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"Christmas Story" Kid Is Back
And so it goes for the former child star of filmdom's latter-day Yuletide classic.
"I've been told I'm the only major person in a major Christmas movie still alive," Billingsley says. "I feel like an old man."
Hardly. After all these (15) years since the holiday movie was first released, Billingsley is just 28. He works behind the scenes as a senior field producer for FX's testosterone-heavy The X Show. He writes and sometimes even acts (including a stint in the mid-1990s soap parody, Sherman Oaks).
And he's telling Christmas stories again.
Christmas Stories...Christmas Songs (Run For Cover Records) is Billingsley's new album, a joint effort with Vegas showroom crooner Brian Evans. Evans sings; Billingsley reads.
Evans, a longtime friend and fellow ex-kid actor who appeared on Full House, was the instigator of the Yuletide project. The way Billingsley tells it, he wasn't an easy sell.
"At first I was hesitant because I didn't want to appear I was mining A Christmas Story," he says, "because I'm not."
To be sure, that's not Ralphie (his Christmas Story alter ego) reading " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" on the album. It's the grownup Billingsley. A grownup Billingsley who has come to terms with being forever 12 (and bespectacled and obsessed with a Red Ryder BB gun) in the minds of movie fans.
"It's my proudest accomplishment today," says the performer, who in the 1980s also did star turns in TV's Real People and in Hershey's commercials as the infamous Messy Marvin. "I think every actor wants a movie like that."
There are few movies, though, like A Christmas Story. A minor player at the box office when it hit theaters in November 1983, the comedy built around humorist Jean Shepherd's memories of family life in the 1940s became a phenomenon on video and cable. Ted Turner's TBS and TNT outlets have been known to turn over their airwaves to the film--running the film back to back to near-infinity at Christmas.
Somehow, Billingsley says he can still watch the thing if he happens upon it--in Turkey or no.
"I like people's reactions to it," he says. "It crosses the financial board. It doesn't matter if people are rich or not...It was just sort of one of those movies that grew on you."
Billingsley says the feedback on Christmas Stories, released in September, is likewise positive. The promise of hearing dear Ralphie return to the Yuletide genre apparently is an irresistible lure.
Almost as powerful as the draw of a Red Ryder BB gun.
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