Dec. 27, 2010
In the fall of 1983, I sat in a darkened theater, watching the credits for A Christmas Story roll by.
I am a connoisseur of movie credits. I do not leave the theater until at least the list of actors and characters has rolled by, and probably not even then. Everyone should do this for comedies. Who knows what the director has added at the end? Ever since Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), attendees have been put on notice: it's not over till it's over. But I was a credits junkie long before Ferris.
I knew that I had just watched one of the great movies of all time. It was perfect. I did not suspect that it would become a Christmas classic; I only knew that it ought to be. I knew that it was like a diamond in a coal mine: a perfect gem of a low-budget film. I rejoiced in the technology of videotape. I could see it again.
By now, I was alone in the theater. I had come to see it by myself. My oldest child was almost nine, but she was not yet a movie buff. The younger ones were not ready for this, I thought. But I was probably wrong.
I went back the next week to see it again. That time, I brought my wife.
A decade earlier, we had lived close to New York City. I had introduced her to Jean Shepherd's late-night radio show. I had discovered it in 1963, when I was a seminarian in Philadelphia. Shepherd would sit at a microphone for 45 minutes, five nights a week, and talk. If we were lucky, he would spin a tale about his years growing up in Hammond, Indiana. We would learn more about The Old Man, Randy, Flick, Schwartz, Grover Dill, and all the other people who had inhabited Hammond in the late 1930s and early 1940s, or at least Shepherd's Hammond.
He did full-time what Bill Cosby did occasionally to launch his career: create a mental universe based on his youth. Cosby produced a few comedy albums, finely rehearsed. Shepherd produced nightly shows with no rehearsal. We would hear him shuffling pages, but we did not know if this was a script or a newspaper or what.
A Christmas Story brought it all back. I had read In God we Trust, All Others Pay Cash as soon as it had come out in 1966. I had read Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories five years later, the title taken from the finest humorous short story I have ever read.
Shepherd was a master of the printed word and also the spoken word. Not many people achieve mastery of both. But the styles he employed were different. As a writer, he never wasted a word. As a raconteur, he was seemingly winging it, not careful about the precision of his presentation. He was a story teller. This was not stand-up comedy. It was sit and chat comedy. There has been no equal to Shepherd in terms of sheer volume. Cosby at his best was as good as Shepherd, but Shepherd's output was incomparable. No other performer has come close.
There is a Website, www.InsomniaTheater.com, which runs Shepherd's late-night shows 24x7. This is streaming audio. It is stream-of-consciousness audio: one show after another, nothing connected -- as was the case when they were first broadcast.
Dozens of the old shows are available here. You can listen one at a time.
SAYING GOODBYE
I cannot simultaneously read or write and listen to a monologue. Because of my writing schedule -- 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. -- I do not listen to Shepherd often. But when I do, it always pays off.
I tuned in last week to Insomnia Theater, and I heard a WOR 1977 show in which he explained why he was departing from the radio show after 21 years. In the early years, he had been an all-night performer. Beginning in the early 1960s, he cut back to his 45-minute show. He had been on the air since 1948 in one city or another. He called it to a halt in 1977.
He explained that he had to prepare long hours for the shows. Yet his colleagues did not see these scripts. He said that he had loved doing radio, but he was a performer, not just a radio performer. He wanted to broaden his schedule. He was getting requests to speak around the country. To do one speech took four days, all told. He could no longer find the time to do radio.
That was his public explanation. It covered up WOR's decision to let him go. He was not alone. Others were canceled. A new format was substituted. But this was common in radio in that era. This was before talk radio, satellite radio, and the Web.
So, he departed. Six years later, A Christmas Story was released. It was not a commercial success. Yet it has become a classic. Who could have known?
Shepherd's verbal output was enormous. I call it incomparable. He left behind a few books of finely crafted short stories, a couple of PBS series that had no impact, and A Christmas Story. The comparison between the audio output, which has left little trace, and without the Web would have left no trace, and the written output conveys a story of a life poorly spent. Apart from A Christmas Story, a person would conclude that Shepherd did not have much to show for decades of his labor on radio.
He came to this conclusion at the end of his life. He dismissed his radio work as if it had little importance. His biographer made this comment in an interview.
Jean was very resentful that radio as a medium he'd loved and which had such possibilities for him and others, had failed to continue providing the opportunities for him to fulfill himself artistically. Then WOR chose to change formats and cancel his radio career and those of several other major, longtime broadcasters a bit before he was ready to make the final decision himself. That his fans continued to focus on his past radio work instead of sufficiently appreciating the new artistic projects that were occupying his heart and soul was to him good cause to become hostile when his radio work was mentioned. It rubbed salt in his wounds and denied his then-current achievements.
I see this as a man who did not receive the recognition for the work he had done. Radio is ephemeral. When he died in 1999, he could not have known that the Web would make his old programs available. But even the Web cannot resurrect the timing of the shows: the era in which they were broadcast, and the format: late-night radio.
By the time he died, he had run out of gas, career-wise. That is a painful fact of life for just about everyone. Not much of what anyone does in life survives. Most of it is here today, gone tomorrow. Writers dream that their work will survive to influence people. Most writers are disappointed. Only the Web gives hope that the "long tail" will provide a measure of immortality. The words "out of print" no longer condemn an author to the grave.
WHAT I LEARNED
A Christmas Story has survived and will survive. In a hundred years, people will watch it. Good Christmas movies, like a handful of Christmas songs, gain this level of immortality.
The movie came out of his imagination. That, in turn, flourished on the radio. Bob Clark, who directed the movie, first encountered Shepherd in a radio broadcast in 1968: the story of a kid with his tongue stuck to a frozen flag pole.
He worked from 1948 to 1983 before the movie displayed to the world that he was a master story-teller. Few people who have delighted at the movie ever heard him on the radio. Even with the Web, few still listen.
Those radio broadcasts were the training ground, like boot camp. He made a living doing them, and he honed his talents. The result was A Christmas Story. It serves as his epitaph. Few creative people ever attain such an epitaph.
He served as a model for other comedians. Jerry Seinfeld is the most famous of these professionals.
If we view the free market as an arena in which consumers express their votes of pleasure, then A Christmas Story is a winner. It has a perpetual market. Few things ever attain such status.
So, the movie reinforced this lesson: "Stick to your knitting." If your output is any good, it will eventually find consumers. The Web is a gift of unimaginable greatness for literary professionals. Word will get out if the product is worth investing time in. Money is no longer the great barrier Digits are cheap.
Flick lives because digits are so cheap.
Yet I still don't understand why the director cast a kid named Ross to play Schwartz, and a kid named Schwartz to play Flick.
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