Xanadu (1980)
Xanadu exists firmly in it’s own girly space-time continuum. An era of blousy peasant skirts slit to the waist, rollerskates, leg warmers, and hair ribbons. It marks the death of New York disco, the end of Studio 54 decadence, and harkens the dawn of Southern California, neon clothes, and workout tapes.
Xanadu is as subtle as children’s breakfast cereal, and had a marketing campaign to match! MCA Records president Bob Singer boasted that by the time Xanadu came out, everyone in America would have heard the name six to eight times. It featured the puffed-corn sweetness of Olivia Newton-John — a triple threat who could act sing and d̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ is pretty — sprinkled with a high-fructose soundtrack by Electric Light Orchestra. The script is crammed with references to art and literature (the title is lifted from the opium-hazed poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), revives the three-part harmony of the Andrews Sisters, pays homage to golden age musicals by Comden and Green. After the success of Saturday Night Fever and Grease, Hollywood musicals seemed to be on the verge of a new platinum age. Gene Kelly was called out of retirement to bless the venture. It couldn’t fail….
Perhaps it was overconfidence in Olivia Newton-John as a star, or the studios’ greedy attempt to cover so many marketing trends at once. Maybe it was the wooden acting of Michael Beck who replaced heartthrob Andy Gibb as the male lead. More likely it was the ham-fisted movie directorial debut of Robert Greenwald who seems to have never seen a golden age musical, or the embarrassing choreography by Kenny Ortega who’d done stage shows for Kiss and Cher, or the often blurry photography that is smeared with Richard Greenburg’s sparkles and neon outlines — originally hired just for the opening titles but eventually contributing over 80 optical effects, until the production ran out of money…. The nightclub set alone cost an estimated $1,000,000, with 237 dancers in the finale! Whatever the reason, Xanadu became a disaster of Titanic proportions.
The movie opens with an artist in crisis: Sonny a cute but frustrated painter (Michael Beck) is ready to give up on his dream. He rips up an unfinished sketch and scatters the pieces into the wind. They flutter down in front of a neon-colored mural of the nine Muses who come to life and dance around aimlessly like lost Solid Gold dancers to the song I’m Alive by ELO. The sisters then beam up to heaven in rainbow streaks, but one comes back as Kira (Olivia Newton-John). Her earthly task is to unite Sonny with Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) a charming former bandleader turned industrialist whom Kira visited in 1945. With Danny’s money and musical experience and Sonny’s artistic vision, they will create a roller-boogie nightclub to inspire a new generation: Xanadu, a temple to Terpsichore, the Muse who not only inspires dance, but is assigned to protect and remember dance’s legacy. Kira helps Danny and Sonny weave the club’s aesthetics that blend looks and sounds from different eras.
Gene Kelly has two dance numbers. The first is a flashback duet with Olivia Newton-John and we see that they had a kind of innocent romance in 1945. Newton-John moves admirably but can’t touch the fluidity and grace of Kelly. I’ve always felt Kelly is kind of schmaltzy and annoying with two exceptions: What a Way to Go where he lampoons his own star image, and Xanadu where his talent and good nature elevate the amateur production. At age 67 Kelly, still in control of his body, is able to add flair and expression to each little step, yet he is generous to his lesser costars and never upstages them. Class act.
Unfortunately, his second dance number is a trainwreck from start to finish. Kelly goes on a shopping spree at Fiorucci’s to ELO’s All Over the World, donning pimp clothes and cowboy fringe as mannequins come to life and dance with the day-glow freaks and punk rock weirdos working at the store for minimum wage. It’s all very LA — and a microcosm of everything wrong with the project. Dressing up in different costumes and appropriating moments from classic musicals results in a superficial spectacle that is less than the sum of its parts. In later interviews Kelly remembered Xanadu as a total disaster and wondered how modern films were ever finished!
Sonny and Kira fall in love, expressed in a stupid roller skating number Suddenly set in an audio recording studio filled with movie props (??). Here Olivia is cautiously lead-footed as she putters carefully around the contrived scenery of palmtrees and backdrops — she’d fractured her coccyx while filming the sequence and wasn’t anxious to have another bad fall. Kira confesses her divine origin, tells Sonny she’ll never forget him, and vanishes in a beam of light. Heartbroken, Sonny pulls out of the disco’s opening. Danny is unsurprised by Kira’s supernatural identity and urges Sonny to find her. Sonny stumbles across the mural of the nine sisters and rollerskates through it, arriving in a Tron-looking Olympus populated by disembodied sparkles and glowing lines. Sonny asks the gods to allow Kira to stay with him on Earth, but “it’s against the rules”. Sonny is expelled and the plot grinds to a halt as Kira sings the snoozy ballad Suspended in Time in one continuous camera take while outlined in neon.
Back on Earth, Danny and Sonny are opening the nightclub. It is a spectacle of tightrope walkers, mimes, jugglers, zoot-suited pop-and-lockers, retro-usherettes, and rollerskating minions clapping and chanting in unison like sieg heil-ing fascists…. Danny skates at the front of the pack leading the cheers: “Xan Ahh Doo (clap-clap-clap) HO…!” Terpsichore appears looking sophisticated and glamorous in a sleek Halston pantsuit and sings the title song while dodging jugglers’ batons and trick skaters. The frenzy builds until her eight sisters take the stage. A genre-bending medley ensues including a cute Betty Grable-esque tap dance, a tiger-striped vinyl rock number, a country dance, and a finale reprise with the sisters in geometric costumes and Olivia Newton-John as a mylar space queen with tinsel wig. For a brief moment Sonny is alone in the club as the muses transform into light and beam back up to heaven. He gets a last glimpse of wholesome Kira in her peasant skirt and hair ribbons before she blows him a kiss good-bye and follows her sisters in a kaleidoscopic explosion….
Universal’s marketing assault backfired, resulting in not one but two roller-boogie movies beating Xanadu to the theaters, forcing the script to be rewritten after shooting had begun. By 1980, critics were tired of disco, had seen enough rollerskating movies, and (perhaps unfairly) were ready to crucify Xanadu as a ridiculous, over-produced flop. Xanadu was such a disaster-piece that Michael Beck never worked in serious film again, despite starring in the imaginative gangland fantasy Warriors. Classic movie fans rued that Gene Kelly’s final musical would stain his unparalleled legacy in cinema musicals. Director Robert Greenwald was honored with the very first Razzie Award for worst director, and steered clear of musicals eventually to become an important director of documentaries — a double feature of Xanadu and the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music was the inspiration for the Razzie awards!
Olivia Newton-John had less to be ashamed of. Even though Xanadu stunted her movie career (it would take Two of a Kind to finally kill it), she walked away with a number-one single Magic, and a string of memorable hits including her duet Suddenly with Cliff Richard, and the title song with ELO which reached number one on the UK charts. The following year she would transform her wholesome image with the winking commentary on the ‘80s workout craze (Let’s Get)Physical which held at the top of the charts for ten weeks. At the time she claimed rather tongue-in-cheekly that Xanadu hadn’t hurt her career because not enough people had actually seen it, but admitted she was more interested in the music and would have been disappointed if the album had flopped. Disco became another genre for Newton-John to topple as she effortlessly slid between country and pop charts, gaining fans across three continents.
Everyone else, from animator Don Bluth to ELO frontman Jeff Lynne, distanced themselves from the film. Bluth, recently emancipated from Disney Studios, got involved when Don’t Walk Away was cut from the film and Lynne insisted the song be restored despite there being no room or purpose for it in the plot. Bluth was busy making The Secret of NIMH and had only 12 weeks to create the fantasy sequence where an animated Olivia Newton-John transforms first into a fish then a bird wearing leg-warmers. Bluth kept a small team of animators at his home until it was complete, and it stands alone from the rest of the film as a charming romantic cartoon filled with roses and sparkles. Nearly identical sequences would be recycled for Bluth’s Thumbelina…. After charting fifteen top-20 hits in the ’70s, and four more from the Xanadu soundtrack, Lynne dissolved ELO replacing his band of 13 years with synthesizers. He went on to record the synth-pop soundtrack for Electric Dreams and eventually released his demo-version of the title song with his own voice instead of Newton-John’s.
When I bought my “rare” Japanese import soundtrack in 1994, Xanadu was almost forgotten except for a few die-hard disco fans. Today it enjoys a revival on DVD, sing-along midnight movies at The Castro in San Francisco, and eventually a Broadway flop helmed by John Farrar, Newton-John’s longtime producer. It is silly and naive and at even at its best laughably bad — at it’s worst a trainwreck reminder of the cinematic musical craft that has been lost forever. But there will never be another girly-sparkle and neon-outline movie that so earnestly urges us to believe in the magic of disco. Xanadu is an artist’s utopia, where beauty is the highest order and history is not forgotten, where multi-racial sisters unite in dance and music, and every cute boy is an almost-artist who just needs the right girl to inspire him to greatness.
