'Christmas Story' turns 20

LOS ANGELES — The phrase "You'll shoot your eye out!" has become as synonymous with the Christmas season as Scrooge's "Bah, humbug!" and Santa's "Ho, ho, ho!"

For 20 years, this warning has defined the holidays for doe-eyed 9-year-old Ralphie Parker in the movie "A Christmas Story," as his mother, his teacher — and even Kris Kringle — reject his plea for one particular Christmas present.

That would be, in his words, an official Red Ryder carbine-action, 200-shot, range-model air rifle with a compass in the stock "and this thing that tells time."

"It catches the truth," said director Bob Clark, who spent 14 years trying to make the film. "It's about the American sense that there is something great in our destiny, and Ralphie's is to get that BB gun with a compass in the stock."

Over the years, the modest little movie has grown into a Yuletide perennial and is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year with a new DVD, featuring reminiscences from the now grown-up star Peter Billingsley.

Meanwhile, this year marks the sixth annual marathon broadcast of the movie on TNT (which runs through 4 p.m. today). TNT started its 12 around-the-clock showings as a stunt in 1988, but popular demand turned it into a tradition. An estimated 38.4 million tuned in at some point to watch it last year.

"Probably about 10 years ago, when it started getting mentioned in the same breath as 'It's a Wonderful Life' — and people weren't disagreeing with that — that's when I realized, 'Wow, this thing might be around for a really long while,"' Billingsley, now 32, told the Associated Press.

But how did "A Christmas Story" begin? What made it a seasonal phenomenon? The truth is: "A Christmas Story" didn't start out as a Christmas story.

The series of vignettes in the film — war with the yellow-eyed school bully, The Old Man's gloating over a garish "leg lamp" in a fishnet stocking; the triple-dog dare of sticking your tongue to a frozen flagpole — were short stories from radio storyteller Jean Shepherd's 1966 collection "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash."

Among them was the tale about Ralphie wanting a BB gun for Christmas, which became the centerpiece of the movie.

While driving to a girlfriend's house in 1968, director Clark said he became enthralled with one of Shepherd's radio narrations. For the next 14 years, Clark tried to persuade a studio to finance a film based on the stories of Shepherd, who died in 1999 at 78. But nobody in Hollywood was interested. Clark made a series of horror B-films in the 1970s. His rowdy 1981 sex comedy "Porky's," which cost only $4 million to make, collected a whopping $105 million. Suddenly the writer-director had some industry clout.

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