LOS ANGELES – Film director Bob Clark and his son Ariel were killed in an early morning collision Wednesday along a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, authorities said.
Clark produced, directed and co-wrote the classic holiday film “A Christmas Story” in 1983 and was the producer of the “Porky’s” films, along with about two dozen other features.
The crash was reported about 2:20 a.m. on the highway just south of Bay Club Drive. Police said Clark, 67, of Pacific Palisades, and his son, who was 22 and lived in Santa Monica, were pronounced dead at the scene.
Los Angeles Police Department investigators said Clark was driving a 1997 Infiniti Q-30 sedan southbound on the highway when the driver of a GMC Yukon, Hector Valazquez-Nava, 24, of Los Angeles swerved and hit Clark’s vehicle head-on.
Set in the late 1940s and adapted from humorist Jean Shepherd’s novel “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,” “A Christmas Story” stars Peter Billingsly as Ralphie, a young boy determined to get a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.
The film was not an immediate box-office bonanza, but it has grown in popularity.
In a 1997 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Clark said the movie struck a chord with audiences because it deals with a “special time and special feeling. Shepherd’s material had the truth and heart in it.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
