The Story Behind "A Christmas Story"

A Christmas Story is one of the humorous Christmas flicks compared to Home Alone films and The Grinch. The film tells a young boy who wants a BB gun for Christmas but when he mentions a BB gun he gets the same pointless quote "You'll shoot your eye out". This film was told by humorist writer Jean Shepherd who wrote "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" that. His story became a Christmas cult film and spawned sequels making this film one of the greatest humorous Christmas film.

Jean Shepherd was a well-known American humorist who performed on radio in the decades after World War II. Beginning in June 1964, he began adapting many of his radio stories for publication in Playboy magazine. He focused primarily on those which depicted his childhood in the fictional town of Hohman, Indiana (a stand-in for Shepherd's home town of Hammond, Indiana).

According to Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, author Shel Silverstein had long encouraged Shepherd to write down his radio stories, but Shepherd was reluctant to do so because he was not a writer. Eventually, Silverstein recorded Shepherd's stories on tape, transcribed them, and then together with Shepherd edited and developed the most popular. Shepherd's stories are a mix of fact and fiction. They are often described as nostalgic or memoirs, Shepherd described them simply as fictional stories about childhood, a view seconded by scholars Penelope Joan Fritzer and Bartholomew Bland. However, drawn as they were from his radio storytelling, Shepherd wove elements of real life into his tales (such as names of some of the characters being found in his high school yearbook, having a younger brother Randy and Hammond being home to a Warren G. Harding Elementary School, a Cleveland Street, and a Hohlman Avenue) and certainly took artistic license in exaggerating any real-life events that may have served as seeds for his yarns. As Mark Skertic put it for the Chicago Sun-Times: [the city of] "Hohman doesn't really exist, but the sights, sounds and events Mr. Shepherd described happening there grew out of his experiences growing up in and around real-life Hammond, Ind."

The title of the novel is a play on the motto "In God We Trust", a foundational belief of the American Founding Fathers adopted by both the nation's coinage and paper currency in the 19th century. The tacked-on "all others pay cash" became a popular witticism in America in the early decades of the 20th century, commonly seen as a form of "cracker barrel philosophy" repudiating credit and checks as payment found on signs and carved placards hanging in bars, restaurants, and retail stores past its middle decades. There are 31 chapters in the book, each its own story. They are told by the fictional character Ralph, who has returned to his home town of Hohman as an adult, to his friend, Flick, who runs the bar where Ralph drinks away the day. The longer stories are linked by one- or two-page chapters in which Ralph and Flick discuss their childhood or the present state of Hohman, exchanges which trigger Ralph's next reminiscence.

The Film Adaptation

Shepherd had wrote and narrated many works, the most famous being the 1983 MGM feature film A Christmas Story, filmed at Cleveland, Ohio.

Four of the short stories ("Duel in the Snow", "The Counterfeit Secret Circle Member Gets the Message", "My Old Man and the Lascivious Special Award That Heralded the Birth of Pop Art", and "Grover Dill and the Tasmanian Devil") were used as the basis for the 1983 film A Christmas Story. Ralphie was portrayed by then twelve year old Peter Billingsley. He was the very first actor to audition for Ralphie in A Christmas Story, immediately impressing director Bob Clark, but they searched nationwide for months before calling him back months later, assuming he hadn't got the part. He nailed the audition, with Clark reportedly saying, "Oh, that's the guy," but the extensive search and his wait for a callback made him think he'd missed out.

The film is presented in a series of vignettes, with narration provided by the adult Ralphie Parker (voiced by Shepherd himself). As a 9-year-old boy living in Northwest Indiana around the late 1930s or early 1940s, all Ralphie wants for Christmas is a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle. But everytime he mentioned he wanted a gun for Christmas, they responded,

"You'll shoot your eye out!"

A Christmas Story was released by MGM/UA Entertainment Co. on November 18, 1983, and received positive reviews from critics. The film grossed $19 million on a $3 million budget. Filmed partly in Canada, the film earned two Canadian Genie Awards in 1984. Widely considered a holiday classic in the United States and Canada, it has been shown in a marathon annually on TNT since 1997 and on TBS since 2004 titled "24 Hours of A Christmas Story", consisting of 12 consecutive airings of the film from the evening of Christmas Eve to the evening of Christmas Day. Due to television airings and home video release, A Christmas Story has become widely popular and is now an annual Christmas special. The film was produced and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). The rights to the film were acquired by Turner Entertainment Co. after Ted Turner's purchase of MGM's pre-1986 film library. Subsequently, Time Warner purchased Turner Entertainment in 1996 and currently holds rights to the film as Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). On December 24, 2007, AOL ranked the film their #1 Christmas film of all time. IGN ranked the film the top holiday-themed film of all time.In 2012, a Marist Poll named the film the favorite holiday film in the US. In 2019, a poll commissioned by Tubitv and conducted by Onepoll also ranked the film Best Holiday Movie Ever. A Christmas Story received a nomination for Best Digital – Comedy, and won Best Digital – Animation/Family at the 2023 Golden Trailer Awards. They were plans of sequels however Jean declined a sequel for A Christmas Story. He felt sequels often missed the point, but he did create more Parker tales for TV and film, capturing his essence in the adult Ralphie narration. However, in 1994 a sequel was made this time with a different cast.

My Summer Story (considered sequel to A Christmas Story) stars young Kieran Culkin as Ralphie and Shepherd narrates as Adult Ralphie in the film. The film takes place in the summer of 1941, after the events of A Christmas Story, which took place in December 1940. It has several plotlines, one each for 10-year-old Ralphie Parker, his father, and his mother, followed by a recurring subplot involving him and his dad on a fishing trip, that proves frequently fruitless until a single night when all fish are caught. This also feeds a needless obsession in Ralphie's 7-year-old brother Randy, much to Mrs. Parker's nerve. My Summer Story was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on September 23, 1994. The film received mixed reviews and was a box office bomb, grossing $71,000 against a $15 million budget. This film would be Shepherd's final narration as adult Ralphie. Shepherd died in a hospital in Fort Myers, Florida in 1999, of natural causes.

A Christmas Story continued to be a hit Christmas flick, it spawned more sequels and adaptations without Shepherd. The PBS series American Playhouse produced two subsequent television film adaptations featuring the same characters, also with Shepherd narrating: The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski and Ollie Hopnoodle's Haven of Bliss. The latter of these was set in the early 1950s with a now-teenaged Ralphie and his friends and family. Shepherd had previously created The Phantom of the Open Hearth and The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters for the same network. A Christmas Story 2 is a direct sequel to the film, which ignores the references and events of My Summer Story and was released direct-to-video in 2012. The film received negative reviews from crtics and fans. In 2000, a stage play adaptation of A Christmas Story was written by Philip Grecian. In November 2012, A Christmas Story: The Musical, based on the film, opened on Broadway. Written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (music and lyrics) and Joseph Robinette (book), the musical opened to positive reviews. The run ended on December 30 the same year. The musical was directed by John Rando with choreography by Warren Carlyle and featured Dan Lauria as Jean Shepherd. The musical received Tony Award nominations for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (Robinette), and Best Original Score (Music or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre. The musical was then adapted for television as the three hour A Christmas Story Live!, which aired on the Fox network in the United States on December 17, 2017. Peter, the original Ralphie, became the co-producer of the musical and the Fox Live television adaptation.

The house from the movie is now display as a tourist attraction and museum. The lamp from the film is now 40-foot tall Leg lamp statue in Chickasha, Oklahoma, March 2025. Almost 40 years since the films debut, A Christmas Story came back for another sequel.

Peter Billingsley would return as Ralphie, this time he is all grown up, in his 40s, married with two kids, staying with his widow mother for the holidays. The film stars half of the cast from the 1983 film returning now all grown up and revisiting the past. This time, Billingsley is the narrator of the film. The film was released in the United States via streaming in November 2022, on HBO Max by Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming & Interactive Entertainment and received positive reviews.

Source

Wikipedia

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-15383353/christmas-story-peter-billingsley-unrecognizable.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-christmas-story-fun-facts-trivia