Former child actor remembers cinema fun of ‘A Christmas Story’

Some former child actors cringe and protest when reminded by loyal fans of long-ago projects. Not Peter Billingsley, star of “A Christmas Story.”

According to journalist Rebecca Murray, “he seems to genuinely light up when the movie is mentioned.”

Billingsley is also used to passersby tossing their favorite quotes at him. “They all still love it,” he told Murray. People ask him if he’s tired of talking about it, but he’s not. “I’m really, really proud to be a part of it.”

Billingsley still appears in front of the cameras now and then. (He had an uncredited role in last year’s seasonal hit, “Elf,” playing - what else? - an elf. He also served as the movie’s executive producer.

He was executive producer on “Zathura,” which is still playing locally in theatres. In the upcoming comedy, “The Break-Up,” starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Anniston, he also does dual duty in front of and behind the camera.

It’s all part of a day in the life of a talented man who, unlike some child stars, was able to make his way gracefully from kid to grownup and remain in show business.

He credits his parents with this successful transition. From the beginning, back in New York City, the Billingsleys looked on the whole thing as fun, and never let themselves take their son’s stardom too seriously. “It was also something that was just done for fun,” Peter said, in a 2002 interview with Wayne Chinsang. “If it wasn’t fun, it was going to stop.”

On the advice of friends who told her that her sons were cute, Peter’s mother took them to a agent. “The first one said we were too fat, the next one said too ugly, but the third one said, ‘Yeah, they’ll work,’” Peter said.

The three-year-old’s first gig was a Geritol commercial. Other commercials followed, and then some forgettable movies. The Billingsleys moved to Phoenix, Ariz., and struck gold in 1983 with “A Christmas Story.”

Well, not literally gold. The movie was made with a modest budget by a director, Bob Clark, who believed in it. “They (Bob and Jean Shepherd) tried for 12 years to get that film made,” Peter said. “Bob had to agree to direct another junky film for the studio to greenlight it. They hardly gave him any money. MGM didn’t support the release of the movie.”

“It was so different,” Jean Shepherd said in a 1998 interview for TV Guide. “It was too real, and MGM didn’t think kids would like it.”

There’s no way for Peter to avoid the movie, even if he tried, not even in his own family. When the Billingsleys get together in Phoenix for Christmas, someone will invariably slip it in the VCR.

He doesn’t mind the connection. “It’s a great film,” he told Chinsang in the 2002 interview. “It’s something I want to be known for.”

Besides a modest paycheck from the movie, Peter was allowed to keep one of the specially made Red Ryder BB guns, the cowboy suit, and the pink bunny suit. “It’s tucked away,” he said. “But the gun is really cool.”

Peter never really left Hollywood, although he did vanish from sight for a while, leading to those predictable rumors that he died a derelict drug addict and was buried in an unmarked grave.

That’s not his style. He joked with Chinsang about his unremarkable, non-glamorous upbringing. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “I grew up in a loving family in Phoenix. I tried a cigarette once.”

What Peter did do was move into editing, some writing, directing, and then producing, where he is most active today. He frequently teams up on projects with friends such as actor Vince Vaughn and director Jon Favreau.

Favreau and Peter collaborated on IFC’s popular “Dinner for Five,” which ran for five seasons. “Zathura” and “The Break-Up” continue their association as director and producer.

Peter acknowledges there have been many changes since 1983 in the way Hollywood markets pictures. “Today, there are so many things that are our of your control,” he said. “All that you can really ever do, which is what we did with ‘A Christmas Story,’ is tell a great story.”

I don't know about anyone here, but I've seen comments elsewhere that seem to indicate some people think this movie takes place "in the Fifties." With no TV and the hero listening to "Little Orphan Annie" on the radio? Actually, the period detail makes it either 1939 or 1940. Can't be any earlier because of the Wizard of Oz movie characters in the Christmas parade, can't be any later because World War II (December 7, 1941 on) would get in the way. After the war is just too late. If I recall correctly, though, Jean Shepherd was his viewpoint character's age even earlier in the Thirties.

Also, Shepherd was from Hammond, Indiana (one of the industrial Chicago suburbs in northwest Indiana). He gave the town a fake name in the book the movie is taken from, but the street names he referred to still map onto Hammond. In the movie, the Old Man makes a comment while reading the newspaper about "somebody down in Griffith, Indiana." Hammond is north of that, so the geographical relationship is right, although nobody would say "Indiana" the way he did because it would simply go without saying as it's the same state and everybody in Hammond would know where Griffith is.

However, the exteriors for the movie were shot in Cleveland for some reason (which is why the department store is Higbee's and not Goldblatt's as it was in the book). Goldblatt's was a real though now extinct Chicago-area chain. Somebody was even trying to sell "Ralphie's house" (the house in the Cleveland area used for the exterior scenes) on eBay recently...I think the price was around $95,000 the last I looked, which may be about right for a house like that in that neighborhood even without Ralphie.

Jean Shepherd -- the script writer's -- famous "I, Libertine" hoax:

http://www.sniggle.net/libertine.php

From “A Lesson for ‘Sensation’ Lovers” by Eric Fettmann:
Jean Shepherd died last weekend at the age of 78… More than 40 years ago, this most gifted of radio monologists — a lost breed, to be sure — perpetrated one of the great hoaxes of the century and, in the process, taught us a great deal about intellectual pretension masquerading as critical judgment.
Shep was an icon all along the East Coast, especially in New York. For 21 years, he broadcast on WOR-AM, mostly on an all-night show and, on Saturdays, live from the Limelight Cafe in Greenwich Village.
Working in free form, seemingly without a script, he spun hilarious tales from his Indiana boyhood and delivered social commentary on the culture of the ’50s and ’60s. Marshall McLuhan hailed him as “the first radio novelist”; a series of stories from his book “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” was made into the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” (written and narrated by Shepherd) which TV Guide called “one of the great Christmas classics of all time.”
But for all his penchant for nostalgic story-telling — and no one could weave a tale as skillfully as he — Shepherd was no homespun hick. On the contrary — he championed the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sax Rohmer and Robert W. Service, produced an acclaimed PBS series, “Jean Shepherd’s America” and was one of the earliest writers for the Village Voice. Harper’s Magazine once called him “radio’s noble savage.”
He also delivered the kind of trenchant and cynical observations on popular culture that quickly won him a cult following. Which is what led him to prick a few balloons in the mid-’50s with his celebrated “I, Libertine” hoax – in which Shepherd and his listeners created a national furor over a totally non-existent book.
“It all started when I got into a discussion one day about people who pretend to know everything,” Shepherd wrote later in the Voice. “We thought it would be a good gag to undermine their faith by creating a demand for something that didn’t even exist. We dreamed up the name and the author on the spot.”
Set in England during the 1700s, “I, Libertine” chronicled the exploits of Lance Courtnay, by day a respected man about town, by night an uninhibited rake. Its author was said to be Frederick C. Ewing, an acknowledged expert in 18^th-century erotica who completed the book while serving as a British civil servant in Rhodesia. Naturally, Ewing didn’t exist, either.
Shepherd told his listeners to go into their local bookstores the next day and ask for “I, Libertine.” They did — and the uproar began.
Prompted by the sudden demand, booksellers started calling Publisher’s Weekly trying to locate the distributor. Articles began appearing everywhere about the publishing sensation; the New York Times Book Review even included “I, Libertine” in its list of newly published works.
Some of Shepherd’s college listeners expanded the gag by writing serious-seeming papers on the book. A Columbia student submitted a review of “I, Libertine” as his thesis — a B-plus. A Rutgers professor returned one meticulously footnoted paper on the fictitious Ewing with a note commending the student on his “superb research.” The Philadelphia Public Library even opened a card file on Ewing.
“Friends would call to tell me that they’d met people at cocktail parties who claimed to have read it,” Shepherd wrote. “One of the professors at Rutgers casually mentioned the book at a Sunday literary meeting and somebody present said he’d just finished it. When pressed, he was evasive about the plot.”
In Boston, the book was banned by the Legion of Decency. New York Post gossip columnist Earl Wilson published a blurb, claiming he’d “had lunch with Freddy Ewing yesterday.”
After about four weeks, the Wall Street Journal exposed the deception and it attracted international attention. In the ultimate irony, publisher Ian Ballantine — who had been pursuing paperback rights to “I, Libertine” — persuaded Shepherd to actually write the book, together with science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, under Ewing’s name.

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