NEARLY WORTH A TIME ZONE VIOLATION (via The Mother Judd):

Recreating ‘A Christmas Story’ for Tourists in Cleveland (CHRISTOPHER MAAG, 12/06/06, NY Times)

[F]ans from as far away as Los Angeles and Phoenix are flocking to a gritty Cleveland street overlooking a steel factory to visit the Parker family house restored to its movie glory.

A San Diego entrepreneur, Brian Jones, bought the house sight unseen on e-Bay for $150,000 in December 2004. He grew up watching “A Christmas Story” every year with his family. After Mr. Jones failed the vision test required to become a Navy pilot, his father tried cheering him up by building him a lamp with a woman’s leg as the base, similar to the one that enchanted Ralphie’s father in the movie.

Mr. Jones loved the gift so much that he started manufacturing copies of the lamps himself. Complete with fishnet stocking and a black high-heeled shoe, most lamps sell for $139 each; more than 7,500 have sold. Mr. Jones used the proceeds to cover the down payment on the house.

“When I first saw the house, there was snow on the ground, and I started running around the backyard,” said Mr. Jones, 30. “It felt like I was a little kid again.”

Unlike the Parkers’ single-family home in the movie, the Cleveland house was a duplex. (All the movie’s interior scenes were filmed on a sound stage in Toronto, Mr. Jones said.) Previous owners had installed modern windows, and covered the original wood siding with blue vinyl.

Watching the movie frame by frame, Mr. Jones drew plans of the Parker home. He spent $240,000 to gut the interior and transform the house into a near-exact copy of the movie set. (Darryl Haase, a tour guide, apologizes that the new stairwell is a few inches narrower than the one where Ralphie modeled his pink bunny pajamas.)

“Now I watch the movie and I catch myself looking at the background for anything we’re missing in the house,” Mr. Jones said.

To make the home feel more authentic, Mr. Jones hopes to install a stereo that recreates the sounds of Mr. Parker in the basement, swearing at the furnace. He briefly considered a Cleveland businessman’s offer to blow artificial smells of food, including Mrs. Parker’s cooked cabbage, through the house’s heat ducts.

No one can top Shepherd himself, but the audio version read by Dick Cavett is pretty good.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 6, 2006 7:06 AM