419: Quentin Schultze & NEW STORY—The Story of His Life

I got a story to tell, every word of it true, except for the parts I made up for you.

Just some history that has been reworded into a mystery called the way I

heard it.

Well, you know what that song means, and by you, Chuck, I mean you specifically.

Oh, I do know what the song means.

It means there's gonna be a story

for the curious mind with a short detention spam.

Yes, I like that.

I don't know why it was Irish all of a sudden.

That's not not a clue, by the way.

But there will be many clues in the story you're about to hear.

In fact, I'm going to give you a clue right now.

What?

The guest for this program to help tell me what I got right and what I got wrong and add a little bit of nuance and surprising detail to the story is a man named Quentin Schultz.

Yes.

Never heard of him, have you?

Well, some people I'm sure have.

I don't think so.

Nobody?

Not even his mom?

You know what?

He's such a great guy, and I know people are going to love meeting him because he he has written a book uh-huh that more people need to read

a very instructive book i don't want to say too much because it would be too much of a clue i can't say the title i know i can't say

well i can tell you this is about

this is

This is a story about one of the greatest stories that you've never heard of.

And this isn't really a clue.

I mean, you'll hear it in a second.

It's called A Duel in the Snow.

But there's some things about the story

that I dare say are transformational.

Rather than blow it with any more clues, let's do this.

I'll read you the story now.

Yes.

Okay.

If you're sitting, as always, by yourself and you think you know what I'm talking about, go ahead and shout it out.

If you're alone.

If you're alone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because if you're not alone, you'll just wreck it for everybody else in the room.

And people hate that.

They hate it, man.

They hate it.

So that's the plan.

This will just take a couple of minutes,

a little something for you, and then we'll meet Quentin and then off we go with episode number whatever this is.

Not that anyone cares what number it is.

Do they?

Do you?

I don't.

Okay, then it's just, it is what it is.

A little mystery called The Story of His Life.

And it goes like this.

The story first appeared in Playboy magazine way back in December of 1965, back when a fella could still insist with some level of plausibility that he subscribed only for the fine literature therein.

This particular story was called Duel in the Snow and told the gripping tale of an epic gunfight between a courageous young man and a marauding gang of bandits who tried to invade his home.

The response to Duel in the Snow was very enthusiastic, and the author of the story, an overnight disc jockey in New York City, thought his audience would like to hear it read live on the air.

And so, on a cold winter night in late December, at exactly 11.50 p.m., the DJ arrived by taxi at the studios of WORAM in Midtown Manhattan, armed with the December issue of Playboy magazine.

As usual, he was cutting it close.

The overnight shift began promptly at midnight, and whatever other indulgences his station manager might tolerate, tardiness was not among them.

The DJ exited the cab, walked quickly through the lobby, and nodded hello to the night watchman, who could not help but notice the magazine in his hand.

A little something that passed the time during commercials?

he asked.

The DJ smiled.

I subscribe for the articles.

The night watchman smiled back.

Who doesn't?

The DJ entered the elevator at 11.52 p.m.

and considered the story he was about to read.

Along with the violence you'd expect to find in a tale about an epic gunfight, there was also a fair amount of profanity and sexual innuendo.

Great for the readers of Playboy, but was it appropriate for the public airwaves in the mid-1960s?

The DJ

was about to find out.

He arrived on the 24th floor at exactly 11.53 p.m.

and walked through the empty newsroom toward a kitchenette.

There he poured himself a large cup of coffee and recalled the first time he had been fired way back in 1945.

He was a young soldier back then, just home from the war, and WJOB, in his hometown of Hammond, Indiana, was looking for an overnight disc jockey, a job for which he had zero experience.

You don't need to be a genius to be a DJ, the station manager said.

All you got to do is play eight songs an hour and chat a little in between.

Think you can do that?

Sure, he said.

Platter and chatter, the station manager said.

That's what the people need to hear to get them through the night.

A whole lot of platter and a little bit of chatter.

For the first week, the young DJ did as he was instructed, but quickly got bored playing eight songs an hour.

So, during his second week on the graveyard shift, he played just four songs an hour and filled the empty space with short recollections about growing up in Hammond.

On his fourth week, the station manager called him into his office.

What are you doing?

he said.

I told you to play eight songs an hour.

I know, he said, but with all the commercials, I don't have enough time to tell my stories.

Oh, said the station manager.

Why didn't you say so?

Please allow me to free up some time for you.

You're fired.

It was like that for the next ten years, constant battles with program directors at a dozen different stations, all of whom wanted more platter and less chatter.

But the young DJ was convinced that his quirky stories would find an audience.

And late one night, the program director at WOR in Manhattan heard him spin a yarn on WLW in Cincinnati while driving through Ohio at 2 a.m.

It might have been a Ferrari in the bedroom, or a fist full of Fig Newtons, or maybe it was Wanda Hickey's night of golden memories and other disasters, Or perhaps it was Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb that struck back.

Either way, he was impressed not just by the story itself, but by the DJ's voice, a comforting voice that seemed to wink at the world and transport the listener back to a time they didn't even know they missed.

You got great pipes, kid, and you're a natural behind the mic.

If you want the overnight slot at WOR,

it's yours.

And that's where he'd been for the last 10 years, behind the microphone at WORAM sharing his quirky stories to a loyal audience of insomniacs who hung on to his every word.

And tonight, he was about to read the best story he'd ever written, a story that would either make him famous or get him fired.

The story of his life.

At 30 seconds till midnight, the DJ entered the broadcast booth, settled into his well-worn chair, and nodded to the engineer, who counted him down from five.

Then, when the on-air sign outside the booth blinked red, the DJ opened the magazine and began to read Duel in the snow.

At least, that's what he called it in December of 1965 when it first appeared in the pages of Playboy.

And that's what he called it in December of 1967 when he read it aloud for the first time on WORAM.

And that's what he called it every December for the next decade when his overnight audience of devoted insomniacs demanded he reread the same story over and over

and over again.

And that's what it would still be called if Hollywood hadn't renamed Duel in the Snow to the story you know today.

A story that now airs on television every year in late December for 24 hours straight.

A story packed with bad language, bloody fist fights, and naughty leg lamps wrapped in sexy fishnet.

A story replete with pink bunny pajamas, triple dog dares, and blistered tongues stuck to frozen flagpoles.

The story of a nine-year-old kid named Ralphie Parker, who did not, in fact, shoot his eye out with the greatest gift he ever unwrapped, but instead used his brand new official Red Rider Carbine Action Range Model Air Rifle to rain hot lead upon a gang of marauding bandits who tried to invade his home.

Bandits who dressed like the hamburgler and moved like spiders across the snowy backyard.

Bandits bandits who lived only in his imagination.

The delightfully twisted and occasionally inappropriate imagination of Gene Shepard, the former disc jockey, who got himself fired for talking too much before

he was finally allowed to narrate the story of his life.

No, it's not the story of Christmas, but it is most certainly a Christmas story.

Anyway, that's the way I heard it.

Yes, it is indeed the way you heard it.

That is a good story.

And today's guest is a guy who worked with Gene Shepard, taught a class with Gene Shepard, and knew him very, very well.

Yeah, and

I can't wait to pick his brain because

I didn't know much about Gene until I dug into this story.

All I knew is what I remembered, the impact he had on me growing up, and it was significant.

And to learn more about this guy is

that's what's going to happen right now when Quinton sits where Chuck is sitting and the conversation commences right after this.

In the interest of complete and total transparency, I feel duty-bound to tell you that I do not use prize picks.

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All right, well, having said all of that,

getting all this filthy advertising out of the way, let me introduce Quentin Schultz.

Or is it Schulze?

Yeah, Schulze would be German, wouldn't it?

It'd be very German.

Yeah, and it means basically mayor.

That's why it's such a common German name, Schultz.

You're the first sort of almost

mayor we've had on the podcast.

Wow, I'm excited for that.

Now, Quentin, my first name is Latin for five, and I was a fan of

the family.

Oh.

I get it.

It's all coming together.

Okay, so I was so excited when you agreed to come do this because if it wasn't made clear clear in the story, I'm a huge fan of this film, but I'm an even bigger fan of your old friend, Gene Shepard.

Wow.

And he was an influence on me before I knew I was being influenced, you know?

So I've got so many questions on so many different things, but...

I want to start with the book you've written.

It's called You'll Shoot Your Eye Out.

It's filled with life lessons from the movie that I bet is playing somewhere right now, even as we speak.

Yes, in the world.

It is, I think, the most popular movie in America now, Mike.

Some people will argue that, but on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on the two Turner channels that run it for 24 hours, the viewership is 50 million annually.

And I checked recently to see how many adults in the U.S.

will go to church on Sunday, and it's almost 50 million.

As Gene Shepard would have said, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting this film around this.

You can't.

And get this.

Warner Brothers last year sold almost 9 million DVDs.

So people are still buying DVDs.

They are.

What they do with them, I don't know, you know?

Let's start here.

Well, wait a second.

Wait a second.

You had your little story,

and I get the response.

Yes, you do.

Yes, you do.

I learned storytelling from among the best.

If it wasn't Shepard, it would have had to have Mark Twain.

I wasn't alive then.

Mark wasn't bad.

He wasn't bad.

So I sent off your story to one of the experts on storytelling.

And this is Miss Shields, who taught fourth grade for Ralphie.

She's still alive, okay?

She lives still in the Hammond area, and I sent her this script.

And I said, The actress or the real Mrs.

Shields?

I'm kidding you now.

Come on, come on.

Just play along.

Take the story.

Take the story.

He's a storyteller, just like you.

Well, there's such a fine line between known, shameless prevaricator and teller of stories.

Go ahead.

I got you already.

I got you already.

Gene would love that.

All right, so I sent it off to Miss Shield and I said, what do you think of this?

Read it through.

You know, you know them and all.

And this is what she said.

She said, dearest Mikey,

try plumbing.

C minus.

C minus.

And then she said, on the bottom of the note to me, she said, P.S., practice your penmanship.

Okay?

Now, related to this is a story about Gene Shepard.

I know we're going to get into this and you have all these questions, but here's the deal.

Gene only took a a handful of college courses at Indiana University.

He took a creative writing course.

His grade was C plus.

There you go.

The grade that Ralphie gets in the movie, which in the original script was C minus.

They changed it to C plus, so it was the same as what Gene got when he took it.

Okay.

There's so many little Easter eggs in this thing, and there's so much to get into.

And I want to focus on Gene, but right now, the majority of people who are listening,

I think it's fair to say, don't know who Gene Shepard was.

They see his name maybe at the end of this film.

The overwhelming majority are super familiar with the movie.

But here's where I want to start.

When I found this thing, it was such a great treat because no one I knew had seen it.

It was a DVD or a tape.

I think somebody gave my parents a tape of this.

And for our family, watching a Christmas story was a secret for probably

three or four years.

And then it started to get some play out there.

And so,

do you remember it like that?

Was this a thing that was a notion and then had a heartbeat and then all of a sudden took on this crazy 50 million a year viewership thing?

Growing every year.

Crazy.

That's the craziest thing.

So I'm a new professor of communication, whatever that means.

And I come to the conclusion that the most potent form of human communication, at least expression, is storytelling.

Sure.

If you can tell a story, you can bring people in, you can teach them.

It became a huge part of my teaching.

I wrote a book on that too, to use story and teaching and all.

Where'd you teach?

I taught at first at University of Illinois, Champaign.

I was from Chicago.

Then I taught at Drake University.

And then after that, I moved to Calvin College, now Calvin University, from a Calvinist background.

Related to that, by the way, when we get into Gene Shepard, I believed he was a Calvinist at the very beginning.

Right.

And he thought that was the funniest thing, and he didn't disagree with it.

He's like somewhere between a Presbyterian and a Methodist.

Yeah, well, here's a Calvinist.

I grew up in Chicago.

A Calvinist is someone who follows the Cubs.

They grew up on the Northwest side.

They follow the Cubs year after year after year.

See losses, terrible losses, fumbling around, and then finally they win a game or they win for a whole season.

But you know they won only because the other team played worse.

Okay?

A race to the bottom.

That's Calvinism in a nutshell.

I'm a new teacher and I say, hey, I want to teach storytelling.

It's the most potent form.

I look at the textbooks and all they're terrible.

Who's the best storyteller around?

And I had been listening to Gene Shepard on WOR radio and I thought, okay, I'm going to contact him.

We had a hobby.

that we shared and I knew that would be the connection because he was obsessive about ham radio or amateur radio.

So I looked him up in the Federal Communications Commission database, got his home address, send them a note, and said, you don't know me, I'm a professor at a Calvinist college and I think you're a Calvinist storyteller.

Would you teach me storytelling the way you do it?

Because you are the best.

You cold called this guy.

I cold.

Really at the height of his career at that point

in radio.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

He didn't know what to make of it.

He sent me a note back.

He said, no professor has ever contacted me wanting to learn anything from me.

He said, this is the craziest thing.

This is all in letters now.

How do you want to do it, whatever?

So at any rate, we started corresponding.

And then I eventually thought, okay, let's make this happen.

I'm going to co-teach with him.

Now, this is all getting back to the movie A Christmas Story because I'm talking with him about the stories that eventually end up in the movie.

The movie, A Christmas Story, isn't really a series of stories, but they're integrated.

You know, Flick's tongue on the flagpole is part of it.

The bumpus hounds coming in and snatching the turkey, and the old man's left with the wing, you know, and he says, all right, everybody.

He finally is a little bit flexible.

He says, we are going out to eat.

And there they go.

So I'm going through these stories with him, talking with him on the phone about them.

He had a home in Maine, a home in Sanibel Island, and

70s, 80s, wherever.

So now we're in the early 80s.

And then the movie, A Christmas Story, comes out, which gets back to your point.

The movie comes out, my wife and I go down to see it.

and I thought, this thing is going to be a huge hit, a Christmas story.

Fabulously done.

Bob Clark, the director, had done Porkies,

and they wanted him to do Porkies too.

And he said, no way, unless you give me a small budget to do the film I really want to do, which is something with Gene Shepard.

Didn't even know what yet, and Gene hadn't written the script.

Didn't he also want

Jack Nicholson?

Ooh, that's a great story.

I'm going to tell you a lot of things on the show that nobody else has said publicly.

Okay.

The studio said, okay, go ahead.

We're going to give you a small budget to make this film, but you have to have Jack Nicholson play the old man.

And Bob Clark and Gene get together and they talk it over and they say, that would be a friggin' disaster.

Jack Nicholson is the old man?

You can't have a lovable, crusty guy exactly.

They say, no way.

But they go ahead through the agents and contact Nicholson anyway and say, all right, what's the going rate right now?

The going rate for Nicholson was more than the whole budget of the movie.

So they said, this is great.

We can't get him.

Let's go for Darren McGavin.

Who was, I mean, kind of old

when you compare, you know,

to the wife.

And for a while there, I mean, it takes you out of it for a minute, but he's so good.

Perfect.

That you stop seeing any age difference.

Yeah.

And in fact, there's a sequel to it that came out a few years later that Bob Clark did too.

And Gene told me one day, don't go see this sequel.

I said, why?

He said, it died on the casting floor.

It was terrible.

But they hit everything together on a Christmas story.

And I'm so glad that they didn't try to do it with Nicholson low budget.

Actually, in the end, Bob Clark had to put more of his money into it, his own money, in order to get it made.

And they shot up in where'd they shoot?

Toronto?

Part of it in Ontario, outside Toronto, and then part of it in Cleveland.

And Cleveland is where they have the house from a Christmas story.

So somebody's preserved the house house there and they do a wonderful tour and they have a little museum and all.

It's really a delightful thing.

Part of what I love about this too is that you mentioned storytelling and the way a great story can come together.

And sometimes it does feel like a flash of, hey, I have an idea and the ideas just flow.

And there it is.

But in this case, I mean, this thing really did start as an article in Playboy.

Multiple.

Right.

Yeah.

With a totally different title, Duel in the Snow.

And when you start to think about the way an idea finds its own footing and how it starts to take root in the mind of the writer, various different iterations, and then when you think about the career that Gene had had and was having, and how he was using his audience of spies, he called them, the night people,

right, as this kind of incubator where he was, you know, I just felt like like he was sort of always auditioning ideas

with this weird focus group.

You just nailed them.

You just nailed them.

In fact, when I was flying out here, I used some earplugs, okay?

So I opened my little case of earplugs, and this is the way Shepard would operate, okay?

I open it up, and I read here as I pull out my earplugs,

In case of misuse, call, and there's a phone number.

And so Gene Gene would read that and he would start thinking about what are the misuses of the earth.

What do you mean by

ears?

What do you mean?

What do you mean it doesn't go up there?

And then he would do a whole thing around that on radio.

The amazing thing that I grabbed on to with Gene that I couldn't believe that anybody other than Mark Twain could do this.

He could take the same essential story, knowing what the theme was.

We'll have to talk about this.

All of his stories had a theme and a message in them.

And then he could transfer them to different media.

But he had a terrible time writing them up.

So he would do them at the Limelight, the comedy clubs in New York City.

He would do them on WOR.

He did a lot of stage performances here and there around universities and all.

He went to Princeton every year.

But he had a hard time writing them up because that's a different medium.

Okay?

And he didn't want to write them up in a way to be read by someone out loud, but to be read silently as you would read in Playboy.

So one of his buddies was Shell Silverstein.

Where the sidewalk ends.

Yes.

And Shell, or Gene called him Shelley, said to Gene one day, look, you got to start writing these things up.

You just have to get them out there in this other medium.

And Gene said, well, gee, I don't know.

How do we do this?

And he said, we're going to do it in Playboy.

He said, what?

In Playboy, you know, well, they were trying to become more legitimate and get some of these great writers in there and all.

It was not just the girly magazine.

So Shelley had a connection.

He had been writing already for Playboy.

He was friends with Hugh Hefner, and he says to Hugh, hey, Hugh, I got this guy that's a phenomenal oral storyteller.

And there's always a little bit of stuff in there that is kind of appropriate for Playboy.

So can we bring him in?

Can we move in together in the Playboy Mansion in Chicago?

And I can work on writing up some of his stories.

And that's what happened.

Wait a minute, Shell and

Gene moved into the Playboy Mansion.

Correct.

Correct.

So that they were together and they were writing.

They had all their meals and housing and all.

Now, one thing I should say about this that Gene said to me one day, he said, ah, Quinn, let me tell you, those bastards at the Playboy Mansion, he said, let me tell you, if you want to go to a place where there's no sex, live in the Playboy Mansion.

He said, it's all one big image.

You know, one of the chapters in my book is, don't trust the media.

Well, and advertising.

And advertising.

One more instance of no truth in advertising.

A grown man can't get laid at the Playboy Match.

Oh,

it's wrong.

Unbelievable.

He said it was the most boring place.

All he did was work on writing, you know?

Yeah, so that's what happened.

And that's also how

Gene was always complaining about his name.

Now, my nickname, and he called me Quinn, he would say, Quinn, that damn old man of mine gave me this name, Gene, J-E-A-N.

How do you come up with Gene with a J?

You know, what the heck was wrong with my old man?

And Shelley got so tired of hearing this.

So finally, he said, Gene, I'm going to write about it.

What do you mean you're going to write about it?

So he writes a song, A Boy Named Sue.

That's Shell Silverstein.

That's Shell Silverstein.

And then Johnny Cash.

Johnny Cash makes it famous.

Yeah, look it up.

Yeah.

I don't have time to look it up.

You're the expert.

That's why I brought you here.

This is the way you heard it.

Well, there was also an American singer named Gene Shepard.

Yes,

last name spelled differently.

Yeah, with Shepherd.

Without an H.

Yeah.

And then an A.

I think it's S-A-S-H-E-P-A-R-D-A-A.

That's correct.

Yeah.

Take me back, though, to the phone call.

Out of the blue, you hear a guy on the radio, and he speaks to you.

And you just call him to say.

I sent him a letter.

You sent him a letter.

Because I didn't have a phone number.

Right.

But this is maybe a testament to a different age, or perhaps

your own age, but this is a time where people wrote letters to each other.

Yeah.

He writes back

in longhand.

Yeah.

And so when does he agree to meet you and how does that meeting go?

So he says, okay, what do you want to do?

How can I teach you this?

He had taught a course, he told me once, on media at New York University.

He had no bachelor's degree, let alone a master's or PhD.

I don't know how well that went, but I suspect it did not go well because Gene was not an organized person.

He could not teach a course on his own.

Okay, you can't build a whole course around just sitting on a desk, which is what he would do in my course, and just tell stories.

So he says, how do you want to do this?

I said, well, what I'd like to do is to co-teach with you.

I'm familiar with everything that you've published, including your earliest book that almost nobody knows or has a copy of,

The America of George Aid.

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Now, George Aid is another character.

Another character.

A big character.

That was decades earlier, Beth.

Decades earlier.

Subversive, rule breaker.

Yeah, he had a column in a Chicago newspaper where he told fables, quote unquote, which were about actual people or stereotypes of people.

It was the most read section in that paper in Chicago.

And then he started writing plays, and some of them ended up on Broadway.

But he was also a northern Indiana guy.

And Shepard got the idea from George Aid

that every story that he would write would be a parable.

It would work on two levels.

So there's the everyday entertainment level.

Okay, so it's entertaining.

The old man wins a major award.

It's a major award, you know, and he goes and the crate comes in and he opens up that crate and he's a leg lamp?

A leg lamp what do you do with a leg lamp you know this is a highfalutin thing and he says I know just the place for it

right and so what does he do and mom is saying well let's talk about this and he goes to the front window and he puts that leg lamp right there in the center then he goes outside to look at it and Gene said to me at that point he becomes someone educated at the Art Institute in Chicago And he is an art curator.

See, now you have to get the humor in this.

It's just fantastic what Gene would do.

And he said, so he's out there a little to the left, a little to the right, right here, right here.

Meanwhile, Ralphie is pawing the leg.

And

he's starting into adolescence.

You have to look out here.

He's pushing him away.

And so I said to Gene one day, so this is early on.

We're first teaching together.

And the movie had come out and bombed, and he was disappointed.

And I said, Gene, what the hell is this leg lamp thing?

I had no idea exactly where he got this from or whatever.

He said, what do you think?

That's the way he was.

He didn't want to tell people the meanings behind what he was doing because he felt that that would demystify his work and then people wouldn't think he was a great storyteller if they knew how he did it.

If you have to explain the punchline, you told the joke wrong.

So here's the punchline.

He says, hey, Quinn,

have you ever heard of a trophy wife?

I said, a trophy wife?

Are you kidding me?

The leg lamp is a trophy wife?

He said, absolutely.

Now we're getting getting into the philosophy this is underlying meaning of the parable he said men this is his worldview are incurably romantic

toward women and toward things

if they don't have a woman they'll go to an automobile they'll go to a rifle and they become obsessive about it They have to have this car.

A woman wants to get from place A to B, he would say.

And the guy is thinking, everybody's going to be looking at me in this car, and it's got to impress people, and so on.

So the the old man puts that leg lamp out there.

Then he goes out front, and the cameo there is Bob Clark, who's the director, and they're standing out front, and he plays Swede, and he says, hey, Parker, what's that?

And he says, it's a major award, you know?

And so it's a leg lamp trophy wife.

And at that point, Gene said to me, it's very clear that when mom realizes what's going on, she has got to end that affair.

She's got to end the affair, and she is going to end it.

Now I'm going to get into something, again, that nobody knows about unless they've already read my book.

Before you do,

let it be known to those who aren't watching but just listening that the aforementioned leg lamp exists on your sweatshirt there in the form of a pin.

A pin, yes.

And right behind you.

And the table.

Right.

Did you notice we've got a mini one right here?

Yeah.

That's why I asked my publicist to send you a note, because I saw the leg lamp was on your show.

That's how this happened?

Yeah.

That's that's how it happened.

This came in like it was crazy because I get this.

I know we're going to do this story at Christmas, right?

He's going to read the story, and I have to have a guest for the story.

And I'm thinking, who am I going to get for this?

Just out of the blue, what's your publicist's name?

Sorry.

Kelly, I want to say Kelly, yeah, Kelly.

And Kelly sends a note, and I'm like, and I called her immediately.

I'm like, you're not going to believe this.

This is serendipity at its finest.

And that's it.

Well, here we are.

Here we are.

The second thing is, back to to

I want to hear about his philosophy with this, but I'm equally interested in

the universal appeal of what you're just talking about, because no one listening ever had a leg lamp in their window.

Like, that never happened.

But everybody who's ever been married has felt threatened at some point by some externality.

Correct.

Some existential thing.

Could be another woman, could be another man, could be the car, could be whatever your hobby is that got a little a hand, a little out of hand, could be a leg lamb.

So that theme and that moment, as absurd and ridiculous and singular as it is to the movie, is awfully broad.

So what Gene learned to do early on as a kind of lay philosopher was look at the world around him and say, what makes the world work or malfunction, depending on the situation.

And these are common things.

And so the fact that men get obsessive toward things, even treating a woman as a thing or other things, he said that's the way it is.

Men have always been that way.

He was a car fanatic.

He had a column in Car and Driver magazine and so forth.

He would fall in love with cars and have to have cars and so on.

And in the movie, he's got the old man with the 1937 Olds touring car.

And so that was part of his worldview.

But the key word there was obsessive.

He said, men become obsessed with.

Yes, of possessing and fixing.

I mean, think about all the moments that rhyme.

It's not just a car, it's an old car.

And the tires aren't just problematic, they're bald.

To the point where he changes them so often, he times himself, right?

Now, this is my dad, and I know this.

But at the same time, that's happening, there's a furnace in the basement.

Not just any old furnace, a doomed furnace that chewed its way right out of the pits of hell and is there to torture him.

He's always down there trying to fix that.

He's always trying to fix his car.

He's always trying to adjust the leg lamp just so.

And then there's his boy forming the same kind of obsession around a BB gun.

And the reason is because he's starting to enter puberty.

And so the hormones are working.

And Gene believed that when the male hormones start working, this obsessiveness begins.

And it leads to trouble, real trouble.

On the clinker one, the furnace, yeah, okay, this is fascinating.

So, Gene and I are talking about this whole furnace idea.

He said, Yeah, we had these furnaces, you know, and the coal wouldn't burn completely often because the controls were not set right, maybe because of mom, maybe not.

Or you buy cheap coal, and he said, That's what my old man did.

He bought this cheap coal, it wouldn't burn all the way through, it became these hard pieces, and they would drop to the bottom of the furnace, and you would hear it clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink.

So, when the old man hears that, Mike,

he says, listen, listen.

Clink.

And he's off and running.

And you said, hell, down to hell.

So Gene put it this way to me.

The old man races down the stairs to the seventh level of Dante's Inferno.

To do battle.

To do battle.

With the demons,

the devil's demons, and he is never going to win.

Right.

Because at the same time, this thing that he's going into mortal combat with, they need to live.

It's still providing them with enough heat, albeit maybe not as much as they would like.

But the guy is constantly surrounded by things that let him down this much,

but that he nevertheless must have.

Yeah, you got it.

You are smart, man.

I'm telling you.

You nailed Gene on that one.

So this is the way Gene put it to me.

He said, Quinn, if you think about this, men are the ones that create the technology.

They're the primary ones that use it.

They're the primary ones that try to fix it.

And they're the primary ones that try to get out of trouble with it when it malfunctions.

This is the male human condition.

Meanwhile, moms are out there saying, I don't know what they see in that stuff, okay?

And so I said, well, how do we describe this, Gene?

Are you anti-technology?

Well, he was a ham radio operator like me he was on all the time

in fact ham radio in some sense is a predecessor to podcasting because you'd get on and talk about people and so he said no you try to control it a little bit but you're never going to get complete control over the technology so men are always going to be exasperated by this yeah that's the male human condition but also attracted to it yeah right so there's gene at war i mean that's way up the food chain now granted, he's doing the midnight shift, so it's not quite prime time, but he wasn't a prime time guy anyway.

He functioned around the fringe.

He liked it there.

And you're right, it so predates podcasting.

But at the same time, it's that media that demands the listener participate.

on the imagination level.

And that's why his oral presentation of of these stories is so rich and why the movie's so surprising.

Because typically, when a guy has a gift like that, you don't need images.

In fact, if you try to cast, if you try and bring that image to life, you know, as long as there's been a printing press, they've been saying the book's better.

Read the book, it's better.

It's better, it's better.

But somehow or another, all of this stuff came together.

And I give Bob Clark a lot of credit for that.

Great, yeah.

Screenplay a lot of credit.

credit, but mostly it's what Donald Fagan, who wrote a fascinating article about Gene,

I'd like to talk about later too.

He called it word jazz.

Right.

Right.

And so we're still getting the word jazz of a guy who cut his teeth painting pictures for people, even as a really good director is bringing those pictures to life in, thank God, a way that actually magnified it for once and didn't ensmallen it.

That's lightning in a bottle.

It is, isn't it?

In order for Gene to pull this off, he had to keep himself as the not narrator, like you do a lot of narrating, which is objective outside party, but he had to be the older Elfie because as older Elfie, he delivers the life lessons if you listen carefully.

So when the old man says he's going to go Turn on the neighborhood with the leg lamp, turn on.

You got a clue there.

See, and then when the old man goes outside and then Clark picks it up as the director and shows the old man kind of moving his hips around a little bit.

He's getting turned on, you know.

So, so and Ralphie is just getting right to third base.

He's got his hand all the way up there.

He's starting up.

So, yeah, you're right.

Now, here's the thing about how Gene worked on the radio show.

By the way, after a while, he got tired of working all night, and they allowed him to move to about 10.

It was 10 p.m.

or 10, 15 p.m.

to 11, shorter show on WR.

But the way he worked was think through what's the story I'm going to tell tonight, or a couple of stories.

And if there are a couple of stories, they're generally related thematically.

And then he would go into the studio with one thing, a little strip of paper.

So I had my prostate taken out recently, okay?

You're wondering how this relates.

Did you bring it with you?

I didn't bring it with me.

Let's have a look at that.

It's gone, man.

When you go into the hospital,

look at that size.

It was 80 cc's, 20s, normal.

Wow.

It had to go.

It had to go.

So, you know, they put these little bands on your wrist, you know, to identify who you are, and then they zap them.

So if you cut one of those bands off and looked at it, and imagine that was a piece of paper, thin little strip, that's what Gene took into the studio.

So he's live 40, 50 minutes, sometimes an hour.

And everything

is...

an improv off of that key idea.

It is.

Which is why you pulled out these headphones and said like he would go into a studio with something as simple as, what did it say?

Yeah, this is great.

Do not misuse.

Yeah, in case of misuse.

In case of misuse, right.

That's right up there with this bag is not a toy.

Right.

Right.

Right?

I mean, and so he's always on the lookout for delightful linguistic absurdities.

And when he finds one, he takes it into his eye.

I want people to understand, too, the incredible

weirdness.

of working an overnight shift.

If you haven't done it, everyone should.

And if you have done it, but you haven't done it in media, it's different still.

So it's very odd to be awake in the middle of the night talking to an invisible audience with nothing around you except an engineer behind some smoky glass who communicates with you, you know, maybe through an IFB or maybe through an intercom.

And you're just there, man.

You're alone, but not alone.

And you are really, it's a high wire act.

And the way he connected with that audience based off a little piece of paper for an hour, that

who does that today?

Really?

I mean, could do it.

A couple of podcasters, maybe.

Yep.

Yeah, maybe.

It's tough.

And Gene learned it gradually over time, as he told me, just starting out, including when he was in the military, just BSing people, start telling a story.

If people lost interest in it, He wasn't doing it well.

Start retelling it.

So he started as an oral storyteller, and that really did it for him.

But yeah, the fact that he could go in there extemporaneous with just a few notes on a little strip.

Let's stick with the movie before we dive too deep.

What else in there really struck you?

Because there's so many vignettes and there's so many moments.

It could be a fight, it could be the frozen flagpole, it could be Mrs.

Shields.

Like all of these moments strike so much familiarity with so many people.

What for you

really just

stuck out?

As you may have heard me say several thousand times before, we need to close the skills gap in this country and we need to do it stat.

I hate to be an alarmist, but there are currently 7.6 million open jobs out there, most of which don't require a four-year degree, and currently 250,000 of those jobs exist within the maritime industrial base.

These are the folks who build and deliver three nuclear-powered submarines every year to the U.S.

Navy.

And there's a real concern now that a lack of skilled labor is going to keep us from building the subs that need to get built.

On the positive side, there's a growing realization that these jobs are freaking awesome.

I'm talking about incredibly stable, AI-proof careers, just waiting.

for anybody who wants to learn a skill that's in demand and start a career with some actual purpose.

Additive manufacturing, CNC machining, metrology, welding, pipe fitting, electrical.

All of it is spelled out for you at build submarines.com.

That's where all the hiring is happening and you really need to see it to get a sense of just how much opportunity is out there.

That's build submarines.com.

Come on and build a submarine.

Why don't you build a submarine?

That buildsubmarines.com.

What blew my mind after getting to know Gene and having him explain it to me was what was going on with the bullies.

Now, I grew up in Chicago.

We had a, Jimmy was the neighborhood bully.

He was an SOB man.

You didn't want to get near that guy.

He was, he was trouble until one day he came in our backyard.

My six foot five brother was there,

12 years older than me.

And Jimmy didn't come around my backyard after that.

But so, bully, Gene, what's tell me about the bully situation?

Were you bullied?

He said, everybody's bullied.

Everybody lives in the world.

He said, you can be an adult.

And in the workplace, you got somebody who's a verbal bully.

I mean, they're everywhere.

They're everywhere.

And then he said, hey, Quinn, listen to this.

The worst bullies in the world are those who are in charge of authoritarian governments.

I said, like,

Like you're thinking of the Soviet Union or China or something?

What are you talking about?

He says, where do you think I I got the name Scutt Farkas?

I said, Scutt Farkas, Farkas.

He says, well, Farkas, that's a Fracas.

They create a Fracas.

I said, but Scutt?

And most people think the name is Scott.

It's actually Scut, S-C-U-T,

named after the Soviet missile system.

Scud.

The Scud missile system.

Scud.

So part missile, part.

fight.

Yeah, and the

miss those missiles are mobile.

So they can be moved around and fired from anywhere.

So the bullies, he said, the neighborhood bullies are mobile.

They're traveling all over the place.

And you first see them in the movie, a Christmas story, you know, when you see the feet, Scott Farkas come along.

And then Scott comes along and you suddenly see his face.

You know, he's got this

cap on.

Yellow eyes.

Now you got it.

He says, the older Ralph, he says, I swear, he's got yellow eyes.

Right.

Right.

Get this, yellow eyes.

What color are the eyes of the Russian cat when it's born?

I'm keen to say yellow.

I'm keen to say yellow.

And what color is the sweatshirt you chose to wear today?

There you have it.

No coincidence.

And let's go a little further on this.

What color were the goggles of the Soviet slash Russian pilots during World War II?

Yellow.

So Gene puts this together and he says, okay, I don't trust these these damn authoritarians.

They're essentially bullies.

We have many authoritarians in our neighborhoods.

And so I have a whole chapter on, you know,

you're never going to get rid of the bullies.

You can do your best to avoid them.

But if things get out of hand, you may have to go after them.

But look out if you do, because you might lose it.

And Ralphie loses it.

when he goes after this bully.

And again, he loses it in a way that rhymes so beautifully with all of the obscenity that comes out of his dad's mouth, all of the obscenity that comes out of his own mouth when he loses.

Except I didn't say fudge.

Fudge.

Fudge.

Yeah.

PG-rated.

There was no PG-13 then.

It was either PG or R, and R would have killed it for a

Ralphie's swearing when he's beating up Scott was scripted because it's hard for, even though I think Billingsley was 13, a little older than the character when he did that.

But Darren McGavin made up all of the

stuff that he threw out into the air that's still hanging over Lake Michigan.

Whose idea, now, do you think that was Gene's idea or Bob's?

To do which?

To direct your main character by saying, look,

we either have to bleep everything out,

or

I need you to curse from the depths of your soul, but we have to figure out a way to do it that allows you to bring all the emotion into it, but with someone must have said, just use nonsense words.

That's it.

Was it Darren who did it?

Yeah, well, remember, they're going after a PG rating.

It was the next year, 1984, that the PG-13 came in.

They couldn't go with R.

They had some real restrictions.

Gene and Bob did not get along on the set over these kinds of things.

And eventually, Bob had to kick him off the set for good.

This is So classic.

So classic.

Because he fired from every radio station you ever worked for, basically.

Yeah, your story hits exactly at the way Gene was.

He was an iconoclast about almost everything.

Subversive.

Very subversive.

But always with a point to it.

You know, he was not a nasty person.

He was very observant.

He was getting at the underbelly of the way things really are, as far as he could tell, and wanted to bring those up to the surface for others to see as well, because he believed most people are meatballs.

And if you don't get at some truth, you know.

You know, I mean, sorry to free associate, but I'm just wondering what that movie would have been like without his narration, without old Ralphie, right?

I don't know that it ever would have landed because that's the added layer.

In fact, if I remember right, that exact weird formula gave birth to the Wonder Years.

Correct.

And Gene was livid about that.

No, really?

Oh yeah.

He said to me about the Wonder Years, which so much used his approach, his whole style, you know.

First of all, he tried to lie to me.

He could tell stories like anybody, you know, fib.

And he said, oh, they paid me a couple million dollars, Quinn, you know, just so that they could.

Then a couple years later, he said to me, yeah, those bastards, they didn't give me a dime on that.

They stole my concept and all.

I should have taken them to court and so on.

But, oh man, so much of that TV series, Wonder Yours, was really taken from Gene in some way.

So the so-called narrator, and if you use that term with Gene, he got upset.

He said, it's not a narrator, it's the older Elfie with the wisdom of commenting upon what happened when he was younger.

Okay?

And so you have to keep that in mind.

So you ask, how would the movie have done without that?

There wouldn't have been a movie.

I mean, that's what really holds it all together when you realize what's going on thematically.

There's so much nostalgia baked into his voice, irrespective of what he's saying.

It reminds me of there was a very famous actor, did a lot of voice work, Mason Adams.

With a name like Schmucker's, it has to be good.

Yeah, great voice.

That guy.

It just dripped.

with something beyond sentimentality, what the Germans called it Wirtschmaltz.

You know,

a yearning for a time that you remember but didn't actually live in.

Yes.

And that's why I called this story the story of his life.

Because from what I read, it seemed like for a long time people thought that Gene had written about his youth.

And he had

in some instances.

But there was so much embellishment and so much conflation of cities and time, right?

And so in the end, it really is the way I heard it.

It's the way he heard it.

Yes.

And he just shared it with a lot of people.

He wanted to get the reality without verisimilitude, right?

In other words, the term he used for this, Mike, was expressionism.

So you want to get at the inside feelings of someone by distorting the exterior.

Okay,

so for Ralphie, let's say in school, and he's imagining he's going to get this A, and the teacher's going to be so pleased, and one of the classmates are going to pick up Ralphie and carry him around, and he's imagining all this.

That's how he felt.

That was the internal reality.

And so Gene felt that if he could get at the internal reality, that people would automatically identify,

even if the exact thing would never happen,

but the feelings were real,

then he had a hit.

in that story.

He did something else, too, in a couple of other stories, like

Ludlow Kissel and the Dago Bomb.

The Dago Bomb, right?

Where he's basically writing about the 4th of July.

Yes.

Here he's writing about Christmas.

And so it didn't strike me right away, but when I think about why is this movie beloved?

Why did it catch on?

It is, I think, due to so many little moments that were relatable.

But the big one is right in front of us.

It's Christmas.

Who among us hasn't stood in line at a mall waiting for freaking Santa Claus?

And who among us hasn't been disappointed by that exchange?

And who among us doesn't remember the weird loss of innocence when we start to realize, ah man, I just saw the Sant in a parade and now he's over here and

I smell a rat.

You know, it's like underneath all of this is the suspicion.

the lingering suspicion that everything is bullshit.

Everything,

whether it's an oval teen ad or the fat man with the big beard that turns out isn't very nice and isn't really listening to me.

And you know what?

What kind of world am I living in if I can actually beat the snot out of Scott Farkas?

Like nothing is what I thought, and yet everything is what I remember.

Yeah.

The word that Gene used for this, and I explained it in the book, is mendacity.

He loved that.

We live in a world of mendacity.

And one of his novels, collection of stories that he called them novels, is A Fistful of Fig Newtons.

Right.

And in the very beginning of that one, he lays it out in terms of mendacity as the theme.

And he said, you cannot trust particularly

well-known people, the stars, the celebrities.

In fact, he said to me one day, you know, Quinn, he says, I serve on this.

with the guild.

He was in the, I don't know, the Writers Guild or one of the guilds out there.

He said, he's on this committee for HR.

And he told me who the other well-known people are who are on it.

I don't want to repeat their names.

But he said, they're all a bunch of bullshitters.

He said, I can't stand these people.

He said, they create all this stuff.

They make money off the American public, and they would never watch their own stuff.

He said, so you got the elites on the East Coast, you got the Hollywood bullshitters on the West Coast, and the only place you're really going to get true humor that gets at reality is in the Midwest.

And that's where he cuts his, that's where he grows up.

Right.

But that's also where he works in radio.

I mean, all his early jobs, right?

From St.

Louis and like there's Cincinnati.

Cincinnati.

I was going to say there's a WKRP vibe under this too, which by the way, I think part of the reason that show was so beloved is a lot of these same themes.

Just a collection of people broadcasting without the benefit of pictures.

It's so primal.

It's so, it's caveman stuff.

It's sit-down.

It's once upon a time.

Except in Gene's world, you're looking not through the lens of a camera, but through the bottom of a Coke bottle.

Everything is just a little half a bubble off plum.

Yeah, and related to nostalgia on that one, Gene said to me one day that he wanted to make sure when all of his stories were made into films, and he had four or five of them on PBS, public television, about three feature films.

I say about because he didn't want to associate himself with one of them.

But

he said,

I want them to be anchored in a time where people can identify the trivia, but just enough changes that they can't say precisely that everything fits that time because my themes are universal.

So there's great argument on some of these Facebook groups about a Christmas story as to exactly what year it was.

And people point out, well, this item over here, this artifact here, and so on, doesn't exactly fit with that.

And so on.

And that's the way Gene wanted it.

But he still wanted it to be anchored close enough in an area that he could have the specifics because he believed one of the things that makes a story go is the details.

And in order to get those details in, especially with a film, he has to describe visually those details.

It's so indulgent on my part.

I mean, part of the reason I write these stories is because I so envy

I don't envy it.

I think about Paul Harvey and I think about Gene Shepard and I think about, oh, maybe Charles Keralt or maybe Studs Turkel to a degree.

They're gone, you know, and it seems like,

as we said before, I would never think I could fill their shoes, but to follow in their footsteps is fun.

And my question is,

Gene was the ultimate.

Chuck's heard me say this a thousand times, but I

people are clearly in on the joke and some people are not and

Gene seemed to be

really in on it.

So if you could riff maybe on his subversive qualities maybe the I Libertine story about you know making something are you familiar with oh, yeah, so people should understand just how subversive he was and just like it went beyond a wink and a nod.

He would outright deceive his advertisers, his bosses, and sometimes his own audience in the furtherance of a good story.

He would.

That's the way he was.

You got it.

So he thought that

these best seller lists, this is bullshit.

People are paying people off to get on the best seller lists.

And he would say, you know, isn't it interesting?

You can be at the top of the best seller list in this paper, and according to this paper or magazine, you're not even on the top 10.

He said, there's something going on here, you know.

And so he said, what I'm going to do is put out a fictional book and try to get it on the bestseller list and show them,

show everybody, but especially my listeners who will be in on the joke, you know,

that this is nonsense.

The night people.

So he and Ted Sturgeon concocted this idea, that's a science fiction writer, that they would put this title out there, ask people to go into bookstores and all and ask for it.

And then if they started to get some traction with it, they would write the book.

Okay, but they first wanted to get the notoriety out there of a book that didn't exist.

And so they went ahead of this.

Now, exactly what happened, Mike, is not clear.

Okay, and I've tried to research this, and I have some friends that have tried to research it.

Did it really make it to any bestseller list before they wrote it and all?

That's not clear.

But it is clear that they put this in motion.

Then he and Sturgeon, in a few days, maybe three days, wrote a horrible book.

I had a copy of it one time just for the fun of

and

tried to read through it.

I couldn't do it.

It was so bad.

They called it I

Libertine.

Yeah.

I libertine.

So yeah, he was doing that kind of stuff all the time.

One time I was listening to him and he had a beer commercial on.

I think it was for Miller High Life.

And it was a long commercial.

And he hated commercials because they took away from his storytelling time.

And this commercial went on and on and on with the jingles and everything.

I love that beer and this and that and other thing.

And then if the commercial's over and there's silence, and all of a sudden Gene says something like this.

He says, all right, gang, you just heard all about this great beer.

I want you all to go out there tonight and buy about 20 cases of that shit.

And I want you to, and once you've had enough snoot full of that stuff, you're going to think the world makes sense.

So go and do that right tonight.

See, so then he could go to his boss and say, hey, I was pitching the product, you know.

Meanwhile, his boss is calling him in and saying, Gene, they're going to drop the advertising.

Do you know that his show was never profitable for WR?

I believe it.

Oh, it's true.

They kept it on because it was such a fantastic show, such great storytelling.

But he was always a problem.

One time they told him, we can't lose money anymore.

We can't lose money anymore.

He said, oh, okay, just wait, just wait.

And so he went on and he took, I think it was a soap.

I can't remember the name of the soap now, but he started doing ads for soap where nobody had ever paid for the ads before.

Yeah.

And And so there was this tremendous demand all around New York City, especially, New England, up and down New England, Clear Channel Station for this soap.

Meanwhile, the management calls him in and says, Gene, how could you do this?

We are in deep trouble.

You can't just start promoting products and all.

He said, Well, you wanted advertising.

I gave you advertising.

Call him and make a deal.

And then he bawled out Gene and Gene said, okay, to hell with you.

And Gene took off for two weeks.

Just didn't show up for a show.

And meanwhile, they had the soap manufacturer trying to say to the station, we want, this has been a boon for our sales.

We want get him back doing those commercials.

Well, Gene waited and waited and wouldn't take the phone call.

That's the way he was.

But again, always because he was trying to get at some underlying truth.

So he did not do it to offend people.

In fact, he distinguished between a comedian and a humorist.

And he said, Quinn, I am not a comedian.

I don't just go out out there on the stage with a bunch of one-liners and so on and nasty language to put people down and make fun of this or that.

He said, my humor is a kind of humility designed to show us the way we are as human beings.

So we can all say, aha, that is the way we are.

I listened to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld once, who said, there would be no Seinfeld show.

without Gene Shepard.

I wouldn't have a career.

He's the reason I'm in stand-up.

And even Jerry, who's pretty erudite, had a tough time describing why

it mattered so much to him.

But what it came down to was he was a kid at the right place in the right time with a transistor radio.

In the middle of the night, he could find Gene's voice

right on the heels of that crazy theme song.

What is it, the Bon Fry Polka or something?

Yeah, there you go.

Right?

Now heard racetracks around the world.

So the absurdity of all of it coming in the middle of the night,

it was just a magical thing for the listener.

And they were just standing by to do his bidding.

And that's beyond broadcasting.

That's another kind of connection.

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Yeah, I talked to Jerry Seinfeld about this

because Seinfeld says that he learned his, these are his words, his entire comedic sensibility from Gene Shepard.

Wow.

And Seinfeld's son is named Shepard.

I believe that's where he got it.

I didn't ask Jerry that.

But the thing is that people have said Seinfeld as a TV series is a show about nothing.

Okay?

You could say the same thing about Shepard's work.

Sure.

Unless you understand what's really going on.

In which case it's a show about everything.

It's a show about everything and all the stuff that really matters to us for the good and the bad and the ugly and how goofy we are as human beings.

And if you can enjoy that goofiness and maintain a sense of humor about it, you're in a much better spot in life.

When art becomes a disembodied limb in a fishnet stocking.

with a fringe lampshade in your front window.

That's the beauty of that.

It's not like it's like, okay, where are we going to hang this?

It's not just art, it's a major award.

It's a major award that's also really,

what did Ralphie call it?

Just standing there bathed in the soft glow of electric sex.

Yeah.

Come on, man.

Yeah, come on.

That's so beautiful.

So, in the beginning of the film, Higby's department store, kids are getting mesmerized by the gifts.

They're starting to get obsessed and all.

And Gene, writing the script as the older Ralphie, refers to what's going on around Christmas time as bacchanalia.

Right?

And then in the final scene of the film, he's got Ralphie getting off hip shots with his new rifle into the night.

So all of this is designed in part around this view that Gene had that human beings, but especially males, have this primordial quality.

where once the hormones begin to kick in, they become irrational in some ways, whether it's a fight, see, or whether it's falling in love with a car.

You know, that damn old, that sucker would freeze up in the middle of the equator in the summertime, you know, and that's life.

Yeah.

If we can laugh about it, we're going to be better off.

But there's also, like, in the middle of all the absurdity is something so incredibly virtuous.

And this struck me right away when I learned that the original title of a Christmas story was Duel in the Snow, taken from the scene in the movie where he finally gets the rifle of his dreams.

And what does he do with it?

He uses it to defend his family.

The burglars are crawling over the fences in that weird herky jerky motion, right?

They're so clearly the bad guys.

And he's so clearly the good guy.

He's got a white hat on.

And there he is is defending his home defending his mom his dad his little brother you know and so

the original story was a turn on that moment where this young pre-pubescent kid steps up like a man with a rifle to defend that which is nearest and dearest to him and so

It comes very late in the movie, but it really struck me as kind of the point of the whole thing.

Yeah, and these are throughout.

So it's not only Gene's life lessons that are seemingly negative or critical, but it's these positive things.

A great example I use in the book, and I just love what happens.

So

Ralphie is beating the daylights out of Scut, right?

That's blood.

Boom, boom, boom.

There's blood.

Oh, and he's got braces too, by the way, which is interesting.

Oh, yeah.

Scut does.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, shiny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With like rubber rubber bands.

Yeah, too.

So he's beating him up.

And you see in the background Randy, who's the tick about to pop, right?

He's so wrapped up.

He can't lean over because if he leans over, he's going to fall.

And if he falls, he can't get up.

He lay there like a slug.

It was his only defense.

It was his only defense.

So

yes, that's great.

I mean, Gene is so good with words.

So Randy finds Ralphie's glasses.

You see this in the background.

And somehow he manages to bend over without falling because he's going to be stuck and get those glasses and run home and give those glasses to mom and at the same time tell mom, hey, we got a problem here with Ralphie.

You got to go and help.

Okay, it's bad.

So there are all of these scenes too, as I talk about in the book, which Gene said this is the way a family should be.

Loyal.

Yes.

Loving.

Loving, loyal, loving.

And it's there again and again.

And much of that Gene didn't have in his own life.

And he wanted to work that into the movie.

It's partly him kind of

living out a time that he wished was better.

His old man was never around.

It was kind of a womanizer.

It was a sad deal.

Gene said to me one day, you know, I was, Quinn, he said, it was after school, late in high school.

His dad came home early from work.

He watched his dad go into the bedroom and he was packing up a suitcase.

And Gene went over and looked, he says, dad, what are you doing?

And his dad finishes packing it up, bam, he closes it, locks it up.

He says, kid, not Gene, but he says, kid, you'll understand when you get older.

And he walked out the front door, down the steps.

I've been at a house a couple of times in Hammond and got into a convertible with his blonde secretary and took off.

And Gene never saw his dad again.

So when you talk about somebody thinking that males can become terribly obsessive about chasing things

and the problems that that causes in life.

I believe that Gene never got over that whole thing and that dogged him.

He was married four times

and had a rough time with interpersonal relationships.

Yeah.

Wow.

What about, you mentioned Randy, who's just such a great, I was going to say marginal character, but he's actually not.

There are no marginal characters.

Even the scene where it's like eat any way you want night, which we used to have, right?

And the only way the mom can get the kid to eat is to just let him stick his face in the mashed potatoes.

And it's just this weird little sweet moment and the way she dresses him up for school and looks after him.

Yeah.

So nurturing.

Yeah.

And then you've got this other kid.

Before you go on, just a second here with the scene of how do the piggies eat, Randy?

How do the piggies eat, right?

The old man solution.

See, this is the male solution, according to Gene, is give me my screwdriver and my plumber's helper.

I'll jam it down the guy's throat, you know.

And then mom says, how do the piggies go?

She's the loving, nurturing one.

And in Gene Shepard's stories, including a Christmas story, the movie, the hero is always mom.

Other people can do nice things too, but the moms are the heroes as they were in Gene's old life when his old man took off.

Interesting.

So go ahead.

You were going to talk about that.

Well, I was going to try and find some parallel between the younger brother Randy with with Scott Farkas' nasty little toady.

Grover Dill.

Grover Dill.

Grover Dill.

Right.

And there's a great moment where Scott and Grover are like punching each other in the arm, just kind of playing around.

And then Scott really hits him hard, and Grover's like, hey, man, goddammit, that really hurt.

And so

what is his purpose?

Does he have a larger purpose, Grover Dill, in this whole thing?

So, yeah, as I talk about in the book, Gene believed that what happens is you start out with one bully, and then you have a couple bullies.

But the second and third bullies that get in line are never really as strongly bullies as the first one.

Okay, they are the toadies.

Great word, the toadies.

And then Gene said one time, you know, Quinn, when you're watching the news on TV and you see these authoritarian leaders from different countries, you know, and they're pronouncing this or that or what they're going to do or they're threatening somebody.

He said, you always see these these guys standing behind them that don't have any smiles, they don't have any motion.

They're all the toadies.

Like the Greek chorus.

Like the Greek chorus.

And if they get out of hand,

whoever that dictator is, is going to turn around and pound them in the shoulder.

See, that's the way they are.

And so, Gene said, You've got to have a toady there.

And then he said to me, I put this in the book because I thought it was such a funny line.

I'm trying to remember exactly how Gene said it.

He said, Grover Dill is getting prepared for a life of crime, but he will only be the hitman.

He will never be in charge.

And I thought, that's it.

Yeah, man.

I mean, underneath, I mean, not to overthink it, but since we are, I can't think of a moment in the film that doesn't drip with portent and double meaning.

or foreshadowing or some combination of all of it.

I mean, what's your riff on the frozen flagpole?

Yeah, so when I was teaching with Gene,

and first time we had like 40 students, 45 in this class, it was big.

And Gene would sit on the desk and just talk.

People would ask questions, and all he's going on and on, and I'm taking notes and all that.

Then I'm getting together with Gene.

I'm saying, okay, Gene, you're telling parables that have life messages in them.

Can we identify them all?

What's your worldview?

What is your, if I can put it in religious terms, what's your catechism about life, see?

And you know, I don't know.

So we're making notes, we're making notes on this, and I came up with 24, okay?

And then I looked at a Christmas story, and I thought, doggone it, 20 of those suckers are in one movie.

This guy is unbelievable.

So that no matter what scene you look at, it's related to this.

So here you have the flagpole scene, right?

This is a

fake flagpole.

It's plastic.

They put a hole in it and then a suction pump.

Grab the tongue.

Yep, so the tongue would be held to it and all.

But they go out there and they start daring each other.

So Gene says to me, you know, that's how it's going to go down.

You get these people in different countries who are in charge here or there, and some of them are bullies, you know, authoritarian bullies and all, and they start daring and double daring.

He's writing about mutually assured destruction.

There, that's it.

That's it.

And then he says, what happens when somebody does the really stupid thing and puts their tongue on there?

Everybody else is going to abandon them.

And they do.

They all go off.

See?

Time for school.

Time for school.

Good luck.

And the officials have to come in.

One of the students says, hey, it's the cops or it's the fire truck or whatever.

Look at what we got ourselves into.

And of course, Ralphie and his buddies there don't want anybody to know.

And so they say it's always better not to get known for the guilt.

And you can think of any politician who doesn't want to be known that they were responsible for the bad that happened.

They literally sell him out.

What was his name?

Schwartz.

Schwartz.

So Schwartz is standing there.

It was a breach of protocol.

Correct.

Protocol.

Yes.

It was a double dog there, and then he, you know.

They skipped the triple dare.

They skipped the triple dare and went to the triple

dog there.

Correct.

So he had no room to maneuver.

They put him in a corner, so it was a matter of honor.

There was no way out, so he does it.

And then just when you think he's going to get credit for doing the hard thing in a Truth or Dare game, he's abandoned.

I think Ralphie's the last to go, and he just stands here.

He's like, man,

they rang the bell.

I got to go.

I got to go, man.

And a similar thing happens when Scutt appears hanging upside down in the playground.

As a surprise,

he scares them all.

And so Ralphie is on the way to find out how great his theme is and how Miss Shields is going to get behind him and convince the parents.

And there was a scene that was not included in the movie where in Ralphie's imagination, again, this expressionism, Ms.

Shields goes to the house and talks to the old man and mom to say, you've got to get him the rifle and all.

At any rate, this is happening here, and Ralphie's looking at this and he says, okay, my buddy is going to get beaten up by Scutt.

I don't care.

I got to get in there and see what's happening with Miss Shields and my theme and how great my life is going to be.

So I'll talk to you later, you know, and he abandons them

over an obsession.

Why Life Boy?

Why Life Boy?

The soap.

All right.

So I know the answer to that.

Of course you do.

You're Quentin Schultz.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I got to know Gene Shepard.

What a trip that was.

And

Gene turned on me sometimes, too, and wouldn't talk to me and got angry with me about one thing or another.

But he was a tough guy to get along with.

But he had this fourth wife that was always the intermediary.

So I would call up and she would say, hey, Gene is really angry.

He doesn't want to talk to you now.

And I said, okay, when do you think he'll be ready to talk to me?

I'll call back.

And he would get upset about different things.

So life boy,

of all the names that you could pick, okay, when you think about that.

Oh, sure.

Life, the buoy.

The buoy.

The life buoy.

So that's what he picked.

He liked the red aspect of it too because it's more colorful.

But to have this life booy,

and what's his buoy at that point?

What's going to keep him afloat

is lying.

He cannot turn in his own old man who used this language 10 or 20, or he liked hyperbole.

400 times a day, the old man would use it.

So he lies and he gets his buddy in the middle of the page.

He worked in obscenity the way other artists worked in paints and all that stuff.

Yes, yes, yes.

It's great.

And that language is still out there.

I can tell you, every time I visit the Art Institute in Chicago now, and I'm from there, you know, I go in and visit, and they got the Degas and all.

But off in the distance, I hear, I hear the old man's language,

coming across that lake.

It's forever.

It's eternal art.

So, I don't know, Chuck, if you're tracking it exactly, but there's a Ralphie is changing the tire with his dad.

Right.

He drops the hubcat.

The nuts go everywhere.

He yells, oh, fudge, except he doesn't say fudge.

Right.

Okay.

Mother's horrified when she, the old man tells her.

So she goes on this snipe hunt to determine where he learned such an awful word.

And it's so beautiful because he won't rat out his old man.

So he rats out Schwartz.

Yeah.

And mom calls Schwartz and says, well, I'll tell you where he heard it.

And then you hear a scream over the phone.

And then poor Schwartz starts screaming on the other end of the line.

He's getting hit.

He's getting the crap knocked out of him by an angry mother.

Right.

And poor Ralphie's just like, you know, man, the retribution flies fast.

You know, over there, Schwartz was getting his, and that's when she shoves a bar of life boy into her son's mouth.

Now, what happens the next day?

Ralphie's out there with Schwartz and Flick.

Everything's over.

Everything's forgotten.

And of course, that's the way it was for me, too, growing up in Chicago.

And everybody, you had to do these sorts of things, but you still love each other as friends, right?

Some days you get your nose bloodied.

yep some days right but tomorrow's a new day and maybe somebody will stick their tongue on a flagpole maybe you'll get an a minus instead of a c minus or a c plus yeah i can't remember gene's exact words on this but it's along the lines of a justice administered you know

not real justice right consequences yeah

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Going back to

Gene as a man,

I mean, since you opened the door to it, four wives, he gets angry with you, he's a management challenge,

he's difficult, he's subversive, he's irreverent.

And this article that I would encourage people to read.

The Fagan piece?

Yeah.

Yeah,

Donald Fagan, of course, founding member, Steely Dan, like Jerry Seinfeld, was deeply, deeply impacted.

He was, in fact, the sub-headline in this article says, I was a spy for Gene Shepard.

He was one of the night people waiting to buy the Miller High Life or the soap or

go into a bookstore and demand a book that hadn't been written.

He was part of all that conspiracy.

And when he finally got a chance a few years later to see Gene live,

what a disappointment Donald experienced.

And it just made me want to ask you about the way our legends live in our

and what happens sometimes when we learn their feet are clay and so forth.

Yeah.

One thing I'll say is I've known a lot of very gifted artists over the years that work in different media.

And they are often testy, often difficult to work with.

They have their strong opinions about how things have to go.

And if you challenge them on those opinions,

or suggest that they have something wrong or it could be done better, you can quickly get into trouble.

And Gene had what I would say a lot of very successful and well-known comedians have, and that is an enormous ego with extremely low self-esteem.

Okay?

That self-esteem was so low that criticism was hard.

I once did a viewing of a Christmas story with Gene, and we had a good-sized audience there,

and the guy stood up right away and said, well

I don't like that Melinda Dillon as the mom you know she's young and sexy that's not the way the mom should be and there was dead silence and I thought oh no oh no what's gonna happen this isn't an audience you know everybody's there kids are there he says well make your own damn movie then next question

so and Gene had good days and bad days sure but he was difficult in relationship.

He desperately needed people to tell him how great he was.

was.

Somebody just sent me, by the way, he was doing a documentary on Gene Shepard, sent me a video clip of an interview with one of the producers at WGBH in Boston, where Gene did a lot of his early movies for public television.

And in that clip, the producer was talking about the fact that one of the things that most helped Gene feel good about his work was this professor from some backwater school in the Midwest who had a whole course on his work.

That course was me.

Didn't mention me by name.

And I'm thinking, for my work with Gene to mean a lot to him must mean that he didn't have a lot of people around him that understood his work enough to compliment him on the quality of what he's doing because the fan base was good to some extent.

Fans could be great.

Sure.

But how far can you take that?

So I think I helped give him some legitimacy

as an academic, whatever that means.

But yeah, he was a difficult guy.

And I think I liked Fagan's piece a lot.

And part of what he does in that piece is to say that Gene got more and more curmudgeonly over the years.

And you would see it coming out in his performances, especially, where you couldn't tell if he was with humor making fun of something because that's the way we all are.

We can laugh at ourselves, versus he was actually putting other people down that he didn't like or institutions he didn't like.

And that line got harder and harder to tell, and it got worse toward the end of his life.

What I took from Fagan's article was that Gene had an idea in his mind early on of who he wanted to be and where he wanted to go.

And

the radio days were sort of a parenthetical.

That wasn't his destination, right?

That's not really what he was doing or what he wanted to do.

It just happened to be what he was doing for a time.

And of course, it was during that time where he gave the world the great gift and many other wonderful stories, but this truly great gift for this time of year.

And the tragedy, which of course is always adjacent to the comedy, is that he didn't really know it.

And when he saw some success come from it, he felt ripped off.

He felt underappreciated.

God, that's just so poignant and so illustrative in so many ways and

so human.

Didn't Fagan also sort of say that Gene became the thing that he railed against?

Yes, he did.

The man, the square, the corporatist,

the careful,

the Ovalteen, you know, he became an advertiser.

Yeah, that's right.

Gene,

when he would move from one medium to another,

would say negative things about the medium that he previously worked in.

Right?

And so he leaves radio.

God, so.

And then he starts doing these interviews or in his performances saying that radio is a stupid medium.

It's only for dumb people and all.

And all of these people in radio are what really made him successful and well-known and sold his novels, his audience, his people.

How can you say that, Gene?

What I understood, again, going back to the big ego and the low low self-esteem, was that he always felt that there was a new better medium that he had to conquer to prove himself.

And in his mind,

I believe in my conversations with him that that medium was feature film.

Because at the time, once you made it there, you really made it.

Okay?

So then he makes a Christmas story with Bob Clark.

I mean, without Clark, it wouldn't have really been made in the great film it was.

And it comes out in 1983

around Thanksgiving, and it's pulled for most theaters by Christmas.

Oh, that hurt Gene.

That hurt Gene.

Because he thought this was it.

He liked the film.

There's one scene in it he didn't like.

We can talk about it if you want.

But

overall, he loved it, and he thought, this is it.

I've made it.

I'm at my epitome.

It did not get good reviews in general.

Siskel and Ebert in Chicago gave it great review, but in general it didn't get good reviews.

So here's Gene.

Now he's been bad talking his radio people because he's in movies, great movies, you know.

And then he's got this flop.

He had no idea it was going to come out in videocassette and the stores were going to put it all over the place and it was going to take off.

He had no idea.

He would be shocked today if he were still alive, died in 99 at how successful it's become.

The scene that he didn't like

He never told me if he argued with Bob Clark over it.

And I don't know if I could trust him if he said he did.

but it was the one that I consider one of the best scenes in the film.

And it's when on Christmas Day, it's in the evening, it's dark out, and the old man is sitting at the sofa

looking out the window, and mom comes down the stairs.

She turns the lights off.

He puts his arm around her.

Yes.

They both touch each other, and then they have the clanking wine glasses.

And the way Bob Clark put it was that he wanted everybody to know that in the end, mom and the old man really loved each other.

And so in spite of all they've been through, all the arguing, and in fact, in spite of the fact that mom, as I say in the book, ended that romance, that trophy wife, she broke it.

You always hate it.

You always hate it.

In spite of all of that, Bob Clark said, we have to have this.

And Gene thought, it's a little too sappy.

It's a little too romantic for my taste.

Yeah, you can have them there.

Things are okay.

And I thought to myself, yeah, Gene, that's the way Gene would think about it.

Because in his own life, things never even got repaired with a lot of his relationships that he broke over the years.

There was no happy ending for him.

Yeah.

But, you know, it's also, I mean, good for Bob if he stuck by his guns.

He did.

He did.

Hey, one other comment about the leg lamp that I forgot to make, which is really important.

Gene took a lot of his root ideas from the Bible, okay?

Biblical stories.

When you look at biblical stories in a kind of mythological sense, everything's there, right?

Oh, sure.

So he said to me one day, he said, okay, the old man's got the leg lamp, which is the most artificially human concocted thing you could imagine.

And where is he going to put it?

Not only in the window for everybody to see, but he's going to put it with the plants, with mom's plants.

I said, what, Gene, what does that have to do with anything?

He said, that's her Garden of Eden.

The plants.

Of course.

And so the old man is taking this terrible thing, this affair.

The serpent.

The serpent and putting it right there.

And so he says, the way it's going to be broken is that she is going to have the watering can that keeps the garden going, the flourishing of human beings

in the world over, and breaks it there, gets it out of the Garden of Eden.

That's great.

That's how deep Gene was with this stuff.

It's spectacular.

Gosh.

I have a question.

You mentioned before that you printed out the story because you had made notes about Mike's story.

Do you have those?

And are there things you wanted to comment about it?

Well, I mean, if we wanted to get literalistic about some of the things in the story that are interesting,

one is...

One is that Gene.

Just when I thought we were out of time.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's just the kind of thing that you always ask people, what did I get right and what did I get wrong?

Yeah, you sure you want that, Mike?

You never asked that question.

Well, look, full disclosure, and my audience has heard this forever

on the shallow end of the pool.

These stories are designed, they're rooted in fact, but they're designed to make you want to learn more and that's why you're here.

But some moments are completely cinematic and concocted.

You know, I have no idea if there was in a an exchange with a night watchman who noticed he was carrying the Playboy that he read the story.

None of us knows that.

I don't know that, but it tracks, right?

Could have happened.

It could have happened.

And so in the same way, Gene wrote a movie about a man and a woman who loved each other very much, even though he came from a broken home.

Yeah.

Right?

I don't apologize for it, but I'd love to know if, in broad strokes, I'm on the right track.

Yeah, just some funny tidbits of things here.

The Duel in the Snow story was originally titled, Red Rider Nails the Hammond Kid.

The Hammond Kid?

I thought it was a Cleveland kid, but okay.

The Hammond kid.

The DJ is interesting.

Gene would always say to anybody who said he had ever been a DJ that he had never been a DJ because he had such a low view of DJs.

Okay.

Chatter and plausible.

But you are correct in that he got into the station at night to play songs, and he didn't want to play those damn songs.

He hated that crap.

He didn't listen to radio that way anyway.

And he wanted to start telling his stories.

He had points of view of things.

Why did Flick say, what is it, you're full of beans?

Beans, of course, have to do with flatulence.

Right?

So I've heard.

Yes.

And so you're full of flatulence.

You're a fart mouth.

But there's actually an earlier reference to that that Gene had in mind.

Oh, you've got a whole section.

Why are farts universally funny?

Yeah.

That's interesting.

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

He would come up with these expressions and then he would go to the library and say, what's the root of that?

Does it have an additional deeper meaning to it?

And if it did, he really liked it because then he had layers of meaning.

It was like he needed permission to be silly.

And I get it.

If you're going to write about flatulence, like with a straight face, you have to balance that somehow.

Ben Franklin has a great collection of his life's wisdom, and it's called Fart Proudly.

Right?

That's interesting.

Like, if you're going to be silly, you better be equally smart or thoughtful in some other way, somewhere down the line.

Then I think the viewer starts to, or the reader starts to trust you a little more, or starts to, you know, think about you differently, or more interestingly, as he would say.

Right.

So it's not done just for some simple little gaggy thing.

You know, that's what

Seinfeld said to me in terms of talking about Shepard's approach.

It's not just one-liners that are meant to get a quick little turn-on,

but rather it's something deeper that it points to.

And obviously, flatulence is one of those things.

Well, it's universal, and it's taboo.

And it's ridiculous to deny it.

And it's loved by kids.

Of course.

Yeah.

Of course.

By the way, there's a scene in the movie with the Bronx cheer.

Do you remember that?

Ah.

No.

Not many people remember this, but in Gene's mind, this was really important.

So they're in the Oles, and they're driving.

They've got the Christmas tree on top of the car and they're driving along and all of a sudden,

well, before they have the blowout, they're singing.

Three of them are singing.

The old man is looking out the window and he's really unhappy.

The two kids and mom are singing.

You remember what they're singing?

Jingle bells.

Jingle bells, yeah.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, and so on.

They finish, and at the very end, all of those three go,

okay?

They give a huge Bronx cheer.

Right.

And the old man is so angry.

And Gene said to me, you know, that's the way these guys get.

They don't have fun when they should have fun.

He should be singing along.

And then that's the setup for the flat tire.

Yeah.

And then he goes out, and the old man is the one that knocks over the hubcap.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's not Ralphie's fault.

It's not Ralphie's fault.

And the old man should apologize and say, I'm sorry, Ralphie.

And by the way, you just use that F word.

I'm not going to tell mom because I use that word all the time.

And Gene said to me, an old man's never going to do that.

He's not going to admit what he did.

But Gene said to me, this is an important theme in life.

We all need to let go like you do with a fart or a Bronx cheer and just have fun.

Let go in life.

Yeah.

And I think that's true.

We take life too seriously often.

Man, what a gift.

He's given us and what an odd way to get to it from the pages of Playboy.

I'll land the plane with this.

I don't remember having a better time talking to a guest about a subject that I care about than you.

Thanks, buddy.

I have one expression about this.

Always try to love your audience as your neighbor.

No kidding.

Go for that audience.

Don't go for all the other people that are telling you what to say or the suits.

And that's what I learned in teaching.

And I became a very good teacher based on loving students.

And in fact, Gene's storytelling transformed me from a halfway decent teacher into a spectacular teacher.

And if Gene were alive today, I wish he were, I would tell him that over a cup of coffee.

Here's the last story about Gene.

I want to end on a positive note.

Great.

We go out for coffee at a diner.

It's colder than hell.

We go into this warm diner.

We get a nice booth and we're sitting there and

We both order coffee, cream with me, Gene's straight up black.

The coffee comes in the mugs, traditional mugs, right on the table.

And Gene looks at his, he picks it up, it's nice and warm, he's got his hand around it, he smells it, gives it a little taste.

He looks at me, he says, Quinn,

you know when you have a really good cup of coffee, there has to be a God.

Nice.

The book is called You'll Shoot Your Eye Out with an Exclamation Point, Life Lessons from the Movie A Christmas Story by Quentin Schultz.

There's an E at the end, but he doesn't pronounce it.

This book is a gift.

The movie's a gift.

You were an unexpected pleasure.

Seriously.

A happy and Merry Christmas to you.

And thanks for making the time.

And thanks for your whole staff.

You're great to work with you.

Well,

the rod and my staff, they comfort me.

I'm just trying to avoid the rod.

Right.

With less rod in it.

Thanks, folks.

Talk to you next week.

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