CAROUSEL OF REGRESS:

Years later, when he was moving his acting career in another direction, Peter Billingsley, who played Ralphie, took Robert McKee's famed three-day crash course in screenplay writing. McKee--aptly portrayed by Brian Cox in the satirical Charlie Kaufman film Adaptation--is something of a gruff guru in the art of storytelling. Billingsley recalled how McKee told his screenwriting hopefuls, "Don't tell me you're going to create a new genre for your movie. Everyone's always saying there's a new genre. There is no new genre. There are comedies, dramas, and tragedy." But then Billingsley was surprised to hear McKee say, "There's only one movie that I can argue has been a new genre in the modern era, and that movie's a little movie--I don't know if you guys have heard of it--called A Christmas Story."

Though the movie did respectable box office, it disappeared in just a few weeks. But over the years its popularity grew, and 14 years after its release, it had become such a staple of holiday fare that TNT began running it in a continuous loop at Christmastime.

The movie's director, Bob Clark, who died in a 2007 car accident, once recalled being in a restaurant in New Hampshire when he overheard a family at a nearby table speaking what sounded like dialogue from A Christmas Story. Turned out, it was. The maître d' explained that it was a ritual every Christmas Eve for this family to come to the restaurant, sit around a table, and recite dialogue from every scene. "That's when it began to sink in," said Clark. "This low-budget fluke of a movie" had become a quintessential Christmas tradition. [...]

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Peter, who grew up in New York City, is related to the bootlegger turned restaurateur Sherman Billingsley, founder and owner of the Stork Club, a centerpiece of café society from speakeasy days through the 1960s. But that glory didn't extend to his descendants. Until Peter was nine, his family of six shared a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, before moving to California and eventually settling in Phoenix.

Ralphie's father, Frank Parker--always referred to as "the Old Man" in the movie--is a perennially grumpy, obscenity-spewing, but loving dad who forever does battle with the family's smoke-belching furnace and with his neighbors', the Bumpuses', passel of hound dogs. Darren McGavin--remembered for his title role in the 1970s television horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker and in supporting roles in films and television--brings just the right amount of gruff tenderness to the role. Screenwriter Jean Shepherd felt that McGavin got the character exactly right. "I saw the Old Man . . . as a guy who grew up hustling pool games at the age of 12 and was supporting himself at the age of 14." Abandoned by his parents when he was a teen, McGavin had a hardscrabble life that made him a believable, hard-boiled dad, trying to provide a good Christmas for his family against the indignities of 1940, small-town American life at the dawn of rampant consumerism.

Irascible as the Old Man can be, he is in fact the Grinch Who Saves Christmas for Ralphie, by--spoiler alert!--getting him his cherished but heretofore denied Red Ryder BB gun. (Everyone else--including the department-store Santa--just tells Ralphie, "You'll shoot your eye out!") Jack Nicholson was considered for the role, though it's hard to imagine anyone else but McGavin in the part. "I love [Jack]," Clark later said, "but thank God he didn't [end up with the part] because Darren is the Old Man." Even better, McGavin, who died in 2006 at the age of 83, was good with kids. Billingsley recalled he "didn't feel condescended to. A lot of people don't like child actors," but McGavin wasn't one of them.

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