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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 suggests he’s a pop culture icon that is living. http://celebritynews.io/gossip/2015/11/17/john-travolta-first-responders-are-special-to-me/ True, there are the framed posters for the films 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. There are noticeable tokens of hit success, like the life size evaluation 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 champion Mike Tyson. (Wild West Picture Show Productions, Billingsley’s company with actor and longtime friend Vince Vaughn, is currently developing a feature film of Douglas’ life story.) But that’s all typical movie producer ephemera, similar to dozens of other well-appointed offices of sorts that are filmmaking that litter the Los Angeles area. There's one item, however, tucked into an inconspicuous corner of his office, that makes plain Billingsley is something beyond an affluent movie industry player. It’s a little lamp, with a tasseled shade, and, if you squint, it is possible to make out the significant part, the indescribably amazing component, the part that could remind among the Fourth of July: a stalk in the contour of a girl’s leg, enveloped in a cartoonishly suggestive fishnet stocking. That would be a tiny version of the notorious “leg lamp” from A Christmas Story, one of the most cherished vacation movies ever. Naturally, 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 comprehend 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 suppose I’ve always had a similar-appearing face,” says Billingsley matter-of-factly. ” Living with his cantankerous old man (Darren McGavin), long suffering mother (Melinda Dillon), and food-averse younger 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 mom, his teacher, and Santa Claus himself all warn him, “You’ll shoot your eye out!” There’s actually very little more to the storyline than that. The movie unfolds as a series of homesick-yet-clear-eyed vignettes about growing up in this specific family at this particular time during this special holiday season, adapted from the novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd (who also supplies the film’s narration as the mature Ralphie). And yet A Christmas Story has come to embody the holidays so completely that TBS plays it nonstop for the 24 hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It sits at the top or very near the top of most lists of the best Christmas films of them all. Folks that are “ keep seeing it over and over and over and over,” says Billingsley. “It just doesn’t go away.” The film has even been adapted into a musical that opened in 2012, earning three Tony Award nominations, including Best Musical. (It’s currently in a small run at Madison Square Garden in Ny through Dec. 29.) As the remainder of Billingsley’s office makes plain, however, unlike many other child stars from your 1980s (or 1990s, or 2000s) — many well-known for far less permanent entertainments — he's somehow emerged into maturity successful and unscathed. “You know, the transition from a kid actor to almost anything is honestly hopeless, Vaughn is said by ”. “The history of it's so unfortunately abysmal. There’s normally a lot of catastrophe involved.” Echoes Jon Favreau, who directed Made, Elf, and Iron Man: “The fact that [Peter] turned out to be, like, a good, ordinary individual, with aspirations, coming out of a life a kid star — that’s not a given. That’s no mean feat.” As Billingsley clarifies, in the 30 years since A Christmas Story first opened on Nov. 18, 1983, while the film has irrevocably shaped his life, it'sn’t have it. Quite the opposite, in fact. But even though he was a seasoned showbiz veteran by the time Billingsley didn’t actually live anywhere near Hollywood. For his whole youth, his parents and four other siblings remained based in Phoenix, Ariz., flying into Los Angeles a smattering of times a year to pack in as many auditions as possible. “It's significant to me that I had not been raised in Los Angeles,” he says. “ mow the lawn and I did chores and had brothers and sisters and had to pick up the dog crap in the yard and do all the ordinary things that kids have to do.” Billingsley says his mom didn’t actually even think about acting as a profession for her kids, all of whom worked at least a small in showbiz — it was more like a hobby that could function as a kind of time capsule of their childhoods. “This was before Macaulay Culkin or the Disney [Station] ” he says, children. “My mom knew nothing about it. She believed, They’re cute, possibly they’ll get a graphic for a scrapbook or something one day to show their children. But Billingsley wanted 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 only thought, oh well, he’d lost the role. “Bob Clark said that I was the first child that he saw,” says Billingsley. “But [he] believed, 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 immediately onto the following thing.” Thousands of kids later, and after an ultimate callback, Billingsley did really get the movie’s lead role, and shot the movie in Toronto and Cleveland over approximately a month in the dead of winter. “This was a real small grinder kind of indie [film],” he says with affection. It took [Bob] 12 years to get the movie made. Nobody needed to finance it, this interval movie about a BB gun. Nobody cared about it. ” With Billingsley in almost every scene of the film, and this kind of tight schedule, Clark kept his pre pubescent star hard at work. “It was not extremely 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 Ohio and Canada were very lax. So you worked lots of hours.” “Oh, they had ‘fuck is said by me,’” he says. Takes. I think 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 have been for a number of years at that stage in Hollywood; it wasn’t the first time I’d heard it, or probably said it.” It’s just this kind of accelerated adulthood that generally fucks up child actors for the remainder of the lives. “ you've got a lot of power When you’re number one on the call sheet,” says Favreau. “ You’re treated a certain manner, and certain things are expected beyond what’s expected of a kid of you.” “Well, you grew up quicker, I think, in some ways,” Billingsley says. There ’s a sense of responsibility that maybe other [children] don’t have. But my parents kept that very much in view. It was always regarded as a privilege [and] a honour to be part of the material.” Luckily for Billingsley, when A Christmas Story first opened in theatres, it was far from a success — even if it didn’t feel fortunate at the time. “I remember the only place you could get info on box office was ” he says, Entertainment Tonight. “I don’t know what it did cume, but under $20 [million].” (His memory is spot on: The movie made $19.3 million over its initial theatrical run, nearly $48 million in 2013 dollars.) “And so you think, That’s it. It was a 13-station universe. Films didn’t have a shelf-life, actually.” He kept shooting guest spots on shows like Who’s the Boss, Highway to Heaven, and Punky Brewster, working, and acquiring the occasional lead movie character, like the 1987 Cold War drama Russkies, opposite a young Joaquin Phoenix. (Billingsley’s 10-word pitch: “Three children discover a Russian sailor. What do you do?”) Billingsley s The Boss ABC But as the ’80s crept forward, and VHS income and movie reruns on basic cable became more essential to Hollywood’s business model, Billingsley started to see that a growing number of folks wanted to know about this small Christmas film he’d done 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 the holiday season, Billingsley started seeing VHS copies of the picture for sale — and selling well. The film started showing up on those top 10 Christmas movie lists. And at some point in the early 1990s, he comprehended essentially everyone knew about A Christmas Story, and desired to talk about it to him. “They would be very complimentary,” he says. “‘That’s my family!’ ‘That film means a lot to me!’ ‘We have a tradition! Can we take a graphic?’ Sure!” The decade-long slow burn, however, meant that Billingsley only actually had to start dealing with becoming a well-known 12-year-old after he was in his twenties. “I mean, you can now get renowned immediately overnight from some YouTube craziness that you simply don’t desire,” he says. “A lot of the children who were my forerunners in sitcoms, 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 for some weirdness that you did. It was just an extremely strange, gradual fame. … 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 at a 1990 CBS Schoolbreak Special about adolescent steroid use called “ The Fourth Man,” one of Vaughn’s very first gigs as a working performer. (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-cool, 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 really had a sharp tongue,” says Vaughn. “He would make fun of me, which I truly enjoyed. I felt that he was quite reliable. He right off the bat just let down his guard and joked ”