However, by 1979, the seeming musical gap separating ELO's neoclassicism and ONJ's decidedly MOR approach to pop music was becoming less apparent. ELO's 1979 album release Discovery would be the most MOR/pop record the band would ever record. In fact, two of the singles from the set, Shine Alittle Love and Last Train To London were heavily disco influenced; exasperated ELO fans would refer to this album as 'Disco-Very'. With the success of the Grease soundtrack, Olivia finally had the latitude she sought to record more 'adult' material. Thus the pairing of these two poles was seen more plausible than what had originally thought.
The club itself was filmed at two locations. The exterior was another old LA landmark, the Pan Pacific Auditorium. The Auditorium was built in 1935 and quickly became a popular venue for large concerts and sporting events; it was one of the stopovers utilized by Elvis Presely during his first appearances in LA. The Pan Pacific was closed down in 1972 and was for a moment forgotten. It would be declared a local landmark due largely to it's architectural design; it was a prime example of Streamline Modern design that was so prevalent though out the 20's and 30's, particularly it's front entrance. For this reason, Xanadu's producers chose to use the Pan Pacific's facade as the exterior of Xanadu for the film. This area is located next to LA landmark Farmers Market which is on the corner of Fairfax and Beverly Blvd.
Xanadu's interior was built in Studio 4 of the Hollywood General Studios (then the home of France Ford Coppola's Omini Zeotrope); it took roughly three months to build the two-story mammoth set. Its design was in keeping with the architectural look of the Pan Pacific exterior.
The original treatment of the screenplay suggested an animated sequence depicting the love developing between Kira and Sonny. The job was handed to Don Bluth, an animation producer/director who had made his reputation working for the Disney Studios; among Bluth's directing credits were The Rescuers and Pete's Dragon. By the late 70's, Bluth had parted company with Disney and was attempting to establish his own studio with a handful of fellow dissident Disney ex-staffers. Xanadu would be the first major undertaking of the small fledgling animation house. In order to save some money for his little studio, Bluth ended up animating the entire scene on tracing paper by himself and had his staff xeroxed it on plastic animation cells and painted them.
The special effects were handled by R/Greenburg Associates in New York City. Before Xanadu, the company was doing commercial and industrial film work as well as assembling movie commercials and trailers ('Alien' and 'Empire Strikes Back' being their early clients). Then the company expanded into traditional SFX, bucking the Hollywood tradition of all other SFX studios in L. A. Their first major break came when they were assigned to 'Superman' to design and execute the opening and closing credits. From there, they ended up with projects for 'Flash Gordon', 'Altered States' and 'Xanadu'. This outfit was the first to developed a 'slit wipes' effect that was used to fade in and out between scenes, like in Xanadu.
One final detail of casting needed to be worked out. It was to be the 'rock' band for the 'Dancin'' number. The group picked to represent the 80's standard-bearer was The Tubes.
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