“I realized that [film] is the medium and I was not going to do any more television,” Shepherd said in 1988. “It’s too temporary. You work a year or two years, writing a damn script. You want it to have a little life, not just show it one night, and that’s it.”
© MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
But even with his newfound disdain for television writing, Shepherd soon realized that A Christmas Story’s success could open the door to more lucrative projects. When PBS asked him to adapt some of his short stories from his 1971 anthology Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, Shepherd entertained the notion, but only after giving them a fair warning: “I don’t come cheap.” As a result, Disney was brought on board as a co-collaborator. Shepherd and Barzyk agreed to produce the film only after they were assured that they would have complete creative control over the production.
James B. Sikking, who starred in the NBC series Hill Street Blues, was cast as the Old Man, while Jerry O’Connell, who appeared in the hit film Stand By Me, was cast as Ralphie. Shepherd cast himself in the cameo role of Mr. Scott, the owner of a furniture shop and Ralphie’s first employer. The film’s plot followed the youngster’s first summer job and the family’s two-week camping trip.
Ollie Hopnoodle’s Haven of Bliss was fairly well received by critics. Time Magazine pegged the movie as a “Critic’s Choice” pick in 1989, while Jerry Krupnick of the New Jersey Star-Ledger called it “hilarious” and “super fun.” Daniel Ruth of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that the actors “all turn in sweet, endearing, and at times, identifiably grating performances.”
Perhaps fueled by Hopnoodle’s critical reception, Shepherd kept hope alive that his stories would once again return to movie theaters. He continued to work on a proper sequel to A Christmas Story with Bob Clark, and by early 1994 a movie finally materialized.
Scott Schwartz © MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
Scott Schwartz remembers the first and only time he watched My Summer Story. It was the holiday season and the former New Jerseyan was headed back east to visit his folks. After the plane reached its altitude and the passengers were instructed to take off their seatbelts, the in-flight movie began.
The MGM lion roared and the sound of Christmas bells chimed over a black background, which eventually faded into an image of the familiar yellow house with green trim on Cleveland Street. Snow fell across the frame as an all-brass rendition of “Deck the Halls” kicked in. The unmistakable voice of Jean Shepherd began narrating.
“Sometimes events in our lives come and go before we realize how important they were,” he said. “That Christmas, when my Old Man gave me a 200-shot Red Ryder Range Model Air Rifle with a compass in the stock — whoa boy, I’ll never forget that! — it was the beginning of something between me and my father. But eventually I returned to the jungle of kid-dom and the Old Man went back to slugging it out in adult world.
“Then the Ice Age ended,” he continued with a laugh. “That’s what we call winter in Indiana. Anyway, that summer, everything changed . . .”
For the first few minutes, Schwartz had no idea what he was looking at. It looked like his film, sounded like his film, but he knew without a doubt that he wasn’t watching his film. When the picture dissolved and the first title card read “A Bob Clark Film,” he realized he was trapped on a flight with no choice but to attempt to sleep or watch My Summer Story.
Schwartz isn’t only an actor in A Christmas Story, he’s one of the movie’s biggest fans. Like most others, he was underwhelmed when he heard a sequel was being made to what he considered a near-perfect movie. However, with his options limited, he braced himself to do what he thought he would never have to.
“Oh geez, here we go,” he said out loud to no one in particular. “I guess I’ve got to watch it.”
Jennifer Mastalski’s Christmas Story-inspired holiday decorations © Jennifer Mastalski
Back in 1984, one year after the original film’s release, A Christmas Story had a limited rerelease in select theaters across the United States. Long before its first cable television broadcast and even before the movie achieved cult status on VHS, it was reported in Variety that Clark and Shepherd were planning a sequel to the film.
“There is no question we will do the film,” Shepherd said at the time. “The question is with whom.”
Peter Billingsley, Melinda Dillon, Darren McGavin, and the rest of the cast were all reported in the article to have signed on to appear in the sequel, but further details were vague at best. It was acknowledged that MGM hadn’t given the green light to a Christmas Story follow-up, but that seemed to be of little concern to Shepherd. According to him, several other studios expressed interest in producing the film, including 20th Century Fox, where Clark had a multi-movie deal due to the success of Porky’s. Despite Shepherd’s professed enthusiasm, there was little to indicate that the Christmas Story sequel plans were anything more than another one of the storyteller’s tall tales.
It wasn’t until ten years after A Christmas Story’s initial theatrical run that MGM began requesting a follow-up film. Because Billingsley and the rest of the child actors were far too old to play their youthful characters, it was decided that none of the child actors would be invited back to participate. It’s unclear whether Dillon and McGavin were requested to reprise their roles. Shepherd claimed that their initial contracts with Christmas Tree Films included a sequel clause that would have required that they appear in a follow-up film if they were asked. Despite his claims, that seems unlikely. Director Bob Clark had a fantastic relationship with Dillon and McGavin on set, so an invitation was probably extended for them to return, but they were not in the sequel.
Tedde Moore was the only original cast member to appear in Summer. According to the actress, Clark called her up and told her she was the only person who wasn’t too old to reprise their role. She jumped at the chance to enter Miss Shields’ classroom once again, mostly because of Clark’s enthusiasm for the project. “It was his dream to film many of Jean’s stories,” she says. “He really believed in Jean’s storytelling ability. He related to it, and he was extremely excited and happy that he finally convinced somebody to give him a chance to do another movie based on Jean’s work.”
© MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
Despite Clark’s best intentions, complications plagued the production. For one, Peter Billingsley’s spot-on portrayal of Ralphie Parker proved difficult to replace. Kieran Culkin, the younger brother of then Hollywood royalty Macaulay, was assigned the tall order of filling Billingsley’s shoes.
“Bob had a very, very difficult time finding somebody to play that part,” Moore says. “And I found the young lad he settled on to be unsympathetic [in the role]. At the time he was very young and it seemed like he was being pushed into something he wasn’t too keen about. He wasn’t particularly happy, I don’t think, and that showed and the film was doomed as a result.” Perhaps making matters worse, Christian Culkin, the youngest in the family, was cast in the film as Ralphie’s younger brother, Randy.
Kieran and Christian Culkin in My Summer Story. © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) / Photofest
Veteran actor Charles Grodin, who had recently become a family movie star after featuring in both Beethoven films, was cast as the Old Man, while Mary Steenburgen was cast as the mother. Their performances received mixed reviews not only from fans of the original film but also from Christmas Story alumni.
“I thought it was a good movie,” Zack Ward says. “But I think because it was My Summer Story, audiences just sort of saw it as a vague and non-specific reference to childhood. It didn’t connect with the audience as specifically as A Christmas Story. The original film has a classical heroic structure. That’s what made it work so well. When they removed all those characters and made a movie that didn’t follow that structure, I think the audience
felt cheated.”
“I like Charles Grodin in pretty much everything that he does,” Scott Schwartz says. “And if I hadn’t seen A Christmas Story, I probably would have liked him in this, but everything he’s doing, you’re comparing Charles Grodin to Darren McGavin. It doesn’t work. Charles Grodin is great, but you can’t do Darren McGavin.
“Mary Steenburgen is the opposite of what Melinda Dillon is,” he continues. “Melinda Dillon is very sort of shy and sweet and kind and quiet, and Mary Steenburgen is a very outgoing actress. So again, in the comparison, you can’t say one is better or worse because it’s completely different.”
Not everyone who saw the film thought the performances in My Summer Story were subservient to the actors in the original film. Entertainment Weekly wrote that “the all-new cast members define their characters more sharply: Kieran Culkin makes a savvier Ralph; Mary Steenburgen, a snappier mom; Charles Grodin, a loonier, less fearsome dad (despite his clenched teeth and an almost constipated delivery).”
But by the time My Summer Story was released, A Christmas Story had become a pop culture force to be reckoned with. With only one returning cast member, and in a cameo appearance at that, the conventional wisdom was that the sequel must not have been that good. The film was viewed by many as a “cash grab,” in the words of Scott Schwartz, instead of as a nostalgic return to a series of tales Bob Clark loved.
Still, while the performances are somewhat uneven — and, yes, Charles Grodin does give a somewhat awkward portrayal as the patriarch of the Parker family — the story is interesting enough to keep a watcher engaged and some of the vignettes are downright hilarious. In one of the best scenes, Mrs. Parker starts an all-out attack of housewives hurling porcelain gravy boats at a manipulative movie theater owner. It’s a great moment, and the movie has quite a few of them, but they have left as much of an impression on Christmas Story fans as the metaphorical falling tree in an empty forest.
During filming, the new cast members remained optimistic that their film would find an audience and share Jean Shepherd’s stories with a new generation of moviegoers. For Mary Steenburgen, the shoot was enjoyable, especially on the day when she discovered love had been blossoming in front of her eyes.
“Sandra, our script supervisor, and Stan Cole, our editor, unbeknownst to us had fallen in love during filming and said they wanted to get married,” she says. Not only were they planning a quick marriage, but they wanted to do it on the set of the film. Steenburgen was asked to be the matron of honor, a role she intended to play with the same enthusiasm she brought to her portrayal of Ralphie’s mother. “It was such a crazy honor,” she says.
© MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
Despite the distinction, the actress’ involvement with the wedding didn’t exactly go as planned. In the last couple weeks of filming, Steenburgen had gone through a romantic breakup. She found herself up late at night, not getting much sleep, and having to return to the set the next day overly tired. The wedding was planned at the end of the last day of shooting. “I was really punchy,” she says. “It was one of those nights where we kept shooting. I think there were lots of little shots that we left until the last minute. But nonetheless, we all were there for this little on-the-set impromptu wedding.”
To this day, Steenburgen believes love must have been in the air that night. After the wedding, the actress was driven to the airport to fly to San Francisco for a meeting to see if she got along with actor Ted Danson. If so, she would be cast as his leading lady in Pontiac Moon. She had been up for nearly two days straight, but when she got to the dinner meeting over 2,000 miles away, she immediately hit it off with Danson. Not only did she star opposite him in the movie, the two also married the following year.
The experience of filming My Summer Story wasn’t enjoyable for everyone. Even though Tedde Moore filmed as Miss Shields for only a few days, she found the experience to be distinctively unlike her time working on A Christmas Story. “It was a different film,” she says. “It was different for me because I wasn’t pregnant, and my ten-year-old son was on the set with me. In fact, I had to actually ask him to step out of the set while I was doing one part of the scene because I simply couldn’t concentrate with him watching me browbeating this other kid. It was different for me. It wasn’t quite the artistic experience I’ve [sic] had the first time. It was more workaday.”
“There was definitely a different approach to it, even though it was Bob and Jean,” Ian Petrella says. “My Summer Story is really more about the family as opposed to A Christmas Story, which was more about Ralphie. They were working with different actors, and it did seem like they were taking a different approach as to how it was told and how the actors portrayed the characters, but that’s just filmmaking.”
While the city of Cleveland had opened its arms wide to the Christmas Story film crew in 1983, it didn’t take long for the Summer Story team to wear out their welcome a decade later. Shepherd, who had an increased role on this film as an executive producer in addition to cowriter and narrator, was a strong advocate of returning to the Midwestern city to film.
“When we filmed A Christmas Story here ten years ago, I knew it would be the perfect location for the sequel,” he explained in 1994. “As a matter of fact, shooting it here was one of my ironclad rules in dealing with the studio. There’s just something about this area — the view of the mills, the trees, the houses and people. It just feels right.”
Some of the local Clevelanders didn’t return the nostalgic feeling. Local journalists reported on the disruption the filming was causing in the city. The press painted the scene of Hollywood big-shots coming to town, inconveniencing the locals with their loud machinery, bright lights, ramshackle sets, and disregard for their simple way of life.
Fan Ray Bigness’ leg lamp tattoo © Ray Bigness
“I don’t know who the hell they think they are, coming in here and taking over like this,” snapped Frances Andrus, a then forty-seven-year-old woman who attracted the attention of a local reporter. “I been here since 1947, and nobody asked me nothing about this.”
“Ma’am, please ma’am,” said a woman with a clipboard, who rushed over to Andrus as filming was about to resume. “Quiet, pleeease.”
“Yeah, quiet please, yourself,” Andrus muttered under her breath in disgust.
When My Summer Story wrapped, its future was immediately called into question. The film was made for $15 million, over three times the budget of A Christmas Story. With the public’s interest in the film virtually nonexistent, MGM decided to give the film a minimal theatrical release. Perhaps anticipating unfair comparisons to its predecessor, before its release in September 1994 MGM made an eleventh-hour decision to change the name from My Summer Story, which would have helped identify it as a sequel to A Christmas Story, to It Runs in the Family. This even confused the actors who appeared in the movie, who believe to this day that the decision to disassociate the sequel with the popular original film helped make what was probably predestined to be a bad situation even worse.
“I actually was not thrilled when I learned the movie [title] was changed,” Mary Steenburgen says. “I don’t know all the reasons why it was changed, but it felt to me like it wasn’t done by the people there making the movie. It just felt to me like it would cause people to not realize that we were continuing that wonderful story.”
“[My Summer Story] never caught on, and I think it’s largely because they chose not to exploit the connection to A Christmas Story,” says Troy Stevens, an actor in the film.
After just a few weeks and $70,936 earned at the multiplex, the film disappeared from theaters. Perhaps as an acknowledgment of their error, the original title was restored to the movie when it was released on home video. By then, the damage was done and very little has occurred to change the perception that My Summer Story is a movie to be avoided at all costs.
Curiously,
the Christmas Story follow-up seems to have in no way harmed the integrity of the original film. For fans really in the know, it’s an odd footnote to the story of the movie’s ascent to the pop culture stratosphere; to the everyday population, it’s a picture that has long since been forgotten, if it was even known at all.
And perhaps Jean Shepherd preferred it that way. “That one’s a real turkey,” he once said, in reference to the sequel. Scott Schwartz certainly agrees.
Bob Clark in 1984 © Photofest
But My Summer Story isn’t really thought of as the moment when the Christmas Story franchise jumped the shark. The movie failed to impress at the box office, is hard to find on DVD, and rarely airs on television. Because the film was produced by MGM, and Warner Bros. owns the rights to the original film, the two companies have been unable — and in the case of Warner, probably unwilling — to publicly connect the two films since its initial release.
The shark jumping allegations didn’t really begin until Warner Bros. announced in early 2012 that they were casting A Christmas Story 2. The reaction was a loud groan from Christmas Story fans around the world, who took to the internet to voice their displeasure.
Ian Petrella was on the frontlines trying to quiet the early rush to judgment about the sequel. He attempted to help the producers find young actors to play Ralphie, Flick, Schwartz, and his own character, Randy, and took to Facebook to ask his fans to send any kids they knew who fit the bill to the casting directors’ attention. Many on his page expressed concern that the film would fail to live up to its original, but Petrella urged them to reserve their judgment.
One of the main concerns was that Jean Shepherd and Bob Clark wouldn’t be involved. In 2007, Clark and his son Ariel were killed in a tragic car accident in Los Angeles by a drunk driver. The loss was one that resonated deeply with the cast and crew of A Christmas Story.
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