‘A Christmas Story’ Facts

Originally, Jack Nicholson was interested in the role of the father. The film had too small of a budget to afford him.

Peter Billingsley was the first child to audition for the role of Ralphie. Director Bob Clark auditioned thousands of other children because he didn’t want to hire the first audition.

After the film, Clark and Billingsley remained friends. To this day, Billingsley said that Clark was “the most significant mentor in [his] life.”

A Christmas Story is based on Jean Shepherd’s book, In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash started as a series of short stories in Playboy.

Jean Shepherd voiced the narrator for the film. Shepherd also makes a cameo as Ralphie and his brother wait to see Santa.

Billingsley actually was saying “fuck” in every take of the famous “Oh, fudge!” scene.

The soap Ralphie has to keep in his mouth is a wax mold.

When Ralphie is shooting the bandits in his daydream and is holding chewing tobacco, he actually had the tobacco in his mouth and said he started getting “really dizzy, sweating, [his] lips started burning.”

The film only made $19.3 million when it first opened.

In 2008, Peter Billingsley was a producer on Iron Man.

The house from A Christmas Story was bought on eBay in 2004 by Brian Jones for $150,000. He spent $240,000 to make the house look almost identical to the movie set. You can visit the house for $10.

For the scene when Flick freezes his tongue to the flagpole, a suction tube was used to make it look like his tongue was stuck to the pole.

On an episode of Mythbusters, they tested and proved that the human tongue can get stuck to a frozen pole. “Cold metal can draw heat out of your tongue’s saliva and freeze its water content, basically transforming your spit into a kind of superglue.”

At the Indiana Welcome Center in Hammond, Indiana, there’s a bronze statue of the famous pole scene. Hammond, Indiana is Jean Shepherd’s hometown.

The actor who played Flick, Scott Schwartz, has performed in several adult films under the name Scotty Schwartz.

For the film, they created three of the iconic leg lamps and all were broken during filming.

The glasses used when Ralphie shoots his eye out were Billingsley’s real glasses. Billingsley also was able to keep the famous pink bunny suit and the Red Ryder BB gun.