Why Xanadu almost ended Olivia Newton-John’s Hollywood dream

When Olivia Newton-John’s death was announced on August 8, it did not take long for people to realise that she had died, as coincidence would have it, on the 42nd anniversary of the release of her film Xanadu. When it appeared in cinemas in 1980, it was regarded as one of the most notorious artistic and financial flops in the history of Hollywood; a mad, incoherent mishmash of high-blown artistic aspirations with an incongruous selection of music. 

The trade paper Variety described Xanadu as “a stupendously bad film”, and the film writer John JB Wilson was so staggered by its ineptitude that he created the notorious Golden Raspberries Awards, or “Razzies”, to honour the worst achievements in cinema in any given year. 

By rights, Xanadu should have sunk into obscurity, and been regarded as little more than a punchline to a hoary comedian’s jokes about the post-Grease career of Newton-John. Yet, remarkably, the film has undergone a reassessment since its release. Not only was it the basis of a successful Broadway musical, but the picture itself has seen writers argue – only partially tongue in cheek – that far from being a bizarre failure, it is in fact one of the most daring and adventurous pictures of its era. 

Certainly, it occupies a surprisingly elevated place in popular culture. When the news of Newton-John’s death broke, she was often described as “the Grease and Xanadu star”, and celebrities were quick to pay tribute to the film; the actress Gabrielle Union tweeted “Me and my sister watched Xanadu more times than I could count”, and the director Edgar Wright, an aficionado of classic music, noted that the title track remained “a classic pop song”. 

But how did a film that was once a byword for excess and misconceived artistry come to be a respected, even adored artefact from its leading star’s career? 

At the time of Xanadu’s release, Newton-John was one of the hottest stars in Hollywood, thanks to the extraordinary success of Grease, which had appeared in cinemas two years earlier. While its male lead John Travolta was already a known quantity thanks to the similar acclaim with which Saturday Night Fever had been greeted the previous year, Newton-John – despite having a successful career as a recording artist that stretched back to 1971’s If Not For You album – had only been taken seriously as an actress after her performance as Sandy Olsson. 

She was nominated for a Golden Globe, won a People’s Choice award for Favourite Female Musical Performer and was able to take her pick of projects. Few would have betted against her next film being another major hit. 

Which is why, in retrospect, it seems strange that an eccentric script by the little-known writing duo Richard Christian Danus and Marc Reid Rubel caught her eye. It was a loose remake of the 1947 musical comedy Down To Earth, which starred Rita Hayworth, which was itself the sequel to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr Jordan; the latter had been successfully remade by Warren Beatty in 1978 as Heaven Can Wait. But what Danus and Rubel had in mind was altogether wilder and weirder than what Beatty had come up with. 

Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu Credit: Alamy

Their conception of Xanadu was to depict a love story between Sonny Malone, a failed Californian artist, and a mysterious and enigmatic woman called Kira who, as is the way of these things, turns out to be the goddess and muse Terpsichore. This metaphysical romance would be complemented by a series of songs, half of which would be performed by Newton-John and the other half by the British rock band ELO. Meanwhile, the director hired for the film, Robert Greenwald, was best known for his feminist road movie Flatbed Annie and Sweetie Pie; he was not, perhaps, an obvious choice for a big-budget musical with fantastical elements. 

Nonetheless, once Newton-John had committed to the project, it began to take shape. Although her first choice for the male lead – “an unknown Australian called Mel Gibson” – was unavailable, his replacement Michael Beck proved suitable, and the film secured a coup in the casting of the legendary Gene Kelly in the role of Danny McGuire, a cynical construction tycoon who harks back to his halcyon days in the Forties as a big band leader who was himself in love with Kira, and whose artistic success deserted him when she disappeared. 

The then 68-year-old Kelly had all but retired from cinema, preferring to make appearances as the host of such compilations of his earlier work as That’s Entertainment!, and he was flattered to be asked to return to the genre that had made him famous. Danus and Rubel’s script even included an amusing meta-element; Kelly’s appearance was a direct homage to his appearance in the 1944 musical romance Cover Girl, in which his character – Danny McGuire – fell in love with Rita Hayworth, allowing Xanadu to homage yet another film from the heyday of musical theatre. 

The original poster for Xanadu Credit: Alamy

With the hottest star of the day in the lead, a soundtrack apparently stuffed full of pop gems in waiting and the reassuring presence of the veteran Kelly in support, it seemed as if Xanadu should have been an enormous hit. Yet unfortunately, there were immediate problems in its execution. 

Greenwald saw the film as a low-budget exercise in – if not quite gritty social realism – a more grounded execution of its soaring themes, and wanted to concentrate on the roller-disco material, which had proved to be such a success for Saturday Night Fever. The producer Lawrence Gordon disagreed, and threw everything that he could at the picture, seeing the budget escalate to $20 million; Grease, which had the virtue of being a known and popular property, had cost less than a third of that. 

The script was rewritten and changed to a point of incoherence, meaning that the Sonny Malone character’s work as an artist all but disappeared from the final film, making the central premise irrelevant. And many of the major flourishes  – an animated scene by Don Bluth, later to become a major director himself; Kelly’s last ever song-and-dance number with Newton-John, which he choreographed as a specific homage to his earlier appearance with Judy Garland in 1942’s For Me And My Gal; the songs by Newton-John and ELO – were individually striking but added up to very little in the context of the confused and, at times, barking mad picture. 

Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu Credit: Alamy

When it was released in August 1980, it was to critical derision and audience disinterest, although the soundtrack was a notable hit; Newton-John’s single Magic was a chart-topping hit, as was the title track, which remains a stalwart of a certain kind of club night to this day. 

Both Kelly and Newton-John disassociated themselves from the film afterwards; his only recorded comment on it was to sigh that “the concept was marvellous, but it just didn’t come off”, and when Newton-John was subsequently asked where it left her film career, she quipped: “Unemployed.” 

She reunited with Travolta for 1983’s unsuccessful Two Of A Kind, but endured the humiliation of being nominated for Worst Actress in 1981’s inaugural Razzies. ELO’s Jeff Lynne, meanwhile, confessed to Rolling Stone: “I wrote half the songs, though I’ve never seen the thing.”

Olivia Newton-John in a 1980 publicity photo for Xanadu Credit: Bridgeman

Greenwald, meanwhile, won Worst Director, an accolade that the critic Roger Ebert had hinted that he deserved when he sighed that “the dance numbers in this movie do not seem to have been conceived for film… the movie is muddy, it’s underlit, characters are constantly disappearing into shadows, and there’s no zest to the movie’s look.” He quipped that a major dance set-piece was turned into “an incomprehensible traffic jam with dozens of superfluous performers milling about.”

By rights, that should have been the end of the story. Yet Xanadu maintained a cult reputation of sorts, as generations who idolised Newton-John and Grease turned their attention to its strange, quixotic successor. Although the film was a box office flop on release, it was a success on VHS, where its camp qualities made it required viewing for the cynical and intoxicated, and the soundtrack continued to be much prized in isolation. 

It was because of the music’s continued popularity that the film was adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 2007, which leant into the silliness and kitsch of the subject matter, and saw critics line up to praise it. The New Yorker announced: “Xanadu is far sleazier and cheesier than conventional musical theatre, and it points out just how tame most other musicals are.” Newton-John, still the best of sports, not only attended the opening night, but joined the cast at the curtain call, firmly associating herself once again with the project that had once apparently spelt the end of her acting career. 

It is appropriate that Xanadu takes its title from Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan, in which the titular Khan did “a stately pleasure-dome decree”. Kubla Khan was conceived and written under the influence of opium, and its lavish excess – until Coleridge’s drug-induced poetic reverie was notoriously interrupted by “a person from Porlock” – remains one of the highpoints of Romantic poetry. 

Xanadu is a one-of-a-kind fantasia, the like of which will never (for better or worse) be seen again on screen in our more cautious and unadventurous era. 

It would be perhaps hyperbolic to compare the poem to the deeply strange film that was, in part, inspired by it nearly two centuries later. But there is a similarly unhinged and pleasingly go-for-broke ethos that means Xanadu, for all of its obvious flaws, should indeed join Grease as a fitting memorial to one of the most talented and likeable stars of musical cinema.