Even the depiction of Santa Claus himself is anti-nostalgic. He just wants to hang up his suit and go home. And how does he get rid of Ralphie, after Ralphie finally gets to the front of the Santa line but is too overwhelmed to remember what he wants? Santa’s elf pushes him down the exit slide. But Ralphie turns, desperately climbs back up, suddenly remembering to ask for the Red Ryder BB gun. That’s when Santa’s black boot pushes Ralphie in the face, right back down the slide.

Tinseltown

It took Bob Clark’s success as the director of the high-grossing gross-out movie Porky’s in 1982—which ushered in an era of raunchy teen-sex comedies—before MGM green-lighted A Christmas Story. That’s not surprising, Billingsley has pointed out: “I think it took so long to get made because the movie, by modern-day standards, is about nothing. It’s a family a couple of weeks before Christmas, and the kid wants a BB gun. That’s not exactly a pitch in which you’d say, ‘Let me get the president of the studio on the phone!’ ” MGM finally gave Clark $4.4 million to make A Christmas Story. According to a 2013 book on the making of the film by Caseen Gaines, he was so eager to make the movie that he gave up his director’s fee and contributed $150,000 of his own money.

Once he had his cast assembled, there were production challenges. First was the problem of location. They scouted 20 cities, finally settling on Toronto for the interiors and Cleveland for the exteriors. It was appropriately winter, and cold, in Ohio, but there was no snow that year. Snow had to be hauled in from ski resorts hundreds of miles away. René Dupont, a producer along with Clark, even had additional trucks of snow standing by (that’s what made him so good at his job—anticipating the unanticipated). When the weather got warmer, they concocted falling snow out of potato flakes, used shredded vinyl as snow set dressing, and further employed firefighter’s foam. In vignettes where Ralphie, his friends, and his little snowsuited brother, Randy, are fleeing from Scut Farkus (the bully “with the yellow eyes”), they are in fact sloshing through foam as if from a washing machine that’s lost its mind.

Another brainstorm of Clark’s was to cut the floors out of the set so the camera would be at Peter’s height, at four feet two inches, so that the perspective is not that of the adults looking down on the child actors but Ralphie’s point of view, looking up, trying to make sense out of the frustrating and unfathomable adult world.

Ralphie’s rapture as his hand glides up the lamp’s prosthetic fishnet leg—that reaction was totally real.

The set was mostly harmonious, but there was one particular source of friction: Clark and Shepherd didn’t get along. Shepherd was just too protective of his material, looking over Clark’s shoulder and making suggestions. When the director’s back was turned, he would come up to one of the actors with his own ideas of how the character should be played. The director would call “Cut,” and as soon as he left the set, Shepherd would lean in and say to Billingsley, “Ralphie’s really like this.” Bob would come roaring back and say, “Jean, get away from the actors!”

Clark had storyboarded every shot in the movie on index cards, down to the smallest detail. He had to quickly countermand Shepherd’s interference—the shoot couldn’t afford two directors. Finally, Clark had to bar Shepherd from the set. Bergmann recalled, “Shepherd was a perfectionist with his own material, but Bob Clark had a budget and a schedule that he had to meet, and he already figured out how this all should be done, and he couldn’t have Shepherd constantly interrupting.”

Shepherd does make a cameo appearance in the movie, Hitchcock-like, as a stern older man scolding Ralphie for breaking into the long line to see Santa at Higbees department store.

Dupont first met Clark as the English producer on a Sherlock Holmes mystery, Murder by Decree, with Christopher Plummer and James Mason, which Clark was directing. One of Dupont’s two sons, Phil Dupont—currently an assistant director filming the FX series Bones—described his father and Bob Clark as having had an especially collegial working relationship. Dupont was involved in every aspect of the production. His younger son, Christian Dupont, who spent time on the set of A Christmas Story, remembers his father working on the logistical problem of how to film the scene of Flick’s tongue stuck to the metal flagpole.