Trivia / A Christmas Story

• Acting in the Dark: When they filmed the scene in the Chinese restaurant, Melinda Dillon was purposely given the wrong script, and everyone was in on it. She had no idea that the duck would still have its head and the first time she saw it was when they were filming. Her reactions during the entire sequence were not scripted, which is what director Bob Clark was going for.
• Adored by the Network: It's been a staple of holiday programming for the Turner networks for decades, and both TBS and TNT have aired a 24-hour marathon of it every year since 1997.^note Which allows the channel to give most of its staff time off during the holidays.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The secret message didn't actually say "Drink More Ovaltine" as is commonly repeated. The actual message was "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine". Same general vibe but different wording.
• Budget-Busting Element: A large portion of the $3.3 million budget was spent on an ultimately Deleted Scene. The scene features Ralphie having an Imagine Spot taking place in the Flash Gordon universe where he uses the Red Ryder BB gun to save Gordon from Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo. Despite the resources used to create the scene, including the large soundstage and set for the planet, the scene was forced to be cut by the studio to keep the runtime close to 90 minutes.
• California Doubling: Cleveland and Toronto stand in for 1940s Northern Indiana (the house used for the exterior shots of the Parker house is still standing in Cleveland, with the parade scene and the Santa scene also done there; most of the interior shots were done in Toronto, plus a few outdoor scenes, while the school was actually in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, about a two hour drive from Toronto).
• Colbert Bump: The film's popularity inspired the Daisy Rifle Company to start producing Red Ryder BB guns for sale during the Christmas season, becoming one of their best-selling rifles.
• Corpsing: Melinda Dillon and Darren McGavin struggle not to laugh during the "soap poisoning" scene, and a couple of times hide their faces in their hands to cover up the fact that they're laughing instead of over-the-top crying.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Peter Billingsley was 12 when he played 9-year-old Ralphie. As Schwartz and Flick, R.D. Robb (11) and Scott Schwartz (14) also count.
  • Could also be the case for Darren McGavin as the Old Man. While his character was intended to be in his early 40s or thereabouts, McGavin was 61 when the movie came out.
  • The female elf was written as a teenager. Patty Johnson, who was in her 30s, wasn't aware of that when she went to audition and responded angrily when she found out. Bob Clark realized that type of outburst was a perfect fit for the character and hired her anyway.
• Defictionalization:
  • The Leg Lamp became a real product in 2003 when a fan of the film started manufacturing real lamps for sale. This then led to the fan using the money he made from his business to buy the house in Cleveland that was used for exterior shots of Ralphie's house. He later dropped another quarter-million dollars to gut the house and remodel it to look like the sets that were used for interior scenes. The house across the street has been turned into a museum and Leg Lamp giftshop. At one point Ian Petrella (Randy) even lived in the house and led tours through it.
  • The specific BB Gun Ralphie wanted didn't exist; Jean Shepherd had conflated several different models in his mind when he was writing the story. It exists now, though....
  • For curious tropers in the Kansas City area, this is averted with the Chop Suey Palace. Though assistant director Ken Goch's mother once mistook a bowling alley with the "w" out as a Chinese restaurant, inspiring the exterior of the Chinese restaurant at the end of the movie, Bo Ling's Chinese Restaurant, a long-standing Kansas City establishment, has no relation, and was opened shortly before the film's release.
• Deleted Role: A scene where Ralphie has a fantasy about being in the Flash Gordon universe was cut, however the credits still list the actors for Flash Gordon and Ming The Merciless.
• Deleted Scene: MGM mandated a 90 minute time limit. (The film still ran 94 minutes.) The Christmas Story House website has a page dedicated to these scenes including screenplay fragments of some of the scenes. The deleted scenes included:
  • Alternate Openings.
  • Ralphie's Mister Imagination fantasies of:
    • Miss Shields visiting Ralphie's parents at home to tell them how wonderful he is.
    • Ralphie saving Flash Gordon from Ming the Merciless on the planet Mongo. The music for this scene is on the soundtrack, and Gordon and Ming are credited, indicating the scene was cut very late in production. It is also notable in that it is the only scene that has a surviving production still, clearly depicting Ralphie with Flash Gordon. Colin Fox, the actor who played Ming, claims that the footage still exists but if so, it's never been included in any video version.
    • Ralphie saving Santa Claus from Black Bart.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • Apparently no one told Melinda Dillon that the waiters in the Chinese restaurant were going to bring in a cooked duck—and then suddenly chop off its head with a meat cleaver! Her startled, tears-of-laughter reaction to the duck (first with its head, then without) is completely genuine.
  • The Santa Claus scene was filmed over the course of several nights and the child extras kept messing up takes. Patty Johnson and Drew Hocevar, who played the elves, were both Cleveland locals who were moonlighting after their day jobs as schoolteachers. Johnson was so sleep-deprived she was dozing off between takes. As a result, the irritated frustration of Santa and the elves in that scene is very genuine.
• Hide Your Pregnancy: Tedde Moore was eight months pregnant at the time of filming. Miss Shields could not be shown as an unmarried mother in the 1940s, so the filmmakers padded the rest of her to match her belly, making her just appear stout.
• Marathon Running:
  • Every year, TBS runs the movie for twenty-four hours solid, beginning at 8 p.m. on Christmas Eve. The marathon originated on TNT in 1997, and remained on the network until 2004, when it moved to TBS (though one year, the marathon was bizarrely aired by USA Network, a non-Turner network). The film returned to TNT in 2014, running an hour ahead of another marathon on TBS so that the movie would start on one or the other at the top of every hour.
  • Recently, ScreenPix Action has done a nice little meta-joke about this by running a 24-hour marathon of Bob Clark's other Christmas movie, Black Christmas (1974), on Christmas Eve.
• The Red Stapler: You can now buy a leg lamp. The Red Ryder BB gun is an aversion, however; while now available, they were produced throughout the 30-odd-year gap between the end of the Red Ryder Franchise and this film's appearance.
• Saved from Development Hell: Bob Clark first conceived of a film based on Jean Shepherd's stories in 1967, and intended it to be his feature film debut, but he couldn't get any studios interested in it. The runaway success of Porky's allowed him to finally secure the financing.
• Sequel Gap: The original came out in 1983. The sequel came out twenty eight years later. A Christmas Story Christmas came out ten years after the first sequel.
• Throw It In!: The gospel choir in the opening sequence were originally just brought in as extras, but they spontaneously started singing "Go Tell It on the Mountain". The quick-thinking crew rolled the cameras and it made the final cut.
• Vindicated by Cable: Only moderately successful at the box office when originally released, the film achieved Cult Classic status in the late '80s thanks to TV and home video.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Jack Nicholson was apparently a fan of the short stories and really wanted to play Ralphie's Old Man. He was even willing to take a pay cut if necessary! However, Jean Shepherd feared that the presence of such a high-profile actor in a supporting role would distract people from the main story.
  • Wil Wheaton was considered for the role of Ralphie.
  • According to Bob Clark, Peter Billingsley was his first choice for Ralphie, but initially passed him up for being "too obvious of a choice," since he was already a famous child actor. Some 8,000 audition tapes later, he realized he wasn't going to find anyone better and chose Peter after all.
• Write Who You Know: Jean Shepherd's usual approach to his stories was Life Embellished, so while this story is fictional, the main characters are based on himself and people he knew growing up in Hammond, Indiana—his brother Randy, his parents Jean Sr. and Anne, his second grade teacher Ruth Shields, and his childhood friends Jack Flickinger and Paul Schwartz.
• Written by Cast Member: Jean Shepherd, writer of the original stories and co-writer of the script, appeared in a voice-over role as the adult Ralphie. He also appears onscreen as the bearded man waiting for Santa at Higbee's who tells Ralphie the line starts "back there".

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