With Vaughn, Billingsley formed Wild West Picture Show Productions, named after the comedy road show Billingsley and Vaughn launched in September 2005 and captured in the feature documentary Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland. (In the film, the duo even re-create their confrontation from that fateful after-school special.) Billingsley executive produced Vaughn's films The Break-Up and Four Christmases, as well as Wild West's TBS sitcom Sullivan & Son, currently in its third season. And this year, Billingsley also collaborated with Glenn Beck's independent network The Blaze on a reality competition TV series called Pursuit of the Truth , in which prospective documentary filmmakers vie for a chance, Project Runway style, to make their film. (Billingsley is also a judge on the show, and shot a get-out-the-vote PSA for The Blaze in which he exhorted the value of individual freedom over the government, but he says Pursuit of the Truth's politics are "100% down the middle.")

He speaks now with a practiced-filmmaker patois, like when discussing his next film as director, Term Life, which begins shooting with Vaughn, Hailee Steinfeld, and Bill Paxton in March. "It's an action sort-of thriller with a bit of levity, but more like the tone of Iron Man," he says. "It's really a father-daughter story. We sort of call it 'Paper Moon wrapped in an action package.'" Billingsley has spent so much time working behind the camera, in fact, that Vaughn takes issue with the notion that anyone could still see him only as the kid from A Christmas Story. "I think if you were dealing with someone who that was the one thing that they did, that would be one thing," he says. "[But] I just think you'd have to live in a bubble to not know what Iron Man was, or The Break-Up, or Dinner for Five. I mean, I don't even think it's a conversation."

It is, however, a conversation that Billingsley himself is still happy to have. "It took me a while to appreciate it as a film," he says. "But I watch it now and go, you know what, that's a damn good director. I can say without ego it's a pretty good performance. It's a good story. It's a good script. It's a well-made movie." After 30 years, perhaps more than anyone on the planet, Billingsley has an intimate appreciation of why the film has resonated with audiences so deeply — and why it took Clark 12 years to get the film made.

"Try selling that [film] today," he says. "I mean, tell me the set-piece comedy scenes? Well, let's see. He tries to make a turkey. They go pick up a Christmas tree. The dad gets a delivery. It doesn't leap off the page. But quite frankly, I think its genius is its commitment to the mundane — it was almost like early Seinfeld. You're just trying to get your kid to school. You're just trying to avoid a bully. You're just trying to stay warm and put on a suit. It's very familiar things, but you take those and make them really big moments."

His innate understanding of A Christmas Story's strengths led Billingsley to spark to a stage musical version of the show and bring it to Broadway — the first time, outside a DVD commentary with Clark, that he's ever attached his name to anything having to do with the movie. "[It was] a little bit of a lightbulb moment," he says of the day in 2009 when theatrical producers Gerald Goehring and Michael F. Mitri approached him about producing with them to help improve a version of the musical that had been playing in Kansas City, Mo. "Like, oooh, I can really see that. Dad wins a leg lamp, and it turns into a leg-lamp kick line. It's all there. He's making it like it's really bigger than it is, because he needs that to feel good about himself."

What has been perhaps the most satisfying experience of all for Billingsley is that for the first time, other kids get to know what it's like to be Ralphie, Flick, Schwartz, and Randy, while he gets to sit in the dark with the audience and watch the story unfold from afar. "Every night I watch the show live, I get a good little butterfly in my stomach," he says. "It has a wonderful reminder of a lot of history. It's great to hear audiences roar and stand up and love it." ●