We are absolutely addicted to this movie and wait impatiently for its 24 hour marathon every year.  I was thrilled to hear that the house was bought and brought back to look like it did in the movies.  

                                    

A Christmas Story is a 1983 film based on the short stories and semi-fictional anecdotes of author and raconteur Jean Shepherd, including material from his books In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories. It was directed by Bob Clark.

Tagline: "A Tribute to the Original, Traditional, One-Hundred-Percent, Red-Blooded, Two-Fisted, All-American Christmas..."

Plot Synopsis

The movie takes place in 1940 in the fictional northern Indiana town of Hohman (based on real-life Hammond, IN). 9-year-old Ralph "Ralphie" Parker (Peter Billingsley) wants only one thing for Christmas – "an official Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot range model air rifle (BB Gun) with a compass in the stock, and this thing which tells time."

Between run-ins with his younger brother Randy (Ian Petrella) and having to handle school bully Scut Farkus (Zack Ward), Ralphie doesn't know how he'll ever survive long enough to get the BB gun for Christmas.

The plot revolves around Ralphie's overcoming a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to his owning the precious Red Ryder BB gun: the fear that he will shoot his eye out. In each of the film's three acts, Ralphie makes his case to another individual – each time he is met by the same retort. When Ralphie asks his mother (Melinda Dillon) for a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, she says, "No, you'll shoot your eye out." Next, when Ralphie writes a theme about the BB gun for Mrs. Shields (Tedde Moore), his teacher at Harding Elementary School, Ralphie gets a C+, and Mrs. Shields writes "P.S. You'll shoot your eye out" on it. Finally, Ralphie asks a department store Santa Claus (Jeff Gillen) for a Red Ryder BB gun, and Santa responds, "You'll shoot your eye out, kid."

One day, Scut Farkus and his sidekick Grover Dill (Yano Anaya) tease Ralphie on the way home from school. The frustrated Ralphie knocks Grover Dill to the ground and beats Scut's face bloody. Ralphie's mother decides to not tell his father about the fight and Ralphie does not get punished.

On Christmas morning, Ralphie's disappointment turns to joy as his father (Darren McGavin) points out one last half-hidden present, ostensibly from Santa. As Ralphie unwraps the BB gun, Mr. Parker explains the purchase to his wife, stating that he had one himself when he was 8 years old.

Ralphie goes out to test his new gun, shooting at a paper target perched on top of a metal sign, and predictably gets a ricochet from the metal sign. This ricochet ends up hitting just below his eye, which causes him to flinch and lose his glasses. While searching for the glasses, Ralphie ends up stepping on them with his snow boot, subsequently breaking them. However, he concocts a story to his mother about an icicle falling on him and breaking his glasses, which she believes.

Suddenly, a horde of the next door neighbor's dogs, which frequently bother Ralphie's father, manage to get into the house and eat the turkey. On a last minute choice, Ralphie's father takes everyone out to a Chinese restaurant where they eat what the narrator calls "Chinese Turkey".

 Subplots

Several subplots are incorporated in the body of the film, based on other separate short stories by Shepherd. The most notable involves the Old Man (Darren McGavin) winning a "major award." He entered a trivia contest out of the newspaper, which asked for the name of The Lone Ranger's nephew's horse (thanks to his wife, who supplied the answer). A large crate arrived and inside was a lamp shaped like a woman's leg wearing fishnet stockings, much to Mrs. Parker's displeasure. The leg was the logo of the contest's sponsor, the Nehi bottling company (the details of the contest were not necessarily made clear in the movie)

Other vignettes include:

• Ralphie's friends Flick and Schwartz disputing over whether or not a person's tongue will stick to a frozen flagpole. Schwartz ultimately issues Flick a "triple dog dare" (the most serious of those used by the kids; he bypasses a "triple dare" from a "double dog dare", a serious boyhood protocol breach), and Flick's tongue gets stuck to the pole, much to his terror. A suction tube within the flagpole was used to simulate the freezing of Flick's tongue to the pole.
• Ralphie receiving his Little Orphan Annie Secret Society decoder pin, and learning a lesson about being ripped off (his first secret message with the pin turned out to be an Ovaltine radio commercial).
• Ralphie and his friends dealing with the neighborhood bully, Scut Farkus (Zack Ward).
• The Old Man's legendary battles with the aging and malfunctioning furnace.
• Ralphie letting slip the dreaded "f-dash-dash-dash" word (after his father knocks a hubcap from his hands, spilling its contents, the lug nuts from a flat tire) and later, when asked where he'd heard the word, falsely blaming his friend, Schwartz, instead of pointing out that his father utters the word daily.
• The numerous smelly and bothersome hound dogs of the next door neighbors, the Bumpuses, including the dogs destroying the Christmas turkey (prompting the family to go out and have Peking duck in its stead, resulting in a giggling fit by the mother and the boys).
• Several fantasy sequences depict Ralphie's daydreams of glory and vindication, including the vanquishing of prison-striped villains, an extremely good grade for his written theme about the BB gun, and parental remorse over a case of "soap poisoning" (related to his swearing).

Major credits

The movie was written by Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown and Bob Clark. Shepherd provides the movie's narration from the perspective of an adult Ralphie, a narrative style later used in the dramedy The Wonder Years. Shepherd also has a cameo appearance in the department store scene, as the man who directs Ralphie and Randy to the end of the line. Director Clark has a cameo as Swede, the neighbor who questions the Old Man about the Leg Lamp.

Cast

• Peter Billingsley as Ralphie Parker - the film's protagonist, a nine year old imaginative dreamer
• Darren McGavin as The Old Man (Mr. Parker) - Ralphie's dad is at the center of the Major Award vignette, and is depicted using colorful nonsensical invective. His first name is never revealed.
• Melinda Dillon as Mrs. Parker - Ralphie's mom is the primary dispenser of the oft-repeated phrase, "You'll shoot your eye out."
• Ian Petrella as Randy Parker - Ralphie's younger brother, who will not eat his meatloaf
• Scott Schwartz as Flick - Ralphie's friend, who learns about tongues and cold metal the hard way
• R.D. Robb as Schwartz - Ralphie's other friend, on whom Ralphie pins the blame for his knowing "the f-dash-dash-dash word"
• Tedde Moore as Miss Shields - Ralphie's fourth grade teacher, the only on-screen character played by the same actor in the sequel, My Summer Story
• Zack Ward as Scut Farkus - the neighborhood bully, who torments Ralphie and his friends en route to and from school
• Yano Anaya as Grover Dill - Scut's toadie, who is promoted to main bully in My Summer Story
• Jeff Gillen as Santa Claus - the rather frightening and cranky department store incarnation of "the Head Honcho," who delivers the last blow to Ralphie's hope for a BB gun
• Jean Shepherd as adult Ralphie - the narrator (also has an on-screen cameo; see above)
• Drew Hocevar as one of the two Christmas Elves. He is the one paired with the Department Store Santa.
• David Svoboda as Goggles (little boy in line, wearing goggles).
• Helen E Kaider as the Wicked Witch - one of the Oz characters, as seen in the department store.

In the DVD commentary, director Bob Clark mentions that Jack Nicholson was considered for the role of the Old Man; Clark expresses gratitude that he ended up with Darren McGavin instead, who also appeared in several other Clark films. He cast Melinda Dillon on the basis of her similar role in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Peter Billingsley was already a minor star from co-hosting the TV series Real People; Clark initially wanted him for the role of Ralphie, but decided he was "too obvious" a choice and auditioned many other young actors before realizing that Billingsley was the right one after all. Ian Petrella was cast immediately before filming began. Tedde Moore had previously appeared in Clark's film Murder by Decree, and Jeff Gillen was an old friend of Clark's who had been in one of his earliest films.

History and related works

Three of the semi-autobiographical short stories on which the film is based were originally published in Playboy magazine between 1964 and 1966. Shepherd later read "Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder nails the Cleveland Street Kid" and told the otherwise unpublished story "Flick's Tongue" on his WOR Radio talk show, as can be heard in one of the DVD extras. Bob Clark states on the DVD commentary that he became interested in Shepherd's work when he heard "Flick's Tongue" on the radio in 1968. Additional source material for the film, according to Clark, came from unpublished anecdotes Shepherd told live audiences "on the college circuit."

Initially overlooked as a sleeper film, A Christmas Story was released a week before Thanksgiving 1983 to moderate success, earning about $2 million in its first weekend. Critics generally supported the film. Leonard Maltin proclaimed it a "Top screen comedy," while Roger Ebert proclaimed it "Funny and satirical...a sort of Norman Rockwell crossed with MAD magazine." The film would go on to win two Genie Awards, for Bob Clark's screenplay and direction. Years later, Ebert would re-evaluate the film, this time more favorably, writing that "some of the movie sequences stand as classic." On December 24, 2007, AOL ranked the film their #1 Christmas movie of all time.

By Christmas 1983, however, the movie was no longer playing at most venues, but remained in about a hundred theaters until January 1984. Gross earnings were just over $19.2 million. In the years since, due to television airings and home video release, A Christmas Story has become widely popular and is now a perennial Christmas special. Originally released by MGM, Warner Bros. (through Turner Entertainment Co.) now has ownership of the film due to Ted Turner's purchase of MGM's pre-1986 library and Time Warner's subsequent purchase of Turner Entertainment.

Television

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the film began airing quietly on SuperStation WTBS and Superstation WGN (now known as WGN America). From 1988-1992, the film had a short-lived tradition of airing Thanksgiving night (or the night after Thanksgiving) to open the holiday television season. In 1988, then-fledgling FOX aired the movie the night after Thanksgiving. In 1989-1990, TBS showed it Thanksgiving night, while in 1991-1992, they aired it the night after.

Turner broadcasting, now a part of the TimeWarner umbrella of cable networks, has maintained ownership of the broadcast rights, and since the mid-1990s, airing the movie increasingly on TBS, TNT and TCM. By 1995, it was aired on those networks a combined six times over December 24-25-26, and in 1996, it was aired eight times over those three days.

Due to the increasing popularity of the film, in 1997 TNT began airing a 24-hour marathon dubbed "24 Hours of A Christmas Story," consisting of the film shown twelve consecutive times beginning at 7 or 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve and ending Christmas Day. This was in addition to various other airings earlier in the month of December. In 2004, after TNT switched to a predominantly drama format, sister network TBS, under its comedy-based "Very Funny" moniker, took over the marathon. Clark stated that in 2002, an estimated 38.4 million people tuned into the marathon at one point or another, nearly one sixth of the country. TBS reported 45.4 million viewers in 2005, and 45.5 million in 2006. In 2007, new all-time ratings records were set, with the highest single showing (8 p.m. Christmas Eve) drawing 4.4 million viewers.

In 2007, the original tradition was revived, as TNT aired the film twice the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend (November 25). The 24-hour marathon continued on TBS for the eleventh year, starting at 8 p.m. eastern on Christmas Eve.

Subsequent works

A movie sequel involving Ralphie and his family, called My Summer Story (alternate title It Runs in the Family) was made in 1994. With the exceptions of Tedde Moore as Ralphie's teacher (Miss Shields) and Jean Shepherd as the narrator (the voice of the adult Ralphie), it features an entirely different cast. A series of television movies involving the Parker family, also from Shepherd stories, was made by PBS, including Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss, The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters, and The Phantom of the Open Hearth.

In the year 2000, an authorized stage play adaptation of A Christmas Story was written by Philip Grecian and is produced widely each Christmas season. In 2003, Broadway Books published the five Jean Shepherd short stories from which the movie and stage play were adapted in a single volume under the title A Christmas Story (ISBN 0-7679-1622-0), with stories including: "Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder nails the Cleveland Street Kid", "The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message, or The Asp Strikes Again", "My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award that Heralded the Birth of Pop Art", "Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil", and "The Grandstand Passion Play of Delbert and the Bumpus Hounds". This collection was also released as an audio book (ISBN 0-7393-1674-5), read by Dick Cavett.

The book Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd (2005, ISBN 0-55783-600-0), has several sections which comment on the movie A Christmas Story.

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                                                                                              Jean Shepherd


                        
                                                        Jean Shepherd @ 1970 - WOR Studio      

Jean Parker Shepherd (July 26, 1921 - October 16, 1999) was an American raconteur, radio and TV personality, writer and actor who was often referred to by the nickname Shep.

With a career that spanned decades, Shepherd is best-known to modern audiences for narrating the film A Christmas Story (1983), which he co-wrote, based on his own semi-autobiographical stories.

Biography

Early life

Born on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, Shepherd was raised in Hammond, Indiana, where he graduated from Hammond High School in 1939. As a youth he worked briefly as a mail carrier in a steel mill and earned his amateur radio license when he was 16. He later attended several universities.

During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Shepherd then had an extensive career in a variety of media:

Radio career

Shepherd began his broadcast radio career on WSAI-AM in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1948. From 1951 to 1953 he had a late-night broadcast on KYW-AM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after which he returned to Cincinnati for a show on WLW. After a stint on television (see below), he returned to radio. "Shep," as he was known, settled in at WOR radio New York City, New York on an overnight slot in 1956, where he delighted his fans by telling stories, reading poetry (especially the works of Robert W. Service), and organizing comedic listener stunts. The most famous of the last involved creating a hoax about a non-existent book, I, Libertine, by the equally non-existent author "Frederick R. Ewing", in 1956. Later co-written by Shepherd, Theodore Sturgeon and Betty Ballantine, this Ballantine Book is now a collector's item. Among his close friends in the late 1950s were Shel Silverstein and Herb Gardner. With them and actress Lois Nettleton, Shepherd performed in the revue he created, Look, Charlie. Later he was married to Nettleton for about six years.

When he was about to be released by WOR in 1956 for not being commercial, he did a commercial for Sweetheart Soap, not a sponsor, and was immediately fired. His listeners besieged WOR with complaints, and when Sweetheart offered to sponsor him he was reinstated. Eventually, he attracted more sponsors than he wanted—the commercials interrupted the flow of his monologues. He broadcast until he left WOR in 1977. His subsequent radio work consisted of only short segments on several other stations. In later life he publicly dismissed his days as a radio raconteur as unimportant, focusing more on his writing and movie work. This distressed his legions of fans who fondly remembered nights with Shep on WOR. He once made such comments during an appearance on the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder. This contrasts with his frequent criticisms of television during his radio programs.

In addition to his stories, his shows also contained, among other things, humorous anecdotes and general commentaries about the human condition, observations about life in New York, accounts of vacations in Maine and travels throughout the world. Among the most striking of his programs was his account of his participation in the March on Washington in August 1963, during which Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and the program that aired on November 25, 1963—the day of President Kennedy's burial. However, his most scintillating programs remain his oftimes prophetic, bitingly humorous commentaries about ordinary life in America.

At the time of the WOR radio show, Shepherd rode a Vespa motor scooter and parked it in the lobby of the WOR building.

Throughout his radio career, he performed entirely without scripts. His friend and WOR colleague Barry Farber marveled at how he could talk so long with very little written down. Yet during a radio interview, Shepherd once claimed that some shows took several weeks to prepare. On most Fourths of July, however, he would read one of his most enduring and popular short stories, "Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that Struck Back," about a neighborhood drunk and his disastrous fireworks escapades. In the 1960s and 1970s, his WOR show ran from 11:15pm to midnight, later changed to 10:15pm to 11pm, so his "Ludlow Kissel" reading was coincidentally timed to many New Jersey and New York local town fireworks displays, which would traditionally reach their climax at 10pm. It was possible, on one of those July 4 nights, to park one's car on a hilltop and watch several different pyrotechnic displays, accompanied by Shepherd's masterful storytelling.

The theme song used on his long-running radio show was "The Bahn Frei Polka" by Eduard Strauss. The particular version he used was recorded by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.

Print

Jean Shepherd posed as Frederick R. Ewing on the back cover of Ballantine's I, Libertine (1956).

Shepherd wrote a series of humorous short stories about growing up in northwest Indiana and its steel towns, many of which were first told by him on his programs and then published in Playboy. The stories were later assembled into books titled In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: and Other Disasters, and A Fistful of Fig Newtons. Some of those situations were incorporated into his movies and television fictional stories. He also wrote a column for the early Village Voice, a column for Car and Driver and numerous individual articles for diverse publications, including Mad.

When Eugene B. Bergmann's Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd was published in 2005, Publishers Weekly reviewed:

This prismatic portrait affirms Shepherd's position as one of the 20th Century's great humorists. Railing against conformity, he forged a unique personal bond with his loyal listeners, who participated in his legendary literary prank by asking bookstores for the nonexistent novel I, Libertine (when Ian Ballantine had Shepherd and Theodore Sturgeon make the fake real, PW called it "the hoax that became a book"). Storyteller Shepherd's grand theme was life itself... Novelist Bergmann (Rio Amazonas) interviewed 32 people who knew Shepherd or were influenced by him and listened to hundreds of broadcast tapes, inserting transcripts of Shepherd's own words into a "biographical framework" of exhaustive research.

Television and films

Early in his career, Shepherd had a television program in Cincinnati called Rear Bumper. Reportedly he was eventually recommended to replace the resigning Steve Allen on NBC's Tonight Show. NBC executives sent Shepherd to New York City to prepare for the position, but they were contractually bound to first offer it to Jack Paar. The network was certain Paar would hold out for a role in prime time, but he accepted the late-night assignment. However, he did not assume the position permanently until Shepherd and Ernie Kovacs had co-hosted the show.

In the early 1960s he did a weekly television show on WOR in New York. Between 1971 and 1994, Shepherd became a screenwriter of note, writing and producing numerous works for both television and cinema. He was the writer and narrator of the show Jean Shepherd's America, produced by Boston Public Television station WGBH in which he told his famous narratives, visited unusual locales, and interviewed local people of interest. He used a similar format for the New Jersey Network TV show Shepherd's Pie. On many of the Public TV shows he wrote, directed and edited entire shows.

He also wrote and narrated many works, the most famous being the feature film A Christmas Story, which is now considered a holiday classic. In the film, Shepherd provides the voice of the adult Ralph Parker. He also has a cameo role playing a man overseeing the line at the department store waiting for Santa Claus. Much to Ralphie's chagrin, he points out to him that the end of the line is much further away.

A 1994 movie sequel, My Summer Story, was narrated by Shepherd but featured an almost entirely different cast from the previous film. The PBS series American Playhouse aired a series of television movies based on Shepherd stories, also featuring the Parker family. These included Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss, The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters, and The Phantom of the Open Hearth.

Live performances and recordings

Shepherd also performed for several years at the Limelight Cafe in New York City's Greenwich Village, and at many colleges nationwide. His live shows were a perennial favorite Rutgers and Fairleigh Dickinson Universities. He performed at Princeton University annually for 30 years, until 1996. The Limelight shows were broadcast live on WOR radio.

He also performed before sold-out audiences at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. He was also emcee for several important jazz concerts in the late 1950s. Shepherd improvised spoken word lyrics for the title track on jazz great Charles Mingus's 1957 album The Clown. Eight record albums of live and studio performances of Shepherd were released between 1955 and 1975. Shepherd also recorded the opening narration and the voice of the Audio-Animatronics "Father" character for the updated Carousel of Progress attraction at Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom.

 Music

Many of his broadcasts were accompanied by novelty songs such as "The Bear Missed the Train" (a parody of the Yiddish ballad "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen") and "The Sheik of Araby", or by Shepherd himself, playing the Jew's harp, nose flute and kazoo.

On radio as well as on his WOR-TV show, he frequently used his own head as a musical instrument, knocking the top of his skull with his knuckles while changing the size of his open mouth to produce different notes. Shep facetiously claimed that his "Head Thumping" (as he called it) spanned about an octave.

Ham radio

Shepherd held the ham radio call sign K2ORS. He was very active on ham radio until his death. He is also credited as the voice for the ARRL's tape series Tune In the World with Ham Radio. This series of tapes helped many young people become ham radio operators.

 Fact and fiction

What is still unknown is to what extent Shepherd's radio and published stories were fiction, fact or a combination of the two. The childhood friends included in many of his stories were people he claimed to have invented, yet high school yearbooks confirm that many of them did exist. His father was always referred to as "my old man" who worked in the Borden Milk Company offices. During an interview on the Long John Nebel Show—an all-night radio program that ran on WOR starting at midnight—Shepherd once claimed that his real father was a cartoonist along the lines of Herblock, and that he inherited his skills at line drawings. This may well not have been true, but Shepherd's ink drawings do adorn some of his published writings.

The 1930 Federal Census Record for Hammond, Indiana indicates that Jean's father did work for a dairy company. His actual occupation is illegible, but may read "cashier". The 1930 census record lists the following family members: Jean Shepherd, age 30, head; Anna Shepherd, age 30, wife; Jean Shepherd, Jr, age 8, son; and Randall Shepherd, age 6, son. According to this record, Jean Sr, Anna, Jean Jr, and Randall were all born in Illinois. Jean, Sr's parents were born in Kansas. Anna's parents were born in Germany.

Jean Shepherd had two children, Randall and Adrien, but publicly denied this. Randall Shepherd describes his father as having frequently come home late or not at all. Randall had almost no contact with him after his parents' divorce.

Shepherd's life and multimedia career are examined in the 2005 book Excelsior, You Fathead! The Art and Enigma of Jean Shepherd by Eugene B. Bergmann (ISBN 0-55783-600-0).

 Influence

Shepherd's oral narrative style was a recursor href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Precursor">precursor to that used by precursor to that used by precursor to that used by precursor to that used by precursor to that used by precursor to that used by Spalding Gray and Garrison Keillor. Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media wrote that Shepherd "regards radio as a new medium for a new kind of novel that he writes nightly." In the "Seinfeld Season 6" DVD set, commenting on the episode titled "The Gymnast" Jerry Seinfeld says "He really formed my entire comedic sensibility—I learned how to do comedy from Jean Shepherd." Furthermore, the first name of Seinfeld's third child is "Shepherd."

Shepherd was an influence on Bill Griffith's Zippy comic strip as Griffith noted in his strip for January 9, 2000. Griffith explained, "The inspiration---just plucking random memories from my childhood, as I'm wont to do in my Sunday strip (also a way to expand beyond Zippy)--and Shep was a big part of them".

New Jersey podcaster Frank Edward Nora often mentions Shepherd's considerable influence on his own style of talk show recording and has stated he was the main inspiration for his show, Theovernightscape. On the show's 715th episode he was very excited to discuss a hand-drawn postcard that was sent to Jean Shepherd in 1956, which Nora purchased from his second wife, Lois Nettleton, through an Ebay auction.

Shepherd was an amateur radio operator, with call sign K2ORS. When operating as an amateur, he was known to use his middle name, Parker. He was listed in the Amateur Radio Callbook and for a number of years his address was on 57^th Street in New York City. His last residence in NYC was on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village where he lived for many years.

Shepherd spent his final years in relative seclusion on Sanibel Island, Florida, with his wife Leigh Brown. She was also his producer at WOR, and played many roles in his varied career. As Shep attained a rotund figure in his later years, Leigh would refer to him as "ma pamplemousse," or, "my grapefruit." He died on Sanibel Island in 1999 of "natural causes." In 2005, Shep was posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.