Xanadu starts filming
HOLLYWOOD (AP) Larry Gordon and Joel Silver had this dream: they wanted to make a movie that would be like the great musicals of the Forties.
Impossible, they were told. Except for a freak like “Grease,” musicals were losers in the marketplace. Recent history has been littered with failures: “At Long Last Love,” “Lost Horizon,” “New York, New York,” “The Wiz.”
Still, Gordon and Silver persisted. And now “Xanadu” is being filmed in and around Los Angeles with a cast headed by Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly, and Michael Beck. The score is by Jeff Lynne of the rock superstars Electric Light Orchestra and by Jeff Farrar, composer of hits for Ms. Newton-John.
The other day the “Xanadu” company was working in the Beverly Hills heartland at Fiorucci’s, a onetime movie house converted into a boutique. It was a dance number in which Gene Kelly danced among the clothes racks with the girls who might have stepped right out of “Singin’ in the Rain.” The lead dancer looked hauntingly like Cyd Charisse, which is why Kelly chose her.
“ON THIS PICTURE I will not touch a toe,” Kelly announced to the producers after he signed for “Xanadu.” At 67, he figured he’d had it as a dancer. Yet there he was, moving to the playback music with his old time grace. Maybe not doing splits or somersaults, but dancing. Producer Larry Gordon watched the scene with obvious delight.
“Can you imagine what a thrill it is to be working with Gene Kelly?” mused the bearded producer. “And to see him dance after he warned us - after we had already signed him - that he would not touch a toe. Gradually he agreed to do a little dancing, then more.
“Not that he’s easy. When we met with him, he said, ‘Now I want this, and this, and this. He knows exactly the way things should be done.”
No one is more aware of that than the director of “Xanadu,” Robert Greenwald. A young veteran of theater and television, this is his feature film debut.
Between shots Greenwald remarked of Kelly, “This man is not just an actor and dancer, he’s also a producer, director, choreographer and writer. It’s not only a challenge to direct him on my first picture. It would be the same on my 50th picture!”
GORDON, WHO HAS produced “Hard Times,” “Hooper,” “The End,” and the current “The Warriors,” described the history of “Xanadu”:
“Joel Silver was an executive for me with the assignment of developing projects. He happens to be a real film buff, and he wanted to make an old-fashioned musical. We developed the story for Warner Brothers, which declined to go ahead. Maybe they were right to do so. A musical fantasy is chancy, and at that time we didn’t have Olivia or Gene”.
“Now Universal had stolen Joel from me. He was still excited about ‘Xanadu,’ and he sold the studio on taking it over.” The plot involved Michael Beck (the gang leader in “The Warriors”) as a frustrated artist and Ms. Newton-John as his helpful muse. Kelly plays an embittered rich man who is persuaded to finance Beck’s dream.
Joel Silver, who is overseeing the film as Universal executive, commented: “Before we started shooting, I got a 35mm print of ‘Cover Girl’ (the 1944 classic with Kelly and Rita Hayworth) and ran it for the entire company, right down to the grips. Although it isn’t basically a fantasy, that is the kind of feeling I would like to get in Xanadu.”
Universal Pictures is gambling $10 million that the Gordon-Silver vision of “Xanadu” will succeed at the nation’s theaters. The result will be known in August 1980.