‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ began as a metro Detroit story

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Bill Shea

The December 1980 issue of National Lampoon magazine.

They don’t teach you in journalism school about what to do when Caitlyn Jenner calls you at midnight from Australia while you’re violently stoned on a 20-mg edible.

In my 30 years in the news business, I’ve learned most lessons the hard way, such as when mercurial celebrities phone you unexpectedly a day early for an interview after you’ve gobbled weed to help you sleep, your brain will snap into something like that of a functioning journalist as a professional survival mechanism.

I was able to take down Jenner’s words and not burst out manically laughing when she’d occasionally dip into musty boomer MAGA drivel. I am, after all, a total professional. Also, I attended a third-rate state college that didn’t have a formal journalism school, so I had to learn all this shit on the fly to survive.

Still, that automatic preservation instinct has served me well over the decades in this terribly fun and awfully shitty business. Not because I was blitzed all the time — I didn’t get stoned until my mid-40s, and thank you for that mental health life preserver, Michigan voters — but because you never know what’s going to happen day-to-day or even hour-to-hour in journalism. I’ve been tear-gassed, shot at, and personally lied to by Donald Trump in my career.

If you’d told me a dozen years ago that I’d be filling in for the venerable Joe Lapointe as a columnist for the Detroit Metro Times, I’d have scoffed at the audacity of such a notion. But a personal political satori — sparked by living and working in downtown Detroit, and learning from and listening to Detroiters — catapulted me from being a dull, replacement-level moderate Republican to becoming a dull Leftist union organizer, social democrat, wealth-spreading radical anti-fascist who sympathizes with Robespierre and Smedley Butler rather than with William F. Buckley Jr. and whatever monstrosity passes for an intellectual today on the Right.

My life being a self-inflicted minor Greek tragedy, the capricious and rapacious Gods of Shareholder Value looked unfavorably on that ideological metamorphosis, and I found myself among the score of journalists defenestrated by The New York Times-owned Athletic in June 2023 after several years of writing about culture, politics, diversity and equity, economics, technology, and media in sports.

It may be a dusty, shopworn cliché to say that getting laid off was the best thing to happen to me — I’ve been privileged to have had some monumentally fun experiences in my life as a globetrotting degenerate Bohemian libertine — but getting laid off did permit me the time and space to do some things for myself that I found impossible while working in corporate journalism.

For example, I’ve been working on a madcap near-future satire novel that’s my only remaining life goal, and I launched billshea.com, a free essay site (I loathe the word blog) that gives me a platform to write what I want without some corporate drone editor telling me I cannot describe Donald Trump as an “enfeebled senile and lazy fascist dipshit” and “a racist sexpest” who is surrounding himself with “a dismal 4chan imperial court of malicious, corrupt eunuchs and vindictive supplicants from the impacted bowels of the MAGA Cinematic Universe” who are gleefully trying to “turn America into Ayn Rand’s Confederate Gilead.”

I guess I wrote that here, too. Vive le Metro Times!

The freedom to be critical and write what I believe in, without being shackled to impossibly bullshit notions of anodyne both-sider objectivity, is sweet freedom and relief. I can write what I believe, fairly and with my bias honestly in the forefront, without fear of losing my health insurance.

So that’s what I’m doing on my personal site, and here to a lesser and more polite degree for the next few weeks. Wrapping up the year being a second-string Joe Lapointe ain’t too bad.

I do have more to share than my white-hot political contempt for Trump and his weird Silicon Valley anti-democracy oligarch cronies, and the cancerous totalitarian-bent white nationalist MAGA cult that’s poisoning our republic with its vicious medieval peasant stupidity and fear.

Lest you think I’m a boring scold, I do have my pleasures. Christmas, for example. I’m a militant atheist and appreciate the December holiday more for its Saturnalia and Yule roots, but I love Christmas music and movies — National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation most of all because it’s basically a documentary of my Midwestern upbringing in the late 1970s through the end of the ’80s.

I was Rusty; now I’m Clark. And maybe Eddie.

It wasn’t that long ago that I learned that the story upon which the movie is based (“Christmas ’59” in the December 1980 issue of National Lampoon magazine) takes place in Grosse Pointe — and not in suburban Chicago like in the film. And the Griswold family name is taken from Detroit’s Griswold Street.

The story and later screenplay were written by Lansing-born John Hughes, best known for writing and directing classics such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Hughes, who died in 2009 at age 59, grew up in Grosse Pointe, and that’s why you see Alan Ruck’s Cameron Frye wearing a No. 9 Gordie Howe jersey in Hughes’ masterpiece, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This is per Hughes’ son James, who in a great Q&A published on The Henry Ford museum’s blog a few years ago, recounted the many metro Detroit links to his father’s work.

Next week, I’ll tackle the cherished tradition of the absurdly wealthy capitalist tycoons, all screeching “no socialism” in metro Detroit and elsewhere, demanding public handouts for their private-sector projects, aka “MOM, THE BILLIONAIRES NEED MONEY AGAIN!”