An inattentive crew member on the set of the holiday classic “A Christmas Story” nearly sent the movie’s young star to the ER — and it had nothing to do with anybody’s eye getting shot out with a Red Ryder BB gun.
In an interview with IMDb’s “That Scene with Dan Patrick” podcast (as reported by Entertainment Weekly), Billingsley revealed a bizarre screwup left him severely sickened while he was filming a dream sequence in which his character, Ralphie, is fantasizing about saving his family with the BB gun he so desperately wants for Christmas.
“The scene says he’s dressed as a sheriff… and the script says he’s chewing tobacco,” Billingsley explained. “So the prop man comes up to me, he’s got this pouch, and it says ‘Red Man’ on it, and he gives it to me. I don’t know the difference. I said, ‘What do I do with this?’ He says, ‘Jam it down in here. Don’t swallow, just spit.'”
About 15 minutes later, Billingsley said, “the world starts tilting, I start sweating, my stomach starts hurting, and I start throwing up. [Director Bob Clark]’s like, ‘Cut, cut, what the hell’s going on?’ The prop man says, ‘Oh, I gave him Red Man.’ Bob says, ‘What are you doing? He’s 12 years old!'”
As a result, production had to halt until Billingsley could recover. “So we shut down, I go and lay on the couch in the living room of the set for about 40 minutes until I can get this s**t out of my system,” he continued.
“And then they did what they should have done, someone had a good idea,” said Billingsley. “They took a bunch of raisins, squished them together, and then stuck that in my mouth, so I had brown spit. It was a very different time, obviously. He just gave me straight up, whole cut leaf Red Man.”
