It's a major award!
How 'A Christmas Story' cast its cranky elf
Hello and welcome to my newsletter! I’m still trying to figure out what exactly this thing might be - work excerpts? reviews? musings? - but I had a feature article go live today at Thrillist that had a perfect seasonal tie-in.
“The 'A Christmas Story' House Is an Enduring Pop-Culture Landmark in Cleveland” covers not just the house, but also the phenomenon of A Christmas Story—how the movie went from a box office flop to a beloved part of the holiday season. Why did this movie inspire an Oklahoma town to install a permanent 50-foot-tall leg lamp in a local park? Why are these characters so timeless? Why are phrases like “It’s a major award!” and “Fra-gee-lay—must be Italian!” integral parts of the holiday lexicon?
To delve into these questions, I turned to experts, including cast members—like Patty Johnson, who portrayed the cranky elf in the film. She gave some colorful insights into the film:
After all, almost nobody thought A Christmas Story had cinematic staying power either. Just ask Patty Johnson. The Cleveland-based actress, who appeared in the movie as the cranky head elf tasked with dragging kids to see Santa, is cheerfully blunt about the film’s lukewarm reputation back in the ‘80s. “I didn’t even have it on my résumé for years,” she admits. “I didn't want to be associated. I was like, ‘It's just a dog of a stinker. Nobody needs to know I was in that thing.’”
Patty was such a great interviewee, some of her best stories ended up on the cutting-room floor. Her remembrances were too good not to share, however—so enjoy this exclusive excerpt, perhaps with a glass of frosty Ovaltine.
How Patty Johnson Came to Play A Christmas Story’s Cranky Elf
A well-known character actress around Cleveland, Patty Johnson brought unique experience to her role as an irascible elf: During the 1970s, she portrayed one of the jollier singing elves during a popular Breakfast with Santa musical event at beloved department store Higbee’s restaurant the Silver Grille.
Years later, when A Christmas Story was filming in Cleveland, a local casting director immediately thought of Johnson. “[She called me and] said, ‘They're looking for an elf with a really bad attitude. And I think if you come down [and audition], you're gonna get [the part],’” Johnson recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, that doesn't sound very flattering.’”
Still, she squeezed in an audition during her lunch break on a particularly busy day. Figuring it would make her stand out from other actresses, Johnson brought pictures of herself performing as a singing elf to show the assistant director: “Like, hello—of course, it's me, I'm a professional elf. Why would you want anyone else?” To her dismay, he noted that the film was looking to cast a teenager for the role.
“I was really pissed,” says Johnson, who was 32 at the time. She grabbed the photos back and chewed the assistant director out for wasting her time, while suggesting he give the casting director more specific direction. Even today, her voice becomes more animated describing the scene. “I said, ‘Good luck with your whole teen thing—but if you want a professional elf, you know where I am.’ And I stomped out.”
Johnson admits that she was already a little stressed out because her mother had recently passed away; in fact, the funeral had been just a few days before the tryout. However, her impatient vibe turned out to be a big plus: Instead of being rejected, Johnson received a callback for the next day, met the director and was immediately hired. “I found out later that the hissy fit I threw was what got me cast,” Johnson says with a hearty laugh. “Me throwing a snit fit about being down there for no reason was exactly what they were looking for.”
She began filming at her old stomping ground Higbee’s the very next week, pulling six nights in a row of twelve-hour shoots between six p.m. and six a.m. “We pulled all-nighters all week shooting the Santa sequences,” Johnson recalls. “It was grim.” Part of the grueling schedule had to do with time limitations — A Christmas Story was only filming in Cleveland for a few weeks before heading to Canada — and the film’s slim budget: $3.3 million (a figure equivalent to $10.19 million today).
The movie’s tiny budget became apparent right away when it came time for Johnson to shoot her scenes. The mountain-like set piece on which Santa sat “was the most rickety thing in the world,” she says, and would “wobble and shake” when some people climbed to the top. “[And] there was no railing whatsoever up at the top of that thing.” The slide attached to the set, meanwhile, was nothing fancy: Johnson says it was rescued from “some dump where playground stuff gets thrown out.”
More crucially, the production “didn't have enough money to have enough cameras,” she says. “They were shooting individual camera angles.” In other words, the crew would film out one part—and then everyone would have to wait around while the cameras were taken down and set up again to film the same scene from another angle. “It just took forever,” Johnson says. “We did things over and over and over and over and over for many hours.”
Today, Johnson has good associations with A Christmas Story. To her, that mix of faith, hope and optimism is a potent one, especially when paired with tradition, family and the whirlwind of the holidays.
“There's always that one family member that's the crazed fan who drags the rest of the family through it,” she says with a laugh. “[But] families tell you how it's become woven into the fabric of their holiday. They talk about, ‘We watch it every year. We turn it on and we wrap presents together and it's always playing in the background, even when we're eating dinner.’
“It’s so humbling, really — I mean from something I wouldn't put on my resume and refused to be associated with to begin with—and now have it be just such a such a big thing to so many people around the world.”