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How “A Christmas Story” Kept Peter Billingsley Normal At first glance, there is nothing in Peter Billingsley’s Hollywood office that indicates he’s a living pop culture icon. True, there are the framed posters for the movies he’s worked on as a producer crowding the walls — 2001’s Made, 2003’s Elf, 2006’s The Break-Up, 2008’s Four Christmases, and 2009’s Couples Retreat (Billingsley’s feature directing debut). There are accolades, like the Emmy nomination certificate for the 2001–2004 IFC series Dinner for Five. There are conspicuous tokens of hit success, like the life size test helmet from the first Iron Man movie, on. There a valuable artifact of sports memorabilia: a boxing glove signed by Buster Douglas, the man famed for his shocking defeat of world heavyweight champ Mike Tyson. (Wild West Picture Show Productions, Billingsley’s firm with celebrity and longtime friend Vince Vaughn, is now developing a feature film of Douglas’ life story.) But that’s all standard movie producer ephemera, similar to heaps of other well appointed offices of sorts that are filmmaking that litter the Los Angeles region. There is one item, however, tucked into an inconspicuous corner of his office, that makes plain Billingsley is something beyond a movie industry player that is affluent. It’s a little lamp, with a tasseled shade, and, if you squint, you can make out the important part, the indescribably wonderful component, the part that may remind one of the Fourth of July: a stem in the contour of a girl’s leg, enveloped in a cartoonishly indicative fishnet stocking. That would be a mini version of the notorious “leg lamp” from A Christmas Story, one of the most treasured vacation films ever. Obviously, if you direct your gaze from Billingsley’s office to Billingsley’s face, one look at his twinkling, ice-blue eyes and youthful, dimpled grin is all you’d need to realize that he is the adult version of A Christmas Story’s daydreaming, bespectacled hero, Ralphie Parker. The 42-year-old even still talks with the slight lisp he had as a 12-year-old in the film. “I imagine I’ve always had a similar-appearing face,” says Billingsley matter-of-factly. “So I’ve been told.” Dwelling with his cantankerous old man (Darren McGavin), long suffering mother (Melinda Dillon), and food-averse smaller brother Randy (Ian Petrella) in 1940s Indiana, Ralphie desires nothing more dearly for Christmas than an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action 200-Shot Range Model BB gun, with a compass in the stock, and a “matter that tells time” — even after his mother, his teacher, and Santa Claus himself all warn him, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” There’s really very little more to the plot than that. The movie unfolds as a series of homesick-however-clear-eyed vignettes about growing up in this specific family only at that particular time during this special holiday season, adapted in the novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd (who also provides the picture’s narration as the adult Ralphie). And A Christmas Story has come to embody the holidays so totally that TBS plays it nonstop for the 24 hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It sits either at the top or very near the top of the majority of lists of the greatest Christmas movies of them all. Folks that are “ keep watching it over and over and over and over,” says Billingsley. “It simply doesn’t go away.” The film has been adapted into a musical that opened in 2012, earning three Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. (It’s currently in a limited run at Madison Square Garden in Ny through Dec. 29.) As the rest of Billingsley’s office makes plain, however, unlike many other child stars from the 1980s (or 1990s, or 2000s) — many famed for much less permanent entertainments — he's somehow emerged into adulthood successful and unscathed. “You know, the transition from a child actor to practically anything is honestly impossible, ” says Vaughn. “The background of it is so unfortunately abysmal. There’s usually lots of catastrophe involved.” Echoes Jon Favreau, who directed Made, Elf, and Iron Man: “The fact that [Peter] turned out to be, like, a great, normal individual, with aspirations, coming out of a life a kid star — that’s not a given. That’s no mean feat.” As Billingsley describes, in the 30 years since A Christmas Story first opened on Nov. 18, 1983, while the movie has irrevocably shaped his life, it'sn’t have it. Quite the reverse, in fact. But even though he was a seasoned showbiz veteran by the time he was 11, Billingsley didn’t really reside anywhere near Hollywood. For his entire childhood, his parents and four other siblings remained based in Phoenix, Ariz., flying into Los Angeles a handful of times a year to pack in as many auditions as possible. “It's important to me that I had not been raised in Los Angeles,” he says. “ I did chores and had brothers and sisters and had to get the dog poop in the yard and mow the lawn and do all the ordinary things that kids must do.” Billingsley says his mom didn’t actually even consider acting as a livelihood for her children, all of whom worked at least a small in showbiz — it was more like a hobby which could function as a sort of time capsule of their youths. “This was long before Macaulay Culkin or the Disney [Channel] kids,” he says. “My mother knew nothing about it. She believed, They’re cunning, perhaps they’ll get a graphic for a scrapbook or something to show their kids one day. But Billingsley needed to keep playing, so his parents dutifully kept flying out with him to L.A. for auditions — including one for A Christmas Story’s co-writer director Bob Clark (Porky’s, Breaking Point). And when they didn’t hear back from Clark for weeks, Billingsley just thought, oh well, he’d lost the role. “Bob Clark said that I was the first child he saw,” says Billingsley. “But [he] thought, Well, jeez, you can’t simply hire the first man you see. So my premise was, ‘Well, that didn’t go well.’ But whatever. You were fast onto the following thing.” Thousands of children afterwards, and after an ultimate callback, Billingsley did really land the movie’s lead part, and shot the film over nearly a month in the dead of winter in Cleveland and Toronto. “This was a real little grinder sort of indie [movie],” he says with affection. http://celebritynews.io/tom-hiddlestons-rom-com-ambition/ It took [Bob] 12 years to get the movie made. Nobody wanted to finance it, this interval movie about a BB gun. Nobody ” With this type of tight schedule, and Billingsley in nearly every scene of the movie, Clark kept his pre-pubescent star hard at the office. “It was not really hot. And the child labor laws back then, if you didn’t live in California, you didn’t have reciprocity with the state’s laws, and I think Canada and Ohio were quite lax. So you worked a lot of hours.” “Oh, they had me say fuck that is ‘,’” he says. “On all the takes. I believe we looped in the word ‘fudge’ on top of it, so you could get the mouth to curl to the consonant of ‘K’ instead of ‘D.’ I was like, ‘Ohhhhhh, fuuuuuuck!’ I had been in Hollywood for a very long time at that point; it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, or likely said it.” It’s just this sort of faster maturity that normally fucks up kid actors for the rest of these lives. “ When you’re number one on the call sheet, you might have a lot of power,” says Favreau. “ certain things are expected beyond what’s anticipated of a kid, and You’re handled a particular way.” “Well, you grew up faster, I think, in some manners,” Billingsley says. “There ’s a sense of responsibility that possibly other [children] don’t have. But my parents kept that very much in view. It was consistently regarded as a privilege [and] a honour to be a component of this material.” Fortunately for Billingsley, when A Christmas Story opened in theaters, it was far from a hit — if it didn’t feel lucky at the time. “I remember the only area you could get advice was Entertainment Tonight. “I don’t know what it did cume, but under $20 [million].” (His memory is spot on: The film made $19.3 million over its first theatrical run, approximately $48 million in 2013 dollars.) “And so you think, That’s it. It was a 13-channel universe. Films didn’t have a shelf-life, actually.” He kept shooting guest spots on shows like Who’s Highway to Heaven, the Boss, and Punky Brewster, working, and still getting the occasional lead movie role, like the 1987 Cold War drama Russkies. (Billingsley’s 10-word pitch: “Three kids find a Russian sailor. What would you do?”) Billingsley s The Boss ABC But VHS income and movie reruns on basic cable became more essential to Hollywood’s business model, and as the ’80s crept forwards, Billingsley began to discover that more and more people wanted to know about this small Christmas film he’d done years before. “There was never a flash point or a turning point,” he says. Independent networks would begin to run it between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It would pop on, and you believe, Oh, that’s trendy, it’s on.” During christmas, Billingsley began discovering VHS copies of the picture for sale — and selling well. The film began showing up on those top 10 Christmas picture lists. And at some stage in the early 1990s, he realized essentially everyone knew about A Christmas Story, and desired to talk to him. “they'd be very complimentary,” he says. “‘That’s my family!’ ‘That movie means a lot to me!’ ‘We have a tradition now! Can we take a graphic?’ Sure!” The decade-long slow burn, however, meant that Billingsley just actually had to start dealing with becoming a well-known 12-year-old after he was already in his twenties. “I mean, now you can get famous promptly overnight from some YouTube craziness that you don’t desire,” he says. “A lot of the youngsters who were my predecessors in situation comedies, you could be nobody, and then Tuesday night at 8 p.m. on NBC, 40 million people view you, and the next thing you know you can’t go anyplace. It only wasn’t that. You’re not harassed that you just did. It was merely a very peculiar, popularity that is slow. … For better or worse, it did n’t hold me back, and it did I am propelled by n’t.” I thought he was hilarious,” says Vince Vaughn of the very first time he met with Peter Billingsley. They were shooting a 1990 CBS Schoolbreak Special about teenage steroid use called “ The Fourth Man,” one of Vaughn’s very first gigs as a working actor. (The 5-foot-10-inch Billingsley, then 19, was the steroid user; the 6-foot-5-inch Vaughn, then 20 years old, was the friend who warns him to quit.) The two immediately bonded over their shared fixations for un-hip, non-Hollywood matters Western culture, like country music, and video games. He was like a sweet kid in A Christmas Story and stuff, but he actually had a sharp tongue,” says Vaughn. “He would make fun of me, which I truly liked. I felt that he was really legitimate. He right off the bat just let down his guard and joked ”