Much to the actor’s surprise, even some of the more tame jokes in his stand-up routine occasionally offended a visitor. One of Ian’s favorite stories to tell was about how MGM almost didn’t release the Christmas film because they were pouring their resources at the time into the Barbra Streisand movie Yentl, which was released on the same day as A Christmas Story in theaters.
“The punchline to that story was, ‘Yes, Barbra Streisand was almost responsible for this movie not making it,’” he says. “The second punchline was, ‘Just when you thought you had found something Barbra Streisand had no influence over.’ Most people would laugh because if you’re a fan of A Christmas Story, you’re probably more conservative and don’t like her, but sometimes you’d have people turn around and walk out the door! People would seriously get offended.”
Two months later, when his stay at the house was coming to an end, Ian and Brian Jones discussed the option of him returning during the holiday season. For both parties, this was an easy decision. Instead of packing up and leaving, Ian stayed at the house through September and October, and in the following month, he went back to meeting and greeting fans.
He didn’t anticipate there being any difference between the two sessions, but there was. Nearly a thousand people a day walked through the front door of the Christmas Story House during the winter months, which kept Ian incredibly busy. The length of the tours was shortened, the crowds were larger, and as a result, the Ian Petrella Q&A was scrapped. Instead, after the tour, the actor would shake hands and meet each of the tourists, offering to sign autographs and take pictures before they made their exit.
© Meredith Poczkalski
The “Randy Comes Home” session was truly a unique experience. It’s hard to think of any other place in the world where fans can visit a filming location for a film and meet one of the actors who will give a tour and, oh, by the way, is also living there. The idea was inspired and innovative, which is likely what made it a success, just like Brian Jones’ initial thought to purchase the house and convert it into a tourist attraction.
For Ian, the stay at the house provided him with an opportunity to not only meet the fans of the film but also help give back to them in some way. As a general rule of thumb, he never charged EMTs, firefighters, police officers, or enlisted servicemen for autographs or pictures, a courtesy that was always well-respected by those groups.
“We’d get a lot of moms coming in and they’d have me sign a picture to their son or daughter and they’d tell me they were sending it to Iraq because their kid loved the movie,” he says. “And I’d tell them to just take it. To see the look in their eyes — they’d almost tear up because they were so grateful for something like that. It was awesome that I was able to do that for them. It was such a small thing that I could do for someone risking their life overseas for our country, but if an 8x10 picture is going to make their day, then how cool is that to be the person to help cheer them up?”
That isn’t to say that living at the Christmas Story House didn’t have its drawbacks. For one, Ian still had to do all of the domestic chores that came with being a tenant, like raking leaves or shoveling snow. Occasionally, people would drive by and recognize him, which usually prompted the actor to tell them that he was just the person in charge of the buildings and grounds.
Another situation that yielded odd outcomes was whenever Ian would have food delivered to the house. After the address was given, he usually had a difficult time convincing the restaurant that he wasn’t a prank caller.
“Is it a house or an apartment,” the person at the restaurant would ask.
“Oh, it’s a house all right.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“It’s the Christmas Story House.” There’d be silence.
“Look, we ain’t delivering a pizza to the Christmas Story House. If you’re callin’ to waste our . . .”
“No, trust me. I’m at the Christmas Story House. Give me a call when you’re outside and I’ll meet you.”
And when the delivery person arrived, there would be disbelief on his face as Ian emerged from inside the house in pajamas, a light jacket, and with a fistful of money.
Visitors to the house would sometimes also add an unwanted dash of spontaneity to Ian’s day. During one Q&A session, a woman forcibly pushed him to the point where he stumbled and nearly fell down.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Ian was undeniably ticked off.
“I wanted to push you on the ground and see if you’d have trouble getting up.”
As Ian considered the absurdity of what had just happened, his anger mounted. He ended the encounter with a statement that was part-joke, part-warning: “You [are] lucky I’m not Christian Bale or Sean Penn. I guarantee you that if I were one of them, you’d be knocked out on the floor.”
The Pocakalski family poses with Ian Petrella © Meredith Poczkalski
When the December season wrapped, Ian thought that his tenure at the house was likely over for good. He had enjoyed his experience, but he felt the idea had grown old. “If I were to go back, I would only maybe keep it to a weekend,” he says. “When you do things with this film, you only get one or two bites at the apple. The first season everyone was really excited. The second season, everyone was even more excited because I was back. After that, you’re done, or it turns into, ‘Wow, how sad. He’s still there? Poor guy.’”
Fans Michael Miller and Kyle Mueller with Ian Petrella © Michael Miller
Despite his thoughts, fans may feel to the contrary. To this day, Ian still receives emails and Facebook messages asking him if he’s still at the house or when he’ll be coming back. If those questions grow into a real grassroots movement to see him return, the actor says he would consider trying to work that out with Brian Jones once again — but he’s not holding his breath for that to happen.
“You have to cut it eventually,” he says with a sigh. “On to the next thing.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Zack the Bully, Toady, and Nameless Victim
Zack? It’s me, Scotty!”
It was October 2006 and Zack Ward, the actor who played Scut Farkus, was at his home in Valley Village, California. He had gotten used to the occasional phone call from Scott Schwartz, the actor who’d played Flick, sometimes to ask him to participate in a Christmas Story–related event, sometimes just to shoot the shit, but this call sounded different. There was urgency in Schwartz’s voice.
“Hey, what’s up, buddy?”
“Well, Joel wants to talk to you! I have some good news for you, man — you’re gonna be an action figure!”
© Yano Anaya
For Ward, this was certainly good, but confusing, news. Over the preceding four years, a significant amount of Christmas Story merchandise had been released, but with one notable limitation. “All this product was coming out and I noticed my face wasn’t on any of it,” Ward explains. “It sort of hurt my feelings a little bit. There were lunchboxes and popcorn containers and all this cool stuff. I’m a comic book nerd and what young man worth his salt doesn’t want an action figure made of him? You’d have to be inhuman to not want an action figure. So I had seen all the action figures of everyone else and I never knew why I didn’t have one.”
His curiosity led him to call a friend who worked in the marketing department at Warner Bros. The friend volunteered to do some poking around to try to figure out why Scut Farkus had been withheld from appearing on any Christmas Story merchandise.
“Dude, they don’t have your merchandising rights,” she said when she called back.
“What do you mean?”
“They don’t have your rights. They have everybody else’s, but they don’t have merchandising rights for you. They’re not allowed to make anything with your face on it.”
“That’s strange. I wonder why that is.”<
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In the months that followed, Ward found out exactly why that was. He describes the reason as only he could, as “a fuck-up in the contract.” Christmas Tree Films, the production studio behind the film, did not negotiate for the rights to Ward’s likeness in merchandising due to a last-minute decision made after the actor was cast and before filming began.
Karen Hazzard, the casting director in charge of finding the actors for the Canadian shoot, recalls the process of finding Ward. “Somewhere it said that 300 kids tried out for that role,” she explains. “That’s not the least bit true unless they put out an advertisement before they even really started casting.”
Hazzard auditioned actors in a group for the part of the bully. The actors would read their lines, be sent out of the room, another group would be called in, and the cycle would continue until a decision was made.
As soon as he entered the room, Ward made a striking impression. “For one thing, I thought his red hair made him stand out,” she explains. “I mean, you’re going to notice that. Also, quite frankly, although he was a very sweet little boy, he had a kind of pointy face. It wasn’t a cute face. You’d believe this kid being a bully.”
© MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
“I was told I got the part of Scut Farkus,” Ward says. While fans of the film easily identify that character as being the schoolyard bully, Farkus was actually the bully’s toady in the original shooting script. Instead, Grover Dill was the bully, as he is in all of Jean Shepherd’s original short stories.
“I showed up on set and went to the wardrobe mistress and she put me in the Scut Farkus gear,” Ward continues. “I walked out with Yano Anaya, who plays Grover Dill, and we went to meet up with Bob Clark. It was my first time ever meeting him. The wardrobe mistress held her hands over Yano and I [sic] and said, ‘This is your Scut Farkus, this is your Grover Dill.’ He looked up and realized the height disparity. I was about a foot taller than Yano and this was the first time Bob really recognized this. He looked at us and said, ‘Oh, okay. You get his lines, he gets yours.’”
© Yano Anaya
Even though he had endured three callbacks to land his first big-screen gig, Yano Anaya, who didn’t have any professional acting credits prior to being cast in the film, understood the reason for the role-switch. “It was more appropriate for Zack to be the main bully,” Anaya says. “He was bigger and had a meaner face.”
Thus, although no one knew it at the time, the infamous fuck-up regarding Ward’s merchandising rights was born. “I didn’t know that was anything out of the ordinary at all,” Ward continues. “I mean, that is pretty bizarre. People just don’t do that. It wasn’t as if my contract got changed or I got any more money or anything like that. I didn’t really think about it as a part upgrade. I had horrendous agents who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, so there was no renegotiation. We just high-fived each other and said, ‘Yay!’ Apparently, my contract wasn’t adjusted to reflect my change in position in the film.”
Yano Anaya © Yano Anaya
While the other principal actors had contracts that allowed Christmas Tree Films, and by extension MGM, the rights to use their likenesses on merchandise for the film, Ward’s contract was written as if he were a minor character. Because the production company had no intentions of ever creating merchandise of the toady, the actor’s merchandising rights were never requested or given. Since it was nearly twenty years before the first piece of merchandise from the film was produced, this was not an issue, but once the film became a full-fledged hit and manufacturers were busting down Warner Bros.’ door to create officially licensed Christmas Story items, it was quickly discovered that Ward was off limits.
However, even with this mutual understanding of the merchandising limitations, Ward found it necessary to deploy his lawyer when he realized that he should be careful what he wished for. In 2006, a company named Enesco, whose Department 56 subsidiary specializes in holiday-themed collectibles, released an officially licensed “Scut Farkus and his Toadies” figurine; they added more baddies to supplement the Grover Dill character. According to court documents, Warner Bros. was aware that they did not have the rights to Ward’s likeness and that was communicated to Enesco. However, Enesco proceeded to make a Farkus figurine and Warner Bros. signed off on the prototype.
When Ward discovered this in November 2010, he was outraged. “I wanted to be an action figure,” he thought, “but how dare they violate the terms of our agreement and not get my permission first!”
© MGM/UA Entertainment / Photofest
The actor’s lawyer, Randall S. Newman, whom Ward had already hired to litigate a separate Christmas Story–related case, sent a letter off to Warner Bros. expressing his displeasure with the figurine. The two were somewhat taken aback by the company’s response: “If you have seen the item in question, you will note that it does not bear the likeness of Mr. Ward,” the email said. “Although the hat, sweater, jacket and boots are similar to those worn by Mr. Ward in the Picture, the face of the character is not Mr. Ward’s face.”
Ward disagreed. In August 2011, he sued Warner Bros. and Enesco for monetary damages due to the sale and distribution of the figurine. For their part, the defendants maintained that the figurine had a “generic face,” and that they weren’t in violation of the agreement. The case gained national attention and garnered the actor the empathy of his Christmas Story colleagues.
“We’ve had our issues with Warner Bros. and things that have gone on behind the scenes,” Scott Schwartz says. “It’s very shameful that big companies make big money and they can’t seem to share enough with the people that made them the big money.”
According to Schwartz, the struggle that has taken place over the last few years between the actors and Warner Bros. has little to do with the fact that most of them were young actors when the film was made.
“We actually have in our contract that we get five percent of wholesale on merchandising and two-point-five percent if there is more than one other cast member involved,” he explains. “We actually have those things in our contract. It’s not because we were kids that were taken advantage of. That’s not it.”
So then, what is it?
“They have creative bookkeeping and creative bookkeeping lets them get away with tons of things, until somebody actually calls them on it,” alleges Schwartz, who was not speaking specifically about Warner Bros., but about production companies in general. “To do a forensic accounting [of their profits] costs between $75,000 and $100,000 dollars. The movie studios know not everybody has that money to . . . get what’s rightfully theirs, anyways.”
Schwartz, who has participated in dozens of fan conventions across the United States over the course of his career, acknowledges that this isn’t a problem specific to the Christmas Story cast. It’s a widespread epidemic that is disseminated from Hollywood bigwigs and that adversely affects actors, who often are at the bottom of the bureaucratic totem pole.
Zack Ward with Drake Przybylski, the winner of a Ralphie look-alike contest in 2007 © Cindy Jones
“I’ve talked to people from Back to the Future, people from Dallas, and people from Happy Days, and at the end of the day, they do the forensic accounting if they can afford it,” Schwartz says. “The studio goes, ‘Okay, we’ll pay you,’ but why didn’t you pay me to begin with? They want to hold onto the money for as long as they can. Everybody thinks, ‘Oh my God! You’re on a Monopoly board! You guys have got to be rich from all this stuff,’ and, no, it doesn’t work that way. You know, we’re just regular working guys who, when we get a check for $200 from Warner Bros., we get excited, and that’s like once or twice a year.”
In fact, even though Warner Bros. didn’t retain Ward’s merchandising rights, they did attempt to enter into an independent agreement with him to use his likeness on the Christmas Story M
onopoly game, but their proposed terms of agreement were less than palatable to the actor.
“In early 2006, the people from Monopoly called me and said, ‘Hey, we want to put you on a Monopoly game. We got your information from the people at Warner Bros.,’” he recalls. “So, I said, ‘That sounds neat. How much does that pay?’
‘Well, we’ll give you a hundred Monopoly $100 bills with your name on it . . .’
‘Yeah?’
‘Twelve board games . . .’
‘Okay?’
‘. . . And eighty bucks.’
‘What?’
‘And eighty bucks.’
‘No. No, I can’t do that!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No offense, but I do this for a living. I’ve been in the industry my entire life. It’s not like I do something else. This is what I do. I use my likeness and skill set to make a living. If I give it to you for free, why would anyone ever pay for it? That’s ridiculous.’
‘Oh. You sure?’
‘Yeah! For eighty bucks?’
‘Okay, how about two hundred?’”
Zack Ward, Peter Billingsley, and Yano Anaya © Yano Anaya
Needless to say, Ward wasn’t tempted to jump at their revised offer. The board was released without his character represented on it.
Ian Petrella’s occasionally problematic relationship with Warner Bros. impacts the way he helps promote the film during the Christmas season and throughout the remainder of the year. “You do have to ask yourself [if you want to participate in an event] every time an opportunity comes up,” he says. “What it all boils down to is the most important thing, the film. If it’s going to do something good for the film, then it’s worth doing.”
A Christmas Story: Behind the Scenes of a Holiday Classic Page 13