Director reaches another chapter with his beloved 'Christmas Story'

But for many, Clark's 1983 film "A Christmas Story" is as beloved a holiday perennial as Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life."

A 20th-anniversary DVD was recently released of "A Christmas Story," which will be shown twice this month on Turner Classic Movies. Another Turner channel, TNT, will run its annual 24-hour marathon of the film Dec. 24.

Film lovers might sneer at Clark's body of work -- "Baby Geniuses," "Turk 182!" and "Rhinestone" are among the more high-profile films -- but he will be remembered for two genre milestones.

It was the vulgar sex comedy "Porky's" in 1982 that made the beloved "A Christmas Story" possible the next year. They are as different as night and day, but they represent two sides of the feisty but little-known filmmaker. And both come straight from the director's heart.

Clark, 62, was born in Birmingham, Ala., and raised in Florida, where he attended college.

Like many young directors, he broke into the business through the horror genre. When his first film, "Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things," was picked up by a Canadian company in 1972, he inadvertently became a pioneer in the exodus of film production from Hollywood to Canada. In 1974, his film "Black Christmas" was picked up by Warner Brothers, and he was off.

Two studio films -- 1979's "Murder by Decree," with Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes, and 1982's "Tribute," with Jack Lemmon -- followed. After each of his films, Clark said during a telephone interview, he would try to get studios to let him make something called "A Christmas Story."

"And they would laugh at me. After `Porky's,' they didn't laugh anymore," he said.

"Porky's" is the story of a group of high school boys obsessed with sex.

"It was the most vulgar, outrageous movie," said Clark, "but it was honest. That's how we grew up. Every single one of those stories is true. Everything in `Porky's' was collected from high schools around the nation, because I realized that high schools are the repository of our ritual of our sexual coming of age, which is an important part of what life is about."

The film became a surprise hit, spawning sequels and modern-day gross-out imitators such as "American Pie" and the Farrelly brothers' films.

The film's success at the box office gave Clark the clout to make his dream project. He had been writing the screenplay for "A Christmas Story" for 15 years, with Jean Shepherd, upon whose autobiographical essays the film is based. Shepherd was a radio announcer turned writer and performer whose works were featured on public TV in the 1970s. Clark tracked him down in 1968 and told him that he wanted to make a film out of his material.

It took 15 years to do it. Shepherd, who narrated the film and who died in 1999, was a notorious curmudgeon, but he and Clark "hit it off from the beginning," the director said. "I revered his work, and he knew that."

"A Christmas Story," set in the 1940s, is drawn from Shepherd's life growing up in a steel town in Indiana, but it also tells a more universal story of a working-class family's life in the days leading up to the holiday. It stars Darren McGavin as the crusty father, Melinda Dillon as the frazzled mom, and Peter Billingsley as the bespectacled boy who dreams of getting a BB gun for Christmas.

In the audio commentary on the recently released DVD, Clark almost dismissively describes a scene in which the family tries to get Ralphie's younger brother to eat his dinner as "a lot of palaver around the kitchen table." Yet the scene's very simplicity reveals the heart of the film and reflects the purity of Clark's aesthetic.

"It's just the gut instinct of, forgive me, an artist who grew up in that world," he said. "That's the world of a lot of Americans. That's their home. Two kids, a father, and a mother who does all the work. The truths were in Shepherd's work.

"Someone said, `There's not a scene where there aren't 10 observations about life.' And it's true. We worked hard for those little moments."

Clark hopes the film will be theatrically rereleased during the 2004 holiday season. Five of his films are being remade, including "Porky's," which is being remade by Howard Stern. But "A Christmas Story" is not among them. "You couldn't do it again," said Clark. "A certain magic happened."