Entertainment

Straight shooter

All Ralphie wanted for Christmas was an official Red Ryder carbine action, air rifle “with a compass in the stock, and this thing that tells time!”

And all 12-year-old Peter Billingsley wanted was a metal detector.

“I was convinced I was going to find buried treasure in my backyard and retire at a young age,” recalls Billingsley, who starred as Ralphie in “A Christmas Story.”

Many bottle caps later — long after that 1983 flick became a cult hit — Billingsley, 41, finally struck gold: as a lead producer of Broadway’s “A Christmas Story, The Musical.” After the warm reviews it won upon opening last month, it may be kicking alongside the Rockettes — leg-shaped lamps and all — for many holiday seasons to come.

Which is a nice payback, considering all the folks who’ve told him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”

“My career’s gone on,” says the actor/writer/director/producer/friend of Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau, whom he worked with as an executive producer on both “The Break-Up” and “Four Christmases.”

“And yet ‘A Christmas Story’ would come up at junkets. I’d get requests around Christmas to go on the morning shows to talk about it, but why?”

Minus the glasses, but with the same electric blue eyes, Billingsley is still recognizably Ralphie. A native New Yorker, he’s the great-nephew of Stork Club founder Sherman Billingsley and attended PS 6 before his financial-consultant dad moved the family to Phoenix, Ariz.

He’d acted in more than 120 TV commercials, a couple of feature films and a handful of TV shows before he was cast in “A Christmas Story,” a movie that was hardly a slam-dunk.

“It’s not the sexiest pitch,” Billingsley concedes. “It’s set in the 1940s, a kid wants a BB gun. The studios were like, ‘What?’ ”

But the suits didn’t count on two passionate guys: Jean Shepherd, the radio bard whose (fictionalized) Christmas story this was, and “Porky’s” director Bob Clark, who worshipped Shepherd.

“Bob told me he was going to pick up a date and he was driving and he heard this [radio] voice,” Billingsley says. “He was so engaged by it that he kept circling for 45 minutes to listen.” The date never went anywhere, but Clark did. He reached out to Shepherd, and for a dozen years they fought to make an unsugarcoated tale about a family grappling with the holidays.

Shepherd, the golden-voiced narrator of the film, wasn’t one to compromise. “Bob would go to the restroom between takes, and Jean would run over and go, ‘Say it like this, not like that!’ ” Billingsley recalls. “And Bob would run back and say, ‘Get away from my actor!’ But it was all done with love and caring.”

As the film’s following grew, there were requests for remakes, but Billingsley didn’t bite: “It was a good movie, it stood on its own. There was no reason to do anything.”

And so the years passed. The boy who played Flick — the one whose tongue gets stuck on an icy flagpole — reportedly went on to make porn flicks. (“I really don’t know,” Billingsley says.) Shepherd and Clark died. Billingsley, now in LA, enjoyed a “Christmas Story”-free life of producing and directing films in which he made Hitchcock-like cameos until three years ago, when a Kansas City troupe decided to make “A Christmas Story” a musical.

Billingsley liked what he heard and later saw — what’s not to like about a leg-lamp kick line? — and signed on. The show played Seattle and Chicago before arriving on Broadway, this time with live dogs; on the road, they just went with recorded barks.

Billingsley tells the kids in the cast what his parents told him: Have fun! “I say that life will take them where it does,” says Billingsley, who still has the rabbit suit his 4-foot-6 self wore in the movie, as well as the BB gun. “I tell them that this is Broadway — enjoy it, and don’t worry about what’s next!”

And whatever you do, don’t let the critics shoot your heart out.

‘A Christmas Story — the Merchandise’: Broadway’s hottest new souvenirs

Not since those Killer Bunny slippers flew off the shelves at “Spamalot” has a show offered such hot merch as “A Christmas Story, the Musical.” The Red Ryder BB gun’s just for display (you can buy the real thing online), but feel free to empty your wallets for the following:

THE LEG-SHAPED LAMP

This pulsating piece of pulchritude — otherwise known as “The Major Award” Ralphie’s Old Man wins and sets up proudly in the window — comes as: a night light ($20), a set of string lights for your tree ($33), a 40-watt desk lamp ($55) and a life-size replica ($250), which is shipped in two big boxes marked “fragile.” Or, as the Old Man pronounces it, “fra-GEE-lay.” It’s Italian.

THE BUNNY SUIT

This polyester/cotton blend homage to the gift Ralphie receives from his well-meaning but clueless Aunt Clara is about the furthest thing from a BB gun money can buy. At $125 each, it’s probably not hopping off the concession stand anytime soon, but who knows? “They make great pajamas,” says “ACS” producer Jerry Goehring says. And they’re fireproof, so put down those matches!

OH, FUDGE!

That’s what Ralphie’s supposed to say when he drops the lug nuts for the Old Man’s tire change. This is real fudge baked from Goehring’s wife’s grandmother’s recipe. It’s made in Connecticut and personally schlepped to the theater by Goehring, who says it’s all-natural and has a shelf life of about four weeks. If you can wait that long.