced for $5 million, made over $105 million in its initial theatrical run and was the fifth highest grossing film of the year in the United States, behind E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Tootsie, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Rocky III. In short, it was a mammoth success, and as mammoth successes often do in the film industry, it gave Clark some capital to spend — and he knew just the project to spend it on.
Bob Clark on the set of Porky’s © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation / Photofest
“Porky’s has allowed me to make studio films without having to sacrifice any of the freedom or control I had as an independent,” he said in 1983. “At an earlier stage, I would have been forced to make unacceptable creative compromises — but not now.”
Director Bob Clark with Peter Billingsley, Melinda Dillon, Ian Petrella, and Darren McGavin © Ian Petrella
A Christmas Story, which at the time was still being referred to under the working title In God We Trust as a nod to Shepherd’s original collection of short stories, was re-pitched to the major motion pictures studios. After much persuasion, MGM agreed to give Clark $4.4 million to produce the film. To save money, Clark agreed to work on the film without a fee, and even contributed $150,000 of his own money to the production. It was later reported that as a result, the director was made a forty percent stakeholder in the film. Those familiar with Jean Shepherd’s business dealings claim that he also contributed financially to the film and was part owner, but the details are less clear.
As happy as the director was to finally be making A Christmas Story, the experience was often bittersweet for him. Although a major studio agreed to release the film, they had no expectations that it would be successful and little faith that it would even be worth watching. They provided such a small budget and so little support that what should have been Clark’s blessing was, at times, perceived to be a bit of a curse.
“I’ve paid a terrible price to do this picture,” he said in March of 1983, as filming was wrapping in Toronto. “I have to do three films back-to-back this year. I’m a bonded slave right now. I like the material in each one of them. But they [Hollywood studios] play very hard ball. But I will never have to do that again. However, I’m sure whatever I want to do the next time, they’ll extract a very high price from me.
“I said I wouldn’t work [on another film] until I do [A Christmas Story],” he continued. “So I’m doing A Christmas Story as part of a package for MGM. And I have a two-picture deal with Fox, although they let me off to do this one.”
A production company, Christmas Tree Films, was established through the collaboration of Clark and Shepherd, and while post-production was being completed on the inevitable Porky’s sequel, they began to move full steam ahead on making the film that Clark had paid his high price for. If MGM had known the film was going to be a success, perhaps they would have thrown more money at the picture. For Clark’s crew and the cast, the process of moviemaking might have been a little bit easier, but then, without the need for some creative cost-cutting throughout shooting, the whole thing might have been a lot less fun and the final film a lot less charming.
Filling the role of Ralphie, the film’s pint-sized protagonist, was relatively easy. By the time he auditioned for A Christmas Story, Peter Billingsley was already a recognizable face to the public. He had scored his first television commercial gig at the age of two and appeared in over a hundred commercials before he was a teenager. Messy Marvin, a pseudo-spokesman for Hershey’s chocolate syrup, was one of his most memorable characters.
Billingsley’s work wasn’t limited to commercial
s. In 1981, he starred alongside Burt Reynolds in the film Paternity, which earned him a nomination in the “Best Young Comedian — Motion Picture or Television” category at the Young Artist Awards. The following year he was nominated in the same category for his stint co-hosting the NBC series Real People.
So it was a mild surprise to him that after he auditioned for A Christmas Story, he went weeks without hearing back from his agent as to whether or not he had gotten the role. Billingsley was the first actor who was seriously considered for the part, but director Bob Clark passed him over because he thought the choice was too obvious. A nationwide search ensued, which resulted in over 8,000 kids auditioning for the lead role. Ultimately, Clark came to his senses. He watched Billingsley’s audition tape again and made his decision that instant. “I must be crazy,” the director said out loud to himself. “Peter is Ralphie.”
The decision to cast Billingsley was a smart one. Not only was the actor perfect on-screen, but he also was the consummate professional on the set. By the time the film was released, the promotional team at MGM was so impressed with his poise and intelligence that they boasted his 150 IQ score in press materials for the film. Other Christmas Story alum who shared the screen with him sing his praises to this day.
© Ian Petrella
“Peter Billingsley was gifted like Jackie Cooper, Shirley Temple, and some of the great kid actors from the past,” says Tedde Moore, who played his schoolteacher, Miss Shields. “He was the most terrific boy. He worked very hard and understood what he was doing and loved it. It was like he wasn’t a child.”
“I was excited to work with Peter Billingsley because I was a big fan of Real People and his Hershey commercials,” says Zack Ward, who played Ralphie’s main tormentor, the yellow-eyed Scut Farkus. “I was a little starstruck by him.”
A Christmas Story Page 4
