Reuben Freed’s sketch for the alleyway scene. Notice a piece was brought to Canada from Cleveland for continuity. © Reuben Freed
© MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
While designing the leg, the production designer started with the description in Shepherd’s original short story “My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art.” The leg was described as being similar to the type used in Nehi — pronounced “knee-high,” get it? — soda company advertisements during the 1920s. Freed was also able to glean some inspiration from the 1976 Phantom of the Open Hearth PBS special, which marked the first time Shep’s short story was adapted for the screen, as well as the first appearance of the iconic lamp.
The main holdup in designing the lamp was what type of lampshade the appendage would wear. Several different styles were designed for Shepherd’s approval, but the winning sketch was one that was reminiscent of an actual lamp Freed had in his childhood home. “I immediately thought of something I had seen in my mother’s front room, which was sort of a gold-colored silk lampshade, pleated with fringe all around it,” he says.
Reuben Freed’s original leg lamp design © Reuben Freed
In total, three legs were made for production. Finding an original leg lamp has been considered the holy grail for Christmas Story fans, but the likelihood of finding one is about as great as locating Pee-wee Herman’s bicycle in the basement of the Alamo. According to those involved in the production, all the lamps were destroyed during filming and none exist to this day.
While filming on the soundstage was relatively smooth sailing, one major distraction frequently got in the way of production — Jean Shepherd. The writer was often on the set while filming was underway, but instead of being a silent observer, he would pull the actors aside and give them direction. Director Bob Clark considered this a massive interference, and the two would often get into squabbles on the set.
“Listen, Pete,” Shepherd would say, before making a beeline over to Peter Billingsley and giving him some suggestions to improve his performance. Clark would come running over as Shepherd walked away: “What did he just tell you?” The kid would reiterate the contradictory notes he’d just received to his director, who would immediately become incensed. He’d make his way over to Shepherd, who would casually be thumbing through his script on the other side of the room. “Jean, we can’t do that, we just set this up!”
“Jean drove Bob Clark nuts,” says Scott Schwartz. “It was hysterical. There was never any specific heated argument or anything like that. It was just fun, wacky shit where Bob would have to go, ‘Listen, Jean, do me a favor, will ya? You can’t tell him something in the middle of the scene.’”
Filming the soap poisoning scene © Ian Petrella
Ultimately, Clark had to ask Shepherd to stop coming to the set so they could remain on schedule. The young actors were fairly oblivious to the growing extent of their annoyance with each other, but looking back, they understand that Shepherd meant well.
“They were both so invested,” Peter Billingsley says. “[They] had been with this a long time and had worked so hard.”
“This is his life. This is his story,” Ian Petrella says. “I’m sure he probably had a lot to say and he contributed as much as he could.”
Jean Shepherd, c. 1972 © Photofest
While the interior shots were being completed at Madger Studios, several exterior shots were being done throughout Toronto. Shepherd was still on the set when the fight between Ralphie and Scut Farkus was shot, and the writer once again had some very specific feedback for the young star.
“When I beat up the bully, [Jean] specifically wrote out [what I was supposed to say phonetically],” Billingsley says. “I still remember the beginning. There are some things from this movie that won’t get out of my head. He wrote me three cards and told me to memorize it. He told me not to just try and get through it.”
Ian Petrella and Peter Billingsley © Ian Petrella
The young actor may have been able to get away with using faux-profanity during that scene, but when it came time to shoot the big “Oh, fudge!” sequence by the Cherry Street Bridge in Toronto on Valentine’s Day, 1983, the young actor got a chance to say “the queen mother of dirty words — the f-dash-dash-dash word.” According to Billingsley, they filmed the sequence with him saying both versions of the profane word. The censored version was used for the audio, while the explicit version was used for the video to give the impression that Ralphie was really going to say it.
Ian Petrella and Peter Billingsley © Ian Petrella
Filming wrapped on March 18. With a holiday deadline looming, Clark and his editor Stan Cole got to work. Carl Zittrer and Paul Zaza started on the score, which incorporated a mix of holiday tunes from period artists like Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, classical music from composers like Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky, and original music cues. The rest of the cast and crew considered the project a part of their past and assumed that, as with most projects, it would be another footnote in their careers. If someone had told them that they would still be talking about A Christmas Story three decades later, none of them would have believed it.
CHAPTER FIVE
Reconstructing Christmas
A Christmas Story was a modest hit in 1983 when it debuted in theaters, but it was far from a runaway success. “The film was not just ignored. It was disliked by MGM,” Tedde Moore says. “They thought it was crapola. They didn’t even want to release it.”
For director Bob Clark, A Christmas Story’s limited box office returns were the direct result of the studio’s negligent attitude toward promotion and release of the project. “I was disappointed [by the film’s financial intake] only because we had a hit,” Clark said in 2003. “We had three weekends [in the] Christmas [season] that year. Sometimes you have two. We would have done $6, 7, 8 million dollars in each one. It grossed $18 million at the box office and we would have ended up doing $45 [million] or something like that which, in 1983, would have been a hugely successful movie, especially for a movie that cost $4 million.”
© MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
However, the film didn’t run for all three weekends of the Christmas season. In fact, it barely ran during Christmas at all. A Christmas Story was released on November 18, 1983, where it debuted as the #3 movie of the weekend with just over $2 million earned over 886 screens. In the following weekend, over the Thanksgiving holiday, the film expanded its presence to 938 screens and actually moved into the #1 slot with $3.9 million. However, the film quickly lost steam at cineplexes and by Christmas was playing in only a handful of theaters.
While Clark’s estimates that the film would have grossed $45 million seem hyper-optimistic, one can’t ignore the power the film had over Thanksgiving weekend and wonder how history might have been different if the movie had actually had the opportunity to play during the time when it presumably would have done the most business of the year.
And while Clark, and arguably some of the actors as well, has blamed the studio for the film’s initial modest box office returns, Moore disagrees with that analysis: “I don’t think [the film’s initial box office] was necessarily the fault of MGM,” she says. “There are endless stories about actors who turn down movies because they thought they were awful and [then they] turned out to be wonderful and you just never know. If we had a crystal ball in this business, everyone would be rich. It doesn’t work that way. It’s the people who decide in the end. Even when all the best minds at work think they’ve got a wonderful movie, if the populace doesn’t like it, it’s over. And even if the critics think it’s wonderful, if the people don’t, it’s still over. It’ll last for a bit, the lemmings will go along to what the critics tell them to go along to, but it won’t be long before everyone sa
ys, ‘Well that stunk,’ and ‘What were they smoking when they thought it was good?’”
As it turned out, the initial critical reaction to A Christmas Story was mixed. Siskel and Ebert gave the movie “two thumbs up,” but other reviewers were less kind.
“A Christmas Story no doubt is meant to evoke the lovely sort of Christmas films that were so popular in the late ’30s and early ’40s, films like Meet Me in St. Louis and Miracle on 34th Street, but it fails to approximate any of them,” John Harkness wrote in his review for Cinema Canada in 1984. “I have never been one to complain about the arrival of American productions in this country, nor about the Americans who work in the industry . . . but the time has come to say ‘Yankee, go home.’”
“There are a number of small, unexpectedly funny moments in A Christmas Story,” New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote in his review. “But you’d have to possess the stamina of a pearl diver to find them.”
Although the critical reaction was hardly worth writing home about, the film did win two Genie Awards, Canada’s top film industry honor, for its screenplay and direction.
Since MGM had been so restrained in its spending, A Christmas Story was hardly a barn-burning addition to the studio’s catalog. Despite the film’s modest returns, or perhaps because of them, MGM had a limited re-release of the film during the holiday season of 1984. By that year, the film was beginning to be identified as a financial success; Variety even alleged that a sequel was in the works.
The film had its first airing on HBO in 1985, which played a part in the film’s growing popularity. But even more significant that year was the film’s release on VHS. Thanks to audiences taking a chance at video stores across North America, the film began to make money again. Throughout the following year, the film picked up steam on home video, and A Christmas Story began to develop an underground following.
“It was very easy to copy those VHS tapes,” actress Tedde Moore explains. “One person would buy the VHS and then give it to all their friends to copy onto theirs. It went a bit like that. It had quite a life.”
While the film gained in popularity and attention, MGM found itself in freefall by the following year. The studio was drowning in massive debt, and in early 1986, they sold the bulk of their film library to Hollywood mogul Ted Turner. He began to find ways to capitalize on his newfound library, which, of course, included A Christmas Story.
By 1988, the film was on Turner’s SuperStation cable channels across the United States during the holiday season. Even without a promotional push or much fanfare, an audience found those broadcasts and Turner, ever the wise businessman, began a holiday tradition.
In December 1990, Turner Network Television (TNT) broadcast A Christmas Story during a block of seasonal movies and specials. The airing was a ratings success, and in the years that followed, the film played as part of the regular rotation of holiday programming.
Throughout this time, home video rentals and sales continued to climb, and an underground legion of fans was created. Just as children of the mid-twentieth century had counted down the days till they could watch the annual broadcast of The Wizard of Oz over Thanksgiving weekend, fans now caused A Christmas Story to slowly and steadily, yet intensely, become television’s must-see event of the holiday season.
Before A Christmas Story became one of the most revered holiday movies of all time, ownership of the film transferred hands once more. In 1996, Turner Broadcasting System and Time Warner, Inc., the parent company of Warner Bros. Pictures, merged. From that point on, Warner Bros. became the company assigned to dealing with the film in all avenues of release, television rights, and merchandise.
In the mid-1990s, right before the two companies merged, A Christmas Story was shown more times on television than ever before. In 1995, the film aired six times from December 24 to 26 on the Turner Broadcasting System, Turner Classic Movies, and Turner Network Television channels. The following year, right after the merger, it had two additional airings.
Those multiple airings were kids’ stuff in comparison to what began in 1997. With their newfound acquisition of the Turner library, Time Warner aired the film on a continuous loop from Christmas Eve until Christmas Day on the TNT network. Billed as “24 Hours of A Christmas Story,” those previously uninitiated with the film could now catch the quirky classic during any one of twelve showings over the holiday.
“We realize A Christmas Story has really become over the past ten years the new Christmas classic,” Lisa Mateas, an executive at TNT, said at the time. “A lot of people really like this movie, and I’m going to tell you that they didn’t see it in the theater; they saw it on television.”
The marathon was a ratings success, which led to the twenty-four-hour block becoming a standard practice. By the time Warner Bros. released the twentieth anniversary two-disc special edition DVD set in 2003, the movie was an undeniable juggernaut on the way to reaching the pop stratosphere. The following year, the marathon moved to TNT’s sister network, TBS, where it firmly planted its flag as must-see TV during the holiday season.
It wasn’t just fans of the film and studio executives who noticed the tide beginning to turn in A Christmas Story’s favor. Many of the actors noticed the increased attention to the little film they had made in 1983.
“I do watch [the marathon],” Peter Billingsley said in a 2010 interview. “It generally winds up on television in the house for a little bit. Some folks in my family still enjoy that movie very much and I do, too. We watch some little snippets here and there, and then we’ll switch to any potential sporting events which may be on. So of the twenty-four-hour marathon, we probably end up watching the whole movie at least once by the end of it.”
For Tedde Moore, the film’s slow ascent was understandable and to be expected, considering the time period in which the film was released and the way society had changed over the twenty years that followed. “We were in the ’80s,” she explains. “It was extremely uncool to be innocent, to be naive, to be sweet, to be gentle. These things were out of fashion. Look at the rock ’n’ roll at the time. It was grotesque. It was brutish. It was anti-female in the worst possible way, and this was cool. Bob [Clark]’s take on this pure family of happiness and life and innocent time was considered absolutely not on for the time. I think it was cultural.”
Over the course of the twenty or so years that followed the film’s release, it became apparent that the movie was not only growing in popularity but also becoming inescapable. “A lot of people won’t leave me alone. It’s a pain in the butt,” Bob Clark joked in 2003. “No, that’s not true.”
Of course, it was half-true. It might not have been a pain to be confronted by Christmas Story fans, but those who love the movie make sure they unleash platitudes on any members of the cast or crew when they realize their involvement with the picture.
“Every room I’ve ever walked in as an actor on an audition, or on the set of something, or even as a producer or director, people do tend to recognize me,” R.D. Robb, who played Schwartz, said in 2003. “It’s definitely a conversation starter.”
“I had a flight attendant come up to me once and say, ‘Boy, you look so much like the kid from A Christmas Story, but you can’t be because that movie was shot in the 1940s,’” Peter Billingsley recalls, chuckling.
Super fan Brian Jones hadn’t run into any of the actors on a movie set or plane, but he was definitely an admirer of the movie. The film was already a megahit when Jones, a then twenty-eight-year-old in San Diego, noticed the easily identifiable house from A Christmas Story for sale on eBay in 2004, but it reached a new level of pop culture infamy when the Californian made a life-changing decision.
“I emailed the guy and said, ‘Hey, I want to buy the house. I’m serious,’” Jones recalls. “He emailed me back the next day. His brother owned half of it, so he called his brother and said, ‘Hey, can we sell it to this guy?’ Within less than twenty-four hours
I owned the house. I snatched it up as quickly as I possibly could.”
Although the house was being offered on eBay for $99,900, Jones offered the owners $150,000 to cancel the listing and sell it to him outright. They agreed, and he soon found himself not only with the Christmas Story house but also in the doghouse.
“My wife was none too impressed,” Jones says. “She’s actually in the Navy and was on deployment, heading toward the Middle East. I didn’t even ask her, I just bought it. It took me all of a day.”
Coincidentally, it was Jones’ wife who first saw the listing and informed him about it. What had begun as an interesting conversation topic between the two quickly became a potential bludgeon in their relationship.
“When she wrote me and first told me about it, it was in line five of some regular email about how her day was going and, ‘Oh, by the way did you see this,’” he says. “Never in her wildest dreams did she think I would go and buy it.”
While buying a rundown house halfway across the country from an internet listing sight unseen might have been bad enough, Jones’ wife had a more substantial reason to be annoyed with her husband.
“The money I spent on that was actually supposed to be a down payment for our house we planned to buy that year,” he confesses. “Now I just blew it all on some rickety old rental property in Cleveland, Ohio. I didn’t even know where Cleveland was. I had to look it up on MapQuest.”
© David Monseur
Although the house listed was the location used for exterior shots of the Parker home, it bore little resemblance to the iconic yellow house with dark green trim that had once provided safe haven to the Old Man’s major award. The house, built in 1895, had been refinished with a blue-gray siding and modernized with contemporary windows. While the large porch remained, there was very little left to identify the home as that of the Parkers. Except for one significant detail — in the backyard there was a shed that had barely retained the unmistakable shade of “Christmas Story Yellow.”
A Christmas Story Page 9
