A Christmas Story: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music, and more. We're your two red rider BB guns of redundant, ridiculous remembrances. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Tug and we're gonna shoot your eye out with facts. Putting the proverbial horse ahead of the card. There, But that's right. We are talking about one of the single greatest entries in the holiday movie can in the comedy So Nice. They broadcast it twice, and then three times and then twelve times at Christmas. That's right, I'm talking about the Christmas Story. What do you say about the Christmas Story? Man? It's so good? Is it? There? I should know this, it's the right now. Okay, we're gonna find out live on air. It's Christmas Christmas? Oh wait, I did know that? Actually? Okay, Okay, great, that's right. We're talking about a Christmas story, a movie zo beloved and ubiquitous. We completely forgot which article is appended to it. But that does not diminish my love for it. It's one of my dad's favorite movies of all times, A big dad movie. I think could see themselves in the Old Man in this movie. Yeah, fond memories of just leaving this on a loop on its loop every year and all out, just wandering into the living room and catching twenty minutes of it at a clip. Um, you know what, I can barely remember if I've ever actually sat down and watched this start to finish. I think i've I've definitely seen it all dozens of times, but never such as we will cover. I don't think they started the loop thing until the late nineties, so at some point in the early nineties we sat down and watched it. But yeah, I mean it's preferred format is, of course watching it twenty minutes at the climb for straight hours. But you like it though, right? I love this movie. I love how begrudgingly sentimental it is, like it gives it a heart without the saccerin aftertaste. And it's also like a really weird movie, like why is there a bunny suit? Why is there a leg lamp? Why does the kid of yellow eyes? Even though I don't some of the iconography in it, like watching that watching it back, you're like, this is borderline Lynch in like, like, yeah, if you put all of that with like disquieting ambient industrial music under it instead of Schmaltz, it is a David Lynch movie. You know, the dogs running through the house. Yeah, even at the Chinese restaurant at the end, it's like a razor head when they chopped the head off the duck. Yes, exactly. Oh, that's so funny on the creepy Santa. I mean, you're right, but I mean it's so great. And you know, the phrase a major award is huge in my family lexicon. I mean for gil a that must be Italian, that that joke kills every time. Incredible success ratio. And you know what, this movie probably introduced a whole generation, multiple generations in fact, of kids to the concept of safety goggles when they play with their BB guns. Kids play with BB guns anymore? Did you have a BB gun to video games? Completely? No? Yeah, no, I don't. I don't. We went paintball on a couple of times, but that's much more more. We were a big lawnmowing family and so like it really pissed us all off when they would end up in the lawn and go spinging out of a riding mower at high speeds. So but yeah, this movie is just like you're grumpy misanthropic uncle who complains about everything but then gives the most touching toast at a Christmas dinner. I don't know where that analogy comes from. I don't have an analog for that in my real life. But just go with it. You have me. That's that. You know what? That's true? That is true. Well, from the cultishly adored Hepcat radio personality who authored the source material, to the director who went from a Christmas themed slasher to a raunchy sex comedy to this. The weird also ran beverage that inspired the iconic leg lamp. Here's everything you didn't know about a Christmas Story. Jean Parker Shephard Jr. Was born in one on the South side of Chicago before moving to Indiana, specifically Hammond, Indiana, where he graduated from Hammond High School, and that's where a Christmas Story is ostensibly set. He fictionalizes Hammond as homan In in all of his stories, and all of his short stories are basically drawn from his life growing up in the Southeast neighborhood of Hammond called Hessville. His early jobs included mail carrier in a steel mill, which is the most Midwest ever amateur radio DJ. He was a Ham radio enthusiast, returned, returned to it in his doted years and uh, I believe once said once a Ham, always a Ham of his time and uh. He served in the U. S. Army Signal Corps during w W two, the Big One. UH. He began working in broadcast radio following his service. This is five on w j O B and Hammond. He had time in the radio in Toledo and Cincinnati and a brief stint in Philadelphia before landing at w o R Radio in New York City in n where most people probably know him from. UH. He was just famous for being one of these like fast talking radio basically a Garrison Keeler. If he was like a beat nick era guy, we could leave sarcastic. Would just ramble and tell these long stories about his his child and everything, and do weird stuff like He had this stunt where he made up a book called I Libertine because he was talking about how easy it was to manipulate the best seller list, so he made up a fake book. He made up a fake author named Frederick R. Ewing and mobilized enough people listeners of his show to actually land this fictional book on the New York Times best seller list. People would call in, call in and ask for it, or called books. Basically, he was encouraging people to call into book distributors and like bookstores and be like, do you have I Libertine by Frederick Arguing? And the title of his his biography that was written about him is uh, excelsior you fathead, which was a phrase that if you, if someone asked who published it, which the bookstores naturally would that you were supposed to tell them excelsior, you fathead. So enough people, based on the strength of is called into bookstores and then subsequently those bookstores called publishers and called distributors that this book solely through word of mouth ended up on the best seller list, which was the entire point of the of the bit was what he was trying to prove. So such was his his influence the fifties. Yeah right. Shepherd was wildly influential for his improvisitory pseudo beat poet stream of conscious siness radio works. Steely Dan Co founder. Donald Fagan paid tribute to him and a piece in Slate in two thousand eight, and Jerry Seinfeld said on a Seinfeld commentary track that he quote learned how to be funny from Gene Shepherd, and Shepherd was occasionally described as the inventor of talk radio, which I guess, given all we know about him so far, kind of makes sense because W. R. Stint lasted two decades, which is astonishing because I have never heard of him before this. Uh, And usually he started every episode with fifteen minutes of him reading bizarre news stories before segan into improvised poetry and spields and short stories and just kind of whatever was on his mind. Really, and the jazz beat nick Tastemaker crowd cottoned onto him purely on the basis of his radio work because again, it really bore a lot of resemblance to kind of beat poetry improvisations. Yeah, do you ever listen to Ken Ordine. He's a he was a big Tom Waite s guy. He would he had this thing called word jazz where he would like, there's like stuff of him on Steve Allen on The Tonight Show, where Steve Allen's like playing jazz piano and Ken Nordine's just kind of like narrating noir stuff. Yeah, it's a lot of like hey, although like drunk early drunk Tom Waite stuff before he gets into beefheart territory of like um, you know, uh, when he's doing like emotional weather report and some of those like like really heavily spoken word things are Ken Nordeen was a huge guy for him, so such was the milieu of the time very interesting. He raised money for John Cassavetti's movies and he euled you ezed, Jack Carolac when he died in nineteen sixty nine. He's buried in Lowell, Massachusetts, near where I grew up. And he was reportedly the inspiration for Shel Silverstein writing the song that Johnny Cash later made famous a boy named Sue Uh. Supposedly, when Steve Allen retired as the first host of The Tonight Show in of it, he suggested Jean Shepherd as a replacement. So a storied passed for this man who wrote the stories that Christmas Story was based on. Also, the jazz nerd me would be remiss if I didn't mention that at some point Shepherd became friends with legendary bassist and composer Charles Mingus. Uh. Mingus had a kind of one of his many pet projects with his own music was combining written word and music and poetry. Um. There's a record called The Weary Blues that's him doing the music and Langston Hughes reading his poetry. Uh. And he wanted Joni Mitchell to adapt some of T. S. Eliott's poems uh later in his life, and that's what led to the Journey album um, where she does Mingus compositions. So before the All, which is just that, there's a there's a Mingus record called The Clown, which has this truly horrifying cover art of Mingus as like Pagliacci. Um, he looks more like John Wayne Gacy than Paga. But there's a track on there called The Clown that is just UM. Mingus loved the radio show and just had Jean Shepherd come down and improvised this narration around this, uh, this jazz tune. Give me a thousand guesses. I never would have guessed that this was the gen this was the mind that birth Christmas story. Alright, even everything I said about what a weird movie it is, Yeah, I guess it kind of makes sense. Well. Beginning in June, Jean Shepherd started pouring his radio stories over to Playboy magazine for publication, honing in on those that depicted his childhood in Hammond, Indiana, which he fictionalized as you said, as the town of Holman and Playboy founder Hugh have To reportedly said that Shel Silverstein encouraged his friend Jeane Shepherd to turn his radio stories into pros, but initially Jean Shepherd resisted, saying that he wasn't a writer. U Hugh Havefter would beg to differy published twenty three of Shepherd's stories in Playboy, and he often would play a Christmas story late at night in the Playboy mansion, which I find weirdly horrifying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shel Silverstein war Jean Shepherd down by recording the stories that he broadcast on the radio and transcribing them for him before us sitting down with him and trying to work them into a proper short story. Incredibly touching display of friendship and belief in his creative power. I think that's wonderful. We should all have a friend like that. A Christmas story loosely throws together five stories that Shepherd had written for radio and published in Playboy and also in his novels. Four of these stories were collected in Shepherd's six novel in Godly Trust, All Others Pay Cash, which is a great title. The fifth story the story of the old Man's War with the neighbor's dog, the Bumpus Hounds. Again the lexicon of this movie The Bumpus Hounds that appeared in a later book that he published in seventy Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories a gift for titles. He really does are saying whether these stories are fact or fiction is not really for us to do here. He famously resisted any attempt by people to pin down what exactly was real and what was embellished. There's a rabid fan base for this guy online, and a lot of people have successfully by doing weird stuff like looking up Hammond, Indiana high school yearbooks, pinned down specific characters from these stories as existing. Um His father was confirmed by the ninety Federal Census record to be a cashier at the Boorden Milk Company, and his younger brother was indeed named Randy, so at least at least that much was true. It suck. It's so good. Uh, transfer, I don't have a segway for this, the film's director, New Orleans native of Bob Clark, he grew up poor and initially majored in philosophy at college, scoring a football scholarship in Michigan, where he played quarterback, and then he moved on to the University of Miami, both of which are football schools, where he studied theater and later turned out offers to play professional football. His film career began somewhat inauspiciously with a nineteen sixty six adaptation of The Emperor's New Clothes. Starting on the decline John Carradine, by the early seventies he was doing horror films nine Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things. But it was in ninety eight that driving around Miami on the way to a date, he heard Jean Shepherd on the radio telling the story of Flick being triple dog dared into putting his tongue in a metal pole in the dead of winter. He listened to that story so intently while circling the block repeatedly that he was forty five minutes late for his date, who did not appreciate this. Ah, he had told himself then and there, according to this great vanity fair oral history of the film, I will do a movie of this man's work, and it would take twelve years to come to fruition. According to The New York Post, Shepherd had already turned down several offers to film his stories, including one from Disney when he was approached by Clark in nineteen seventy three, So five years after hearing out of the radio and ten years before the movie came out. Can you imagine if Disney made a Christmas story that would really suck? Yeah? No, I can't three. Wasn't Catzenberg in the Power there? I don't think Yetberg? When did Jeffrey? No, we're not doing this. Stay focused. Happy Place, Happy Place, Happy Place, Happy Place. Clark did make a very influential nineteen four film called Black Christmas, which is generally considered one of the first slasher movies, hugely influential on on the films that would follow, especially Halloween. John Carpenter has talked about what an influence that movie was on on Halloween, not just in the holiday title. Funny to me that the Christmas Story guy went from Black Christmas to his other biggest film, a film he co wrote, produced, and directed, the gross out comedy Porky's very personal produc looked for him right, apparently about loosely based on like the Shepherd stuff, loosely based on his own youth. That movie has been I think so eclipsed by its descendants, most notably American Pie and everything that, all the American Pie imitators, that it is easy to forget that that was the third most successful movie of two briefly one of the top grossing films of all time in the US, and also briefly the most successful comedy in film history. Wow. And that got him the juice to get Christmas Story adapton. Uh. He either I've heard various accounts the studios either wanted him to do Porkies, to which he eventually did do, or another horror movie. And he said, Okay, if you'll give me money to do a Christmas Story. So MGM turn their pockets inside out, because, as we will discuss later, they were not in a good place in the mid eighties, gave him four point four million for this um and according to book on the Making of Christmas Story by Cassine Gaines was so eager to make this movie that he gave up his director's fee and tossed a hundred and fifty k of his own money into the budget. Shepherd himself, along with Bob Clark and Shepherd's third wife, Lee Brown, wrote the screenplay. By this point, Shepherd had left w R in nine, and Uh would later be openly contemptuous of his diving radio, calling it just another gig because he liked anything that he's done. No, he didn't like anything at all. Another thing that Jean Shepard was openly contemptuous of was the film's title. He said, I fought it all the way down the line. He's talking to the New York Post. It was based on a story called Red Rider Nails the Cleveland Street Kid, and I could accept that was too long for a marquee. But my original title was Santa's Revenge. That's like, that is a good title. That's why he liked the Christmas slasher movies so much, Shepherd continued. We argued over dozens of titles, then finally settled on Boys Life After the magazine m It turned out that Steven Spielberg owned that. Of course he did it was the original title of E T and he refused to give it up. Finally, bios Moses and this is what causes water gates. You settle on one that nobody can get mad at, but nobody likes. Incredible quote. It was a quote machine jeans Yeah. All years on radio free associating, I did not know that was the original title for the shooting. Title for et Was it a real working title or was it like a like a dummy title like Titanic was planet Ice? So it might have been. It might have been the code name for the shooting. You can, I guess you can find this script up there so under the name of Boy's Life. The I. R. Y. L. Shepherds lived in various places around him and Indiana or in the nineteen thirties, they moved into their house at twenty nine oh seven Cleveland Street, which is a slightly over one thousand square foot bungalow dating from the early part of the century, and there is a carving in the attic containing the autographs seventeen years old old Jean Shepherd February nine and fifteen years old Randall Randy Shepherd February The only reason I mentioned that is because they scouted twenty cities for production, finally setting on Cleveland for the exteriors and Toronto for the interiors. They did film during the winter in Ohio, but there was no snow that year, and consequently they had to import snow in from ski resorts hundreds of miles away or use snowblowers to cover up the trees. And at that time, apparently the technology was not great and they had to run these things for twenty four hours to get enough snow to shoot in um And then when the weather warmed up and neither of those became options, they used potato flakes, an old Hollywood trick. Oh yeah, dried potato flakes, that's what they used to use on TV as well, or shredded vinyl to dress the sets, both of which don't particularly sound very The e p a friendly uh and then in even worse in the scene with ralph and his brother of fleeing Scott Scott Farcas in the scene where Ralphie and his brother and friends are fleeing the bully, Scott Farcas keeping that firefighters foam that they are trucking through. So man, remember when the Ohio River caught fire that probably wasn't related to the filming of this movie, but it also probably didn't help. Supposedly, the decision to film in Cleveland came down to the department store Higgbie's, which is a real life department store that allowed them to film there at nights and left its Christmas decorations up for them, as did a lot of the other parts of the town they shot around. I always assumed that was a fake department store because it sounds like such a made up name, but it is real. Uh. The place that Higgbie's used to be is in the center of town. It's now a giant casino in Cleveland, where I've actually been on several occasions. It's actually kind of cool. You can sort of tell it was an old department store because there's these huge atriums and massive escalators, which might be the ones that uh Ralphie and his family went up on. The house that plays the family's home in the film In the Role of Itself was built, and it was auctioned off on eBay in two thousand four for a hundred and fifty grand. You can't get a damn studio apartment in Cleveland for a hundred fifty grand new. The new owners restored like the aside into the Lamb's house that's been like vacant for years. That every every two years, like clockwork. When I when I was working in news, that that house would pop up again. People will be like, you can buy Buffalo Bill's house. And everyone was like, no, thank you. Wait, really I've never heard that. Uh, oh, I was wrong. It did sell. It's sold last year. The three story Victorians sold for two hundred ninety thousand Perreopolis, Pennsylvania, just an hour from Pittsburgh. You gonna turn into an airbnb. Well funny you should mention that because the new owners of the Christmas Story House restored it, built a museum across the street, and uh, they have turned it into a foundation that preserves the house in the neighborhood. They sell a two night stay there around the holidays every year and funnel the proceeds back into preserving this historic home. And they sell a lot of Christmas Story stuff and a lot of the trivia we found out from this episode comes from their site. Oh Cleveland loves that house. Like I was in Cleveland in the spring and like that's very high on all the like Cleveland tourism stuff like year round, like people flock out to this little suburb and go check out this house. And yeah, they redid the interiors match the way it was in the movie, even though those were filmed on sets in Toronto. Became a designated landmark in Cleveland and has welcomed over a million guests since opening in two thousand and six. And did you hear about this? There was some news story earlier this year about the guy who played Grover Dill, who's like the little toady kid who pals around with the bully. Uh. He was trying to get consortium of ex Christmas Story actors together to buy it, I guess. But then I'm kind of unclear as to what happened, but he got into some kind of physical fight with the current owner of the house. Like Outside of the House would have loved that. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, I mean it's perfect. I mean, this is such a dysfunctional family, it's such a perfect story for it. But yeah, like TMZ did several stories on this, so I'm not really sure what the latest is with the ownership of that house. But interestingly, the actor who played Randy, who plays Ralphie's little brother. He actually moved in to the Christmas Story House decades later, in so this would have been twenty three years after the movie. The actor's name is Ian Petrella, and he moved into the house after quitting acting to pursue graphic design, and he befriended the owner of the house and asked if he could reside there for a few months, and he moved into the third floor and gave tours and host and beat in Greece with visitors. Brilliant idea. Because you're adding value to this guy's house, you can charge some extra bucks to the tours because you're getting an actual tour from you know, Ralphie. I'm honestly shocked. More places don't have that as like a bit like they're like actor here, Yeah, move back into this place and give tours and it'll be like a symbiotic relationship. Yeah, free room and board and maybe even some some extra kickback to I don't know. I thought you're gonna say, maybe some mouth stuff. Um, keeping that as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more. Too much information after these messages. A neat trick that Clark pulled with the child actors was to cut the floors out of the set so that the camera would be down at the kid's height around four ft looking up at all of the adults um, rather than the perspective of the adults looking down at the kids. So you are literally in the kids uh perspective for these movies and Charlie Brown style. Yes, Muppet Babies an unheralded influence on this film. Um, the director of Black Christmas, frequently cited Muppet Babies is one of the most uh moving on a fun way to tell which scenes are filmed where. When they're filmed at the Cleveland House, the drapes are open in the living room, but on the sound stage that drapes are closed, which is funny because in some of those scenes that they did film in Toronto, you can see one of Toronto's trademark red trolley's driving past in the in the background. UM Victoria School in St. Catherine's, Ontario, Canada, where the school exteriors were shot, along with the tree lot scene. As mentioned earlier, this film was made on a shoestring budget, which actually turned out in their favor because in the DVD commentary, Ralphie actor Peter Billingsley noted that the studio was barely involved and that that they had a ton of freedom working on it. He said, unlike other studio films where you couldn't change a word of the script. The studio was like, ah, you're making that weird radio play Christmas movie. Do what you want, just don't let it cost too much. But the film is remarkably period accurate. The cars, phones, the d coda ring, the radio um there was I think Peter Billingsley talks about at one point he was like talking to a woman and he mentioned he was an actor and he was like, yeah, I was in a Christmas story and she's like, you can't be, you're too young. That was filmed in the forties, neglecting to realize that they I guess the color film. They would not have been shooting in color in the nineteen FOURTIESZ was thirty nine. Yeah, that's true, that's true. That's true. I stand corrected. Not the first time Wizard of Oz will come up in this. One of the things that was not real was the life Moooie soap bar that was made of wax. But it was a real brand. Yes, yes, yes, sorry, but they did not put actual soap in that kid's mouth, which is funny because, as we'll talk about in a second, they put these kids through the damn bringer. Billingsley said his real life mom actually used that that punishment a lot, and Clark chimes in and he's like, yes, life Booie was known for being the worst tasting. All Right, we gotta talk about sweet sweet. Peter Billingsley, the kid had played Ralphie. He was apparently the very first kid out of thousands that they auditioned for the role, he told BuzzFeed. In director Bob Clark said, for whatever reason that I was the first kid he saw. But he thought, well, geez, you can't just hire the first person you see. I read. They also auditioned Seawan Aston from The Goonies and Will Wheaton, who played the kid from Star Trek The Next Generation, Um Wesley Crusher. That's the Crusher, Thank you, um. Peter Billingsley had worked as an actor since he was two and a half, and at the time he was known mostly for a series of Hershey's Syrup commercials in which he played Metsi Arvin, but he also started in some big Hollywood productions in the early eighties, including the movie Paternity opposite Burt Reynolds, and also an ensemble comedy called Honky Tonk Freeway, and as a correspondent for the variety show Real People, which I am not familiar. I was gonna say, I thought you'd be familiar with the most of them. But Peter Billingsley is interested in me also because he's related to Beaver Cleaver's mom from Leave It to Beaver, Barbara Billingsley. I think he's like the cousin of her husband or something. But that's notable to me, not only as a mid century media obsessive, but also because Barbara Billingsley, Beaver Cleaver's mom, has my birthday December. I love how they got Peter Billingsley to play the elf ming ming in Elf. They kept kept him on the Christmas He is he is. He is apparently tight with um Vince Vaughn and those guys. He works as a producer on their films. Yeah. Moving on, Uh, sweet sweet Peter Billingsley. It was really cold, he told Puzzfeed, shooting in Cleveland and Toronto in the winter, and the child labor laws back then, if you didn't live in California, you didn't have reciprocity with the States laws, and I think Ohio and Canada were very lax, so you worked a lot of hours. And while we're on the topic of abusing kid actors, for the scene in which Ralphie imagines himself fighting Black Bart's gang with his Red Rider BB gun, he spits tobacco juice a couple of times, which was real. The prop man, either not thinking or not caring, just gave the twelve year old Peter billings some red man chewing tobacco chaw for those in the know. Uh, And within minutes the twelve year old actor was sweating. And then he said we shut down for an hour or so he's talking to Vanity Fair when I just had to lie down on the couch. I guess after this they realized that maybe giving a twelve year old chewing tobacco was a bad idea, and for the rest of the scene they gave him ground up raisins to chew on. Yeah, not a work. Uh. And in case you were wondering for the iconic hub cap scene, Billingsley told BuzzFeed, Oh, they had me safe on all the takes. I think we looped in the word fudge on top of it so you could get the mouth to curl to the continent of K instead of D. I had been in Hollywood for a long time at that point. It wasn't the first time I'd heard it or probably set it. And yes, he still has a lot of the stuff from the film, including the pink bunny suit and the rhinestone cowboy outfit that he fights off Black Bart's gang with. He also still has the red Rider BB gun and the glasses that he broke, which were his own in real life. Um, I mean that baby gun. You know what I'm gonna say, but I'm gonna say it anyway, belongs in the museum. Uh, the museum. V there was a real life Black Bart. I just wanted this this There's one reason I'm mentioning this. He was an Englishman who came to the States of this family. He served in the Union Army and moved out west started a mine in Montana. Some men from the Wells Fargo Bank offered to buy his claim and he were fused, at which point they choked off the water supply to the mine. He wrote in a letter to his wife of this incident, I am going to take steps and proceed to become a famous outlaw specializing in robbing wells Fargo stage coaches. So I just had to completely mention that dude's career and the incredible line I am going to take steps, and then I don't think she ever heard from him again. That was like the last she didn't hear about him until he was in the news for robbing stuff. Can you imagine that being the last thing you hear from your spouse and the next time you see them, they're they're bank robber rules. Moving on up the familial tree, Jack Nicholson showed interest in playing the role of the old Man, but Bob Clark pushed for Darren McGavin because I believe largely Jack Nicholson was making like a mill two mill or movie at this point. But still, did you turn down Nicholson? He would have eaten the This was like three years removed from really like three years removed from the Shining too, so he would have been bringing that energy to it. Yeah, he improvised that string of of profanity in the furnace scene. Um, he told give us a taste, uh by the Favorites when it comes back up, you know. Uh, the first draft had actual swearing in it, he told a Cleaveland newspaper. But then we came up with the idea of using nonsense words for the swearing. I had a great time doing that. The English knows he's the English, the audience knows he's cursing a blue streak, but it's just harmless noise. Conversely, the jibberish that Ralphie is yelling when he's beating up Scott Farcas was scripted, so the yin and yang of movie gibberish there. What is cursing a blue streak? You know, going blue tonight? Why? Why is blue synonymous with bad words? You know, Jordan, that's a great question, because there's a blue dot to cover up nudity, and you know, movies and TV shows and stuff. So I don't know why blue is such a I thought red red is a very suggestive color. Blue is the warmest color. The Oxford English Dictionary contains at eighteen ninety reference to the phrase blue stories. There you go, as as nineteen hundred. Let us propose to celebrate Chaucer by publicly reading some of his bluest productions. Wow. And then there's the Blue Laws, which prohibits selling or buying or selling alcohol on I think Sundays from Massachusetts. Shion this just no idea why that it dates back to like yeah, like Middle English, But no one is able to tell me why that. Any etymology experts listening tweeted us blue is the Warmest color hashtag, hashtag Christmas story, hashtag blue is the Worm A Christmas kellor A Jean Sheppard felt that Darren mcgavian got the character exactly right. One of the few things Jean Sheppard liked about this movie, apparently, he said, I saw the old man as a guy who grew up hustling pool games at the age of twelve and supporting himself at the age of fourteen, and that was eerily close to Darren McGavin's actual life story. His parents divorced when he was eleven years old, and he was placed under the custody of his father, who immediately boarded him with strangers while he worked as a traveling salesman, and McGavin ran away and was subsequently sent to Catholic boarding school, which you ran away from again at the age of sixteen and lived as a runaway under a wharf in San Francisco Good Lord. Director Bob Clark would later say, I love Jack Nicholson, but thank god he didn't end up getting the part, because Darren is the old Man. Yes. Indeed, my favorite detail about this character is that he's notably not one of the three adults in the film that Ralphie mentions the red writer bb Gun too, but he just got his son the exact Christmas gift he wanted anyway, which gets back to what I said about the whole the the the grumpy uncle who then on Christmas Day gives the most beautiful, touching speech. The whole movie is this kind of terrifying figure that really you don't see a lot of redeeming qualities for. And then the look in his face when Ralphie goes behind the couch at the tree or whatever it is and pulls the president out. It's very sweet. It's very very sweet. One thing that the Old Man is not is a period accurate sports fan. In the beginning of the film, he becomes irate after reading in the paper that the White Sox traded Bullfrog. But the White Sox never traded Bill Bullfrog the trick They released him on September, but the film is ostensibly set in the late thirties or early forties, which would make that sports pronouncement six years an acronistic. He also refers to the Chicago Bears is the Tear of the Midway, which is not their nickname is the Monsters of the Midway. There are all sorts of confusing signs about when this movie is supposed to take place, and it makes me wonder if it was intentional just to keep it vague and kind of throw people off the trail. Uh. First, Ralphie's mom mentions a Bears versus Packers game which happened in and then there's the little or Finanni Dakota pin, which we'll talk more about later, shown in a scene which is the same model that came out in And there's a calendar in the Parker family kitchen that has December one on a Friday, which took place in nineteen thirty nine. So make of that what you will. And I don't know if this is going to ruin anyone's enjoyment of the film. But according to the film's shooting script, the old man's name is Frank, but scans there's been a long rumor that his name is hal because of the exchange with the neighbor where he says that damn how you say you won? That he's actually saying damn hell. According to the shooting script, no one in history has ever said that damn hell? Are there last names ever mentioned in this movie? Me? The Parkers? I don't remember that at all, But while researching this, I kept saying that they're the Parker family. I don't know. That's a blind spot in my research. Look that up. While I read this, Clark saw the actress who plays the boy's mom, me Linda Dylan in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He said that was all he needed to cast her as the mother. That is our second Spielberg alien movie reference. The Parkers is their name, Yes, tremendous Frank Parker. You heard it here? First? Uh for the scene in the Chinese restaurant Chop Suey Palace in Toronto where that's actually set her surprise when the duck comes out, when the head with its head intact and they all start singing, that was real. Um. They intentionally gave her the wrong script pages that day, so she was baffled and surprised and the new by all that happening. It's so great she clearly cannot stop laughing at it. Well, and then they take out the accent, just oh yeah, she's the streams. Yeah yeah, you can tell that that is not active. It's like a Titanic when Rose gets in the cold water for the first time and she lets out a yelp. That is that you cannot act that that was a real sound, like that yelp when the duck gets its head chopped off. Tweet at us at duck getting its head chopped off. In the movie, the Chinese restaurant is called the Bowling Chop Suey Palace because there's an old sign for bowling out front with the W burnt out. This came from a real life experience by assistant director Ken Goosh when he was a child. His mother had accidentally mistaken a bowling alley with a burnt out W for a Chinese restaurant when driving around looking for a place to eat, which I think it's hilarious. I love that of Ralphie's mother. Shepherd said, she's 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. Um. Melinda Dillon is so interesting. She began a career as a coach check girl at Second City, the improv comedy theater in Chicago, popularly known as a early breeding ground for s I know, and she would start performing there. She was in the original Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. She was nominated for Tony and That, And she got two Academy Award nominations, one for Close Encounters and again for playing opposite Paul Newman in Absence of Malice. And she is just like not as much of a household name as you would really think considering all of these things, all of these roles that she's been in, And now for the rest. Zach Ward, who plays the yellow eyed bully Scott Farcas and his little Tody Grover Dill played by you know Anya, originally had each other parts i e. Dill was the bully and Farcus the tody, which would have been true at a Shepherd's book and the stories. But when they got onto set, Bob Clark took one look at them and swapped them. It was like you get his lines and you get his lines. It was the jokes was to be that the bully was tiny and it's a visual Why would that be in a book like Yeah? Um, and I has a great bit about auditioning for Bob Clark. He goes, I went into audition and he asked me to do two crazy things. So first I acted like a rock star are I was into van Hamma men. And then for the second crazy thing, I farted really loud. He told this to vanity fair, ladies and gentlemen. Um zach Ward wins today's lawsuit category. That's scart Scott Farcas Sky can't it's gotta intentionally be What the hell kind of a name is scuttu? I mean it's a perfect name him. Yeah again, this guy Geene Shepherd's gotta got a gift for for titles and names. Um zach Ward sued Warner Brothers and a toy company in two thousand eleven for an action figure of his character from the movie Uh, dropping the suit in two thousand twelve when it was revealed that a he was never entitled to merchandising rights in the first place because of a clausing his contract when he signed it and be the toy used a generic phase in its design going back to two thousand six. So then that same year he tried to sue them again over a Christmas story board game, playing cards and calendar that he had been presented with two years prior at the annual Christmas story charity fundraising convention in Cleveland. Uh. That suit was quickly settled, But there are some astoundingly mean things that the toy company Nika Necka said about him in the press um, which like what they call him a baby or something? I hang on, I mean, this kid's story is devastating. He tells the story in a twentieth anniversary mini documentary about the making of a Christmas Story And he was, I guess making money for his single mom as a child actor, and he paid for everything in the household. And one year for Christmas, she took him to the mall and he had to pick out a sweater that he paid for and then she wrapped it up and gave it to him for Christmas, which is so sad. Jesus, Yes, Nika Neca whatever I pronounced it. They call it a long, exceedingly silly case by a plaintiff who had a bit role as a thirteen year old in the well known film and then they said he has grown up to become a professional plaintiff. Ouch. Yeah, murdered murdered in court filings by a companied by by a toy company. Well, now we've got to talk about Flick, who's played by Scott Schwartz. He's the I mean, he will forever be the kid who got his tongue stuck to a pole. What else needed enough? Yeah? Uh? The said tongue suck to a flagpole scene was created with a plastic pole that they drilled the tiny hole into which is rigged up to a vacuum so that I would actually suction people's tongues into this little hole in the ball. And it was popular with the boys on the set, and they all took turns sticking their tongue into the air hole to hit their tongues if they're lucky. Uh. Scott Schwartz, the kid who played Flick, had to shoot the scene twice after they accidentally underdeveloped the film on the first shoot, and at one point Dr Bob Clark, who was so annoyed with flicks constant breaking on the set, called lunch while the suction was on, leaving him stuck there. So all the scenes of him like when the teacher looks out the classroom window and he's just like flailing around. Yeah, that's exactly well. This was because they brought all the Clark Bottle these kids up to Canada and and basically stuck and and Cleveland. They were roomed in a hotel in the in the Stafford's Hotel in downtown Cleveland for the shoot. And he brought him to Canada so that they could get this you know, the classic cool hand. Luke a bunch of guys, rowdy guys, chemistry um. And they would rehearse at his home in New Bedford, UM. And so, like I said, most of them were staying in this hotel together and being a bunch of ten to fourteen year old boys, they got up into all these shenanigans like chucking water balloons and and sodden rolls of toilet paper out of the windows of the top floors, would send hundreds of dollars of delivery food to people in the middle of the night. They woul ding dong ditch people pretending to be housekeepers. And Schwartz, who was fourteen, he was the oldest of all of them and had kind of he was a bit of a movie veteran. He'd been on the toy with Richard Pryor and Jackie and he was the ringleader, which is why Clark couldn't stand him by the time they went to film that scene. The kid's tongue suction to a proper pole. That's got to go down in the annals of mean treating kids poorly in films. I can't believe it wasn't Scott Farcas as the his braces are one of the many anachronisms in this film, presumably because he actually had them and they were not going to like pry them off his teeth just to ensure period accuracy. I didn't know that that's a whole Wikipedia thing that there's a lot I would go down. There's a lot of them. Uh, a little weird date things. I think mental floss has it. Uh. Jean Shepherd and his wife have a cameo as the couple in the Higbies department store, and Bob Clark is the aforementioned Swede, the family's neighbor. Um Shephard read the film's narration off screen so that Billingsley could act to it in real time, but he and Clark had a mildly contentious relationship while shooting. Apparently, Shepherd was constantly looking over Clark's shoulder and just making suggestions uh, and then would approach the actors after he yelled cut. He would come up to billings and be like, ralph, he's really like this, and then Clark would come back onto the set and be like, Gene, get away from the actors. But because this film was made a very tight budget, Clark had tightly storyboarded like every shot in it, and so he didn't have a lot of time for for Shepherd to be, you know, telling kids, Oh, you should do it again this way, like, you know, more true to what Ralphie was actually like. And then so Clark finally just barred him from that. Shepherd retired to Santa bell Island on Florida's Gulf Coast and passed away in two years after Turn to Broadcasting began its tradition of the twenty four hour Christmas story marathon. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information and just a moment. Jordan's tell us about the leg lamp. Yes, this would not be an episode of t M if we didn't go extremely in depth on the major award, the leg lamp. Jordan's it belongs in a museum segment. Yes, we gotta write a theme song for that so we can throw to it. I'm gonna get on that, hires John Williams Jenny Jenny Gett, friend of the Pot Paul Williams to write Jordan's it belongs in the museum segment. The leg lamp was first described in the nineteen sixty six Geen Shepherd's short story My Old Man and the Lascivias Special Award that heralded the birth of pop hearts. The title of the short story um and it actually appeared on screen before Christmas story in the PBS film The Phantom of the Open Hearth, which was broadcast in six I'm guessing that was a Geane Shepherd's story that was done for PBS or it had to PSYEA well, no, I mean it was a Jean Shepherd story. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Jean Shepherd was inspired to create the leg lamp by old print ads for the soft drink Knee High, which featured a woman's I can't remember. It's one or two. I think just one leg from the skirt down and the very simple copy drink knee high quality beverages. I looked that up online. You're right, it's it's the legs. The design of the leg lamp for a Christmas Stories the work of the production designer, Reuben Freed, and he told Cleveland Magazine in two thousand nine, I immediately thought of something I had seen in my mother's front room, which was a okay which grew up in a New Orleans Bronthel, which was sort of which was sort of a gold colored silk lamp shade pleaded with fringe around it. I thought of it immediately and never thought of anything else. I assume he means just while designing this leg lamp, just that classic big, ugly shape, and he drew a couple of quick sketches that Jean Shepard approved immediately, and they cast the real woman's leg to use for the design. It's like plaster cast, like Cynthia plaster cast. But if you are a loved one was cast for the design of the leg camp, he may be entitled to residuals from Ted Turner. Please get in contact Scott fucking sus Oh, poor Zach Ward, with your life here, we are just piling on. Clark didn't let any of the boys on the set see the lamp until they were shooting. So Ralphie's blazed eyed stare as his hand glides up the lamp was real. Was that his genuine reaction? Again, just like when they didn't let them, when they didn't tell any when the woman was going to be on the side. They were just like letting all these horn dog preteen boys see this fish net clad leg lamp. You get Peter Billingsley's genuine reaction of awe, Well, now I feel bad because my dad is a joke. Got me a leg lamp, I think, like a half size one Christmas one year, and I had it in my dorm because I thought it was a goofy looking thing. I might worry about the impression it gave off. I just thought it looked surreal. I thought I thought it was the birth of man Raith, the birth of pop art exactly. Rd Rob, who played Schwartz on the on the DVD, said I loved the leg lamp. That thing was sexy as hell. Inventors Digest in their feature on the leg lamp notes that is protected by Federal trademark Registration number three three six four five four two, with a separate registration for a leg lamp Christmas tree ornament, which I believe we do have an our home. Um. Three lamps were made for the movie, but none of them exist today, Jordan, I'm so sorry. God. There were of reports that all three were broken as part of filming, but a Canadian blog called Retrofestive wrote that one did survive and sat unused for years in the window of Martin Malivoir's special effects shop in Toronto. I have no idea what any of those words mean. It was eventually discarded in the early nineties, belongs in a museum, and the celebrate a Christmas Stories thirty anniversary in Cleveland's roles It's filming location, Terminal Tower in Cleveland's Public Square was turned into a giant leg lamp, complete with red garter. I need to see that. Uh. In less sexy prop categories, the little Orphan Annie Dakota ring featured in the movie is the nineteen forty model. Another thing that helps kind of established when the film is set. Uh. The design for that Dakota originally featured the words radio orphan anys S S and two cross skeleton keys. Now why could that have been a poor decision in the nineteen thirties, I wonder, Well, the S S did stand for secret society, but it took them until ninety nine to remove the words S S with a striking logo from a children's toy. I mean that the US didn't enter World Ward two in the December forty one, and maybe it was just something that that the connotation wasn't a strong Maybe I don't know. Well, the S S was Jan's which I only looked up to rebut your fact, so it sucks to your Asthmar. I'm shocked. I haven't hit you with that one yet. That's one of my favorite note context. This is Lord of the Flies, Ladies and gentlemen, friend of the pod. The Lord of the Flies popularity of a Christmas story has caused some people to believe that the secret messages at the end of the Orphan Andy radio shows, the first Late Afternoon children's serial based on a comic strip by hell Gray, existed to promote Oval team. That is not strictly true. The secret messages that the children would code were previews of the next week's adventure. But the guy who was the announcer for the show, Pierre Andre, would however, ramble on at least twice per show about Ovaltine, sometimes for up to three minutes, which was a big chunk of time for a fifteen minute show. And now, for all of those toy gun completists out there, yes, sadly, while the Red Rider model BB gun was manufactured in Plymouth, Michigan by the Daisy Company beginning in it never existed in real life as it does in the film. The company's Buck Jones model did have a compass and sundial in the stock, but those features were not included in the Red Rider model. And further, since Peter Billingsley was left handed, the compass and sundial were placed on the opposite side of the stock that they would have been in the actual toy because the world is not kind to the left handed. Oh he he still has that, he has that problem. I mentioned that earlier. I have goldfish memory. According to stan Cole, the film's editor MGM wanted a Christmas story cut down to ninety minutes so it could be turned around in a tight two hour showing window in theaters. Consequently, several scenes were cut from the film, among them fantasy scenes in which Ralphie rescues Flash Gordon from Ming the Merciless on the planet Mango, and another one where he rescues Santa from Black Bart's gang Um. And there are photos of Ralphie in that cowboy costume standing next to a dude playing Flash Gordon there. Really, it's really wild the film that the scenes don't exist anymore. But in the credits to the film you can see people credited as Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless. So that's why those are in there was because those were shot and then cut. The film opened the week before Thanksgiving and according to Clark, doubled its business over the long weekend. Roger Ebert, in his review wrote, my guess is either nobody will go to see it, or millions of people will go to see it. Unfortunately the former was right. The film was in theaters for basically half of November and half of December, but MGM pulled it just in time for Christmas, which Well mentioned that they were running out of money by the mid eighties. Business decisions like that probably a reason why uh it took a few years for the film to become a hit. It first appeared on television on HBO Friend of the Pod HBO, which is around the same time it was released on VHS, and it really took off with the advent of home video and home video bootlegging. People discovered it and began sharing it and buying it and ritually watching it, and it just sort of steadily grew, Peter Billings told Vanity Fair Coincidentally, around this time, MGM was falling apart and sold its film library to Ted Turner to help pay its debts, which is how a Christmas Story ended up on Turner's Superstation cable channel, where it was his idea to run it annually. He might have been taking inspiration from another MGM hit, The Wizard of Oz, for which CBS paid two grand for the rights to rebroadcast year early, which they did from Is that a thing growing up in your household? I definitely remember like my parents and relatives all being like and once a year we would gather around the cathode ray to watch a Wizard of Oz. I think it was more of the sound of music in my house. Yeah, And then that I remember to growing up. I mean, that's why it's like at the fact of Christmas Movie now is that they just needed to show up hours of programming when people were off for the holidays. But when Turner Broadcasting merged with Time Warner in they began running the film on it's now famous continuous twenty four hour loop Christmas Eve for Christmas Day on t n T Turner Network Television. In two thousand four it moved to TBS. It's also on HBO Max, so he actually says, you get a little more of the leg lamp. Ironically, one person uncomfortable with the film aging into a beloved Christmas tradition was Jean Shepherd, who, as you mentioned earlier, hates everything. Uh. He sought to puncture the very notion of nostalgia with his stories, so I guess it makes sense why he wouldn't be all that thrilled with the movie version of one of his stories becoming a golden holiday standard. He originally envisioned the Christmas story as quote Dickens's Christmas Carol as retold by Scrooge Gazing again a quote machine, and consequently disavowed the film version, although on one point of fact, the sign that Ralphie's bebe ricochets off of to break his glasses. Reads Golden Age, which you say, it's a very nice visual symbol about the dangerous of nostalgia. Looking backwards at the Golden Age, it can blind you. Oh, that's very good. Apparently it's a soda company sign a regional Cleveland area soft drink company. That is our second obscure soft drink reference this episode front of the pot obscure regional soft drink. I can sider. For example, this quote that Jean Shepherd gave to Q magazine back in nineteen sixty one. Childhood seems good in retrospect because we're not yet aware of the basic truth that we're all losers that were all destined to die, and death is a defeat. Merry Christmas. Everyone just picturing Santa saying that as he's kicking Ralphie down the slide. Ho ho ho, death is a defeat. Uh. Supposedly, Jean Shepherd really really didn't like the show The Wonder Years, which premiered in just after a Christmas story became popular. UH. Wonder Years co creator Carol Black told New York Magazine, we played around with writing a screenplay that used narration as a device. We started to think that there was a lot of potential fun in that because you can really play with the contrast between the narrator's point of view and what the characters are doing, and you can go inside their head and expose what they really think when they're saying something different. And then we just sort of jumped from there to thinking that effect is ascentuated when you have an adult narrator looking back on childhood. Again, these are all the things that goes into Kevin Arnold's Daniel Stern's voiceover for Kevin Arnold. Yeah, so you're a big wonder hears guy, do you do you have you heard this about this? Yeah? I dimly remember hearing this. I think there's like an A and E biography about the show The Wonder Years, and they talked about a Christmas story kind of being in the air and being one of the things that was a was an influence on it. Peter Billingsley even appeared in the final two episodes as one of Kevin's roommates on The Wonder Years. Oh yeah, that's right. He goes to work at like a summer camp or something to try to or like a foot loose, stunt, foot loose, foot loose style like resort or something, because when he goes and works there. Oh yeah, that was sad. According to a Celsi or you fathead, the art and Enigma of Geene Shepherd, the Jeene Shepherd biography you mentioned earlier, Shepherd singled out the one Your Years along with Garrison Keeler, as work that he thought heavily cribbed his style. And yeah, I can really see how Kevin Arnold's dad Jack on The Wonder Years is really similar to the scary dad on a Christmas story. That makes a lot of sense. But let us look on to happier things, which is namely this beloved movies legacy. Peter Billings gave this great quote to Vanity Fair but I really love he says, I don't know if it was the first, but it was certainly one of the best embodiments of a real family. There's tension, there's some fear of the father. There's anxiety in the household. There's very much a sibling battle. There's a mother trying to hold things together and hold her place. There's probably financial trouble. The fathers do it yourself aspect of the household. Yet through all that there's a genuine sense of love and protection within the house. And yet the words I love you are never uttered in the movie. Still, he says, one of the last shots is just that simple gesture of the father touching the mother for the first time in the movie, And in that moment, it says all you need to know about their relationship. It tells you how that guy loves her, He's there for her, and that's it. I want to go out on this quote. Joan Diddion famously wrote, in a line that could have summed up Jean Shepherd's entire life, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. The actor playing the old Man himself, Darren McGavin, unintentionally hit on a parallel with that in an interview that he gave to the Plains Dealer. Asked about a Christmas story, the reporter said, McGavin fell silent and lowered his head before looking up, smiling and saying simply, it will live, and it will. Our feelings about the stories we tell ourselves can change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but they will live, and that is all anyone can hope for. That, And a Red Rider b begun folks, this has been too much information. Thank you for listening. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Time. We'll cat you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Punk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows