(from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY # 943, July 13, 2007)
With Xanadu roller-skating onto Broadway next week, EW looks back at the making of the 1980's gloriously terrible Olivia Newton-John film - and why its cult followers still believe in the magic
By Clark Collis
Broadway productions based on box office hits are incredibly common these days. But what about shows based on Hollywood debacles? Some critics counted this film among the worst ever committed to celluloid. When it was released, in 1980, the London Evening News described it as "the most dreadful, tasteless movie of the decade." It has become a byword for cinematic catastrophe. It helped consign the bi screen musical to the dustbin for decades. Its name.
Xanadu
The musical fantasy - starring Olivia Newton-John as the leg-warmer-wearing lead (and Greek Muse) - almost single-handedly spawned the Golden Raspberry Awards, an annual celebration of onscreen dreck. After paying 99 cents to see a double bill of Xanadu and the Village People epic Can't Stop The Music, "Razzies" founder John Wilson demanded a refund but was refused. "Xanadu is a touchstone of movie wretchedness," he rages 27 years later. "Seeing Gene Kelly, who did Singing In The Rain, doing these clunky roller disco moves with people throwing bowling pins over his had - it is almost like he had gone to hell before he died."
The plot of the movie Xanadu, though bizarre, is easy enough to describe: A frustrated painter named Sonny Malone (Michael Beck) decided to open a roller disco after meting a comely, but mysterious skater named Kira (Newton-John). He's helped by a jazz musician-turned-construction magnate (Kelly) who, decades before, had a relationship with someone who eerily resembles Kira. In fact, however, Newton-John's character is an ancient Muse whose romantic feelings for Sonny transgress immortal law. Eventually their love triumphs over this obstacle. The End.
What this summary leaves out are the film's amateurish special-effects which include silhouetting Newton-John in a supposedly ethereal glow (which actually makes her look like she's just returned from a holiday in Chernobyl). Nor does it highlight a conclusion so abrupt it makes the last episode of The Sopranos seem like a model of dramatic closure. And there's the raft of laughably terrible lines: "I'm a Muse!" Newton-John attempts to tell Back at one point. "I'm glad somebody's having a good time," he replies.
Though technically an 80's film, Xanadu was very much a product of the late 70's, a period when studio executives were scrambling for ways to entertain the young moviegoers who were flocking to Star Wars, Grease and Saturday Night Fever. At times, the music-driven mix of fantasy and romance seems to have been Frankenstein-ed together from footage cut from those three movies. But Xanadu tapped into something new: the then hugely popular phenomenon of roller disco. A dazzling, pastel-heavy take on the late-70's skater chic permeates the entire movie, from the interior of its titular roller palace to Newton-John's many costumes - which loom large in the memory of Xanadu director Robert Greenwald: "One of the points I think it's important to make us the hidden political meaning in the film. I want people to look carefully for the politics in the leg warmers."
Greenwald is joking, of course. The 61-year old has spent the last few years directing documentaries like 'Outfoxed: Rupert Murdock's War on Journalism', 'Wal-Mart: The High Coast Of Low Prices' and 'Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers'. And he's not the only one of Xanadu's architects whose participation seems incongruous in hindsight. This testosterone-free cinematic confection was produced by Larry Gordon, who went on to make Predator and Die Hard, and co-producer Joel Silver. Yes, that Joel Silver, the action-movie titan who partnered with Gordon on Die Hard and Predator and spearheaded other ballistics-heavy extravaganzas like Hudson Hawk and The Matrix. In 1979 Silver was a young executive hell-bent on producing a discofied remake of the 1947 Rita Hayworth vehicle Down To Earth. It was a project Silver wanted to make so badly that he once claimed he was prepared to "stab myself in the back" to get it off the ground. (Silver declined to be interviewed for this story.)
"You have to understand that Joel loves musicals," explains Gordon. "I think when he came [to LA], he was more familiar with musicals than action films." Newton-John, then white-hot from the success of Grease, was an obvious choice to play Kira. She, in turn, suggested an unknown Australian named Mel Gibson be cast opposite her. Instead, the part was given to Back, who'd starred in Gordon and Silver's previous collaboration, The Warriors.
The production, which bean principal photography in September 1979, was often turbulent. Newton-John broke her coccyx during a roller-skating lesson. ("It was very painful," she remembers. "But the show must go on, right?" And then there was the script, which according to the actress was being rewritten on the hoof during filming.
"I wish it was being rewritten on the hoof," sighs Greenwald. "It was being written on the hoof! In my enthusiasm for the idea of doing a musical, I signed on before there was really any kind of script." (To be fair, as Gordon points out, "a lot of movies are rewritten all the way through production.")
"You were not quite sure why you were doing what you were doing," recalls Kenny Ortega, one of the film's choreographers, who went on to mastermind the dance sequence in One From The Heart and Dirty Dancing before directing Disney's hugely successful High School Musical TV movie. "You know, it's kind of nice to know what's talking you into a musical number and why you're coming out of it."
Xanadu was released in August 1980, backed by a lavish marketing campaign that included Xanadu boutiques in department stores, where copies of the film's costumes could be purchased. But the disco beat that had hypnotized America in the wake of 1977's Saturday Night Fever was now causing a nationwide headache. On July 12, 1979, just a few weeks before the filming began on Xanadu, a "Disco Demolition Derby" was held at Chicago's Comiski Park, during which 10,000 dance-floor-friendly records were blown up with explosives. Disco no longer ruled. In the lingo of the new era, disco "sucked." And then the movie critic's weighed in. Variety called it "Truly Stupendously bad!" Roger Ebert, "Mushy and limp!" Esquire, "In a word: Xanad-don't!"