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.”