Awful, Awful, Awful

This site is turning very morose. It was reported this morning that Bob Clark, director of "A Christmas Story" and his twenty-two year old son were killed when a drunk driver collided with their car last night on the PCH.

First Darren McGavin died last year, and now this.

Just think, where would we all be without our yearly 24 hours of "A Christmas Story"? As the story goes, Bob was a lot more involved in the creation than one might suspect. According to local lore:

In the late 1960s, “A Christmas Story” director Bob Clark was driving to a date’s house when he happened upon a broadcast of radio personality and writer Jean Shepherd’s recollections of growing up in Indiana in the late ’30s and early ’40s. Clark wound up driving around the block for almost an hour, glued to the radio until the program was over.

“My date was not happy,” Clark said, but he knew right away he wanted to make a movie out of the stories, many of which first appeared in Playboy magazine and were collected in Shepherd’s 1966 book, “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.”

Clark’s adaptation, however, didn’t happen overnight. At the time, he was a journeyman director who specialized in low-budget B movies. For years Clark tried to find a studio to finance the film. But none were interested. Nevertheless, Clark held on to his ambition to bring Shepherd’s stories to the screen, and, in 1981, he directed Porky’s. Which became a hit at the box office. Suddenly he had some clout the bargain with. In the wake of that hit the studio want a sequel to Porky’s. Clark agreed to make a sequel if the studio agreed to let him do “A Christmas Story” first.

Thanks, Bob.