|
|
This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
|
|
Author
|
Topic: "A Christmas Story" Redux
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Steve Kraus
Film God
Posts: 4094
From: Chicago, IL, USA
Registered: May 2000
|
posted 12-20-2003 02:26 PM
Charles, I don't want you to get yelled at for posting a link that will soon go belly-up without including the text because then you might hate whatever movie you are going to see.
A MOVIE STORY
By Karena Walter
Saturday, December 20, 2003
There it is, our old school on Niagara Street. How could we ever
forget it? There’s the Hollywood crew, making the big picture. They’re taking down the Canadian flag and replacing it with the Stars and Stripes. What’s that? They’re spreading potato flakes on the lawn? Hey! Isn’t that the director responsible for Porky’s? What the heck??? But no matter, a modern classic film is on its way, though only time will reveal that. A lovely, glorious, beautiful movie around which the entire staff and student population of Victoria School revolves.
Twenty years ago, a feature film production crew armed with a script about a boy’s 1940s Christmas in northern Indiana found what they were looking for in St. Catharines.
The script, A Christmas Story, followed the trials of Ralphie as he longed for an official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle for the holidays.
Although filming was set for Cleveland and Toronto, the production company was looking for a city with an urban landscape that hadn’t changed all that much in 40 years. The trouble was finding a period-style school for Ralphie that wasn’t flanked by high-rises. As The Standard said at the time, “St. Catharines doesn’t have that problem.”
The 71-year-old Victoria School and its surrounding neighbourhood fit the script as snug as Santa’s boots.
With the co-operation of a local school board, parents, teachers, students and other city residents, the film crew got to work in that winter of 1983.
Little did those involved know that the low budget, $5-million Canadian-financed movie would become a Christmas classic. On its 20th anniversary, it’s on the Top 10 video sales list, has been reissued as a special edition two-disc DVD and has a string of Internet fan sites. There are action figures, ornaments, lunchboxes and $200 US lamps shaped like women’s legs, a homage to Ralphie’s father’s major prize.
One American television network is showing a 24-hour marathon of the film Dec. 24. And Macy’s department store in New York City, renowned for its annual Christmas-themed window displays, is featuring the now-infamous flagpole scene filmed in St. Catharines.
But none of that was anticipated at the time by locals, despite the Hollywood fever sweeping the school.
“We looked at it as movies come, movies go,” says Monica Harvey, one of the school’s students chosen to be an extra. “But we never thought 20 years later it would still be playing and people would be buying DVDs.”
Students such as Harvey, who still lives in St. Catharines, became classmates of Ralphie, played by California actor Peter Billingsley. A letter from producer Rene Dupont to the Lincoln County Board of Education and principal Marshall Pomroy in January 1983 requested the use of 20 children for classroom scenes and about 75 for schoolyard shots. As compensation, each child would be given $1. The board would be given $3.50 for every hour of service per child.
“We actually weren’t sure what we were getting ourselves into,” says Anne Dean, the school’s former music teacher and now a vice-principal at Westdale School. “It was disruptive in some sense but it was exciting.”
After shooting scenes in Cleveland for two weeks, crews began casting in St. Catharines on Jan. 6, 1983. They anticipated filming from Monday, Jan. 31 to Friday, Feb. 4, though lack of snow would cause that to fluctuate.
Excited, giddy students with parental consent forms were brought into a classroom for auditions, which consisted of being measured, weighed and photographed.
Ernest Harris Jr., in Grade 5 at the time, recalls the excitement of being chosen. He says he and his younger siblings Julene and Vic were cast because they were the only black family in the school.
“It was completely amazing. I remember high five-ing a friend in the hall when we found out we’d be in the classroom scene,” recalls Harris, still a St. Catharines resident. “Someone did a cartwheel. It was completely spectacular.”
The one drawback was having his afro cut for the first time, but it was worth it. Local hairdressing students were brought in to give all the boys buzz cuts.
“It was so busy that the excitement was everywhere; it’s all we talked about,” says Harvey.
It was the year Michael Jackson hit the airwaves with Billie Jean and leg warmers were necessities in every wardrobe. But at 173 Niagara St., an odd phenomenon had taken the school by storm. Kids’ attire included fur-collared coats, horn-rimmed glasses and hand-knit sweater vests. No one did the moonwalk and no one wanted to.
The extraordinary task of making a major motion picture at a St. Catharines public school was recorded by Dean in a point-form diary. On Jan. 28, trucks arrived with furniture, costumes, wardrobes, machinery and lights.
Residents in nearby houses had to move their cars off the streets. Monkey bars were installed in the schoolyard. The school basement housed makeup, with wardrobe in a classroom upstairs.
“It was a zoo. You’d have to see it to believe it,” says Jim Rutherland, the school’s former custodian, who retired a few years ago. People ate in hallways, media visited, crews took up the parking lot and half the schoolyard.
The first classroom scene in the film shows students putting fake teeth in their mouths to play a joke on their teacher. They had to say “Good Morning Miss Shields” and giggle.
“I still dread seeing any of those false teeth things,” says Mary Jo Schmidt of St. Catharines, who was in Grade 3, the youngest grade from which students were chosen. “It took forever and they were uncomfortable and tasted horrible.”
Children’s acting and dialogue coach Charlie Northcote of Toronto says the St. Catharines children were well behaved. “It was a terrific bunch of kids in that classroom.”
Queen Victoria, ruler of the British Empire, was honoured in our city with her name on a school. But for a handful of magical days in 1983, her building would take on the name of the 1920s Republican U.S. president who accidentally coined the word “normalcy” while trying to say “normality.” Warren G. Harding’s name was lowered from the roof of Victoria School. The American flag was raised. No one was alarmed by this dramatic turn of events.
Lack of snow forced the film crew to pull out of St. Catharines that first week. Location manager Michael MacDonald sent a letter home to parents thanking them for their patience. “We look forward to our return and hope that it is very soon, so think snow!”
Filming with a landscape of snow was imperative for one of the most memorable scenes — the tongue stuck to the flagpole.
The moment lasts only minutes on screen, but took hours to create in the back corner of the schoolyard Feb. 7. Ralphie’s friend Flick accepts a triple dog dare to touch his tongue to a metal pole in freezing weather and is rescued by firefighters. The flagpole was a fake erected in the back of the schoolyard with a hole for the tongue to stick into and an air compressor attached. When the actor stuck his tongue to the hole, he was held to the spot by a sucking motion.
“They put a little bit of chocolate on it so it wouldn’t taste so bad for the kid,” Rutherland recalls.
Costumed teachers such as Dean had to monitor the students playing in the background. “All afternoon we stood in the cold,” she wrote. “We all were frozen, the children didn’t want to ‘play’ anymore, it was miserable.”
Parents were asked to check closets for old-fashioned clothes for the day of shooting. Cory Ireland, in Grade 4, wore an old rough wool plaid jacket for the outdoor shots. “It was a big mistake because we were filming the pole scene and it was freezing,” says Ireland, now a Cambridge resident. The film crew handed out hot pads to put inside mittens to stay warm.
As the fire department pulled up to the rescue in a 1940s-style truck — borrowed from the Chippawa Volunteer Fire Department — out jumped John Kennedy. The current assistant chairman of the Regional Niagara Fire Buff Associates had just purchased an antique fire helmet at a flea market. “I had the best helmet, so I became chief,” he laughs.
Another extra playing a firefighter was Dave Duff, who aids Flick until the teacher arrives. “She walked away, I took a few steps and that was the end of my career,” he says.
Duff, a St. Catharines car enthusiast, was hired by the film company to help on location by rounding up local owners of antique cars to drive. He would also collect snow from Garden City Arena to spread over a green lawn.
Joining Duff for the flagpole rescue was Grade 6 teacher Ray Foxton. “I rode up in a police car but the motor didn’t run so they had to push it by hand,” recalls the St. Catharines resident.
Foxton says one of the only instructions given was not to look into the camera, something former student Tina Di Fruscio also recalls. “I do remember them telling us to play normally,” the St. Catharines resident says. “It’s hard when you’re a kid and people tell you: ‘Don’t look at the cameras.’ It was fun.”
The students picked up little-known facts about the film that would make die-hard fans envious.
Di Fruscio recalls seeing the actor playing Ralphie’s little brother get into his snowsuit costume. He was able to keep his arms sticking straight out — an ongoing gag in the film — because he had a spring mechanism in his armpits. The pregnant actress playing the teacher was padded so her shape wouldn’t change if they had to reshoot scenes later on. And there were potato flakes used as additional snow that were left to rot in the schoolyard.
They also know some things are out of place in the film, like a modern math book from Victoria sitting on the teacher’s desk. And someone was wearing something that didn’t quite belong in the 1940s.
“I flubbed up. I wore a black Dukes of Hazzard digital watch,” says Alex Stamper, who was in the classroom scenes. “I forgot to take it off. You can see it on my wrist.”
Harris recalls playing soccer in the gym with Billingsley, slipping as he went for the ball because of his traction-less 1940s boots and getting kicked where the sun don’t shine by the child star.
Student extras whipped playdough at the walls with the stars, Ireland remembers. “They were allowed to do what they wanted,” he says, “and we kind of tagged along for fun.”
The pupils at Victoria School lived in a time warp. On camera, their lives were supposed to be consumed by radio shows like Little Orphan Annie and toy locomotives. But when the director yelled cut, they would go home to the A-Team, Cabbage Patch Kids and if they were really lucky, the Holy Grail of computer games, Atari’s Ms. Pac-Man.
The audience at Lincoln Mall Cinema on Welland Avenue began cheering and howling 14.51 minutes after the MGM Lion roared. That’s when the first shot of Victoria School is seen in A Christmas Story. The entire school population, just shy of 300, was watching a special screening at the theatre in late November 1983 arranged by their principal.
The specialness of what they had been a part of now dawned on them.
“We never knew who they were actually filming and what they were actually filming, we thought we were background,” says Harvey, who was featured in the flagpole scene. “I still get people coming up to me saying, ‘I saw you on TV last night.’ It happens every year.”
The mini actors and actresses had their brief brush with Hollywood in the span of a year. None would go on to become blockbuster Hollywood stars as many dreamed — but neither did the actual stars of the film. Billingsley’s career had peaked, though he is featured in Elf this year. Actor Scott Schwartz, the tongue-stuck Flick, became an adult entertainer in such films as New Wave Hookers 5.
The school ended up making $6,000 for its role in the project and used it to purchase audiovisual equipment. Overall, it was a positive experience —the money was a nice windfall and former principal Pomroy gets a kick out of watching the movie because he recognizes the children.
“It’s been called a classic by some people,” the St. Catharines man says. “I don’t know if I’d call it a classic. It was a nice movie and a nice story.”
Ireland thinks the movie’s appeal is that it covers themes people can relate to.
And Foxton, the former teacher, said it captured the 1940s and childhood.
“I remember as a kid myself, my dreams,” he says. “It fit perfectly. It was exceptionally well done.”
It was the greatest Christmas movie that had ever been filmed here or would ever be filmed here. Victoria was boarded up at the end of the 2002 school year. But there would always be memories of that time. Props displayed at the St. Catharines museum. The old fire truck housed at the Chippawa hall. Glimpses of those spectacular kid days would live on with TV and DVDs... maybe for another 20 years.
© 2003 , OSPREY MEDIA GROUP Inc. All Rights Reserved.
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
Paul Linfesty
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1383
From: Bakersfield, CA, USA
Registered: Nov 1999
|
posted 12-20-2003 08:01 PM
For archival purposes, here is the actual copy of Michael Coate's link to Widescreen Review's coverage of the L.A. showing of "A Christmas Story."
For the first time in 20 years, the cast of the holiday favorite A Christmas Story gathered in Hollywood December 5 to celebrate the film's 20th Anniversary and Special Edition DVD release. Stars Peter Billingsley (Ralphie), Ian Petrella (Randy Parker), Scott Schwarz (Flick), R.D. Robb (Schwartz), Zack Ward (Scut Farkus) and director/co-producer/co-writer Bob Clark were all present to pay tribute to the film that has become a Christmas classic over the last two decades. The scene was reflective of the film's all-American Christmas in Indiana...transported to sunny Los Angeles. The ArcLight Hollywood was bedecked for the holidays complete with leg lamps, Christmas trees and more! After posing for photos on the candy cane striped red carpet, the cast attended an exclusive screening of the film in its newly remastered splendor, and participated in a Q&A session with former CNN correspondent Dennis Michael. Audience members got a glimpse of the experience of making the treasured film and an update on what the cast members have been doing.
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All times are Central (GMT -6:00)
|
This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
|
Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM
6.3.1.2
The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion
and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.
|
Home
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic