Gene Kelly Back From Xanadu
By Dick Kleiner
HOLLYWOOD (NEA) There may be some hope for musical-dance movies yet. Would you believe Gene Kelly is coming back?
Of course, Kelly has never been away, exactly, but he’s been directing and appearing in little non-dancing cameos and just being his usual charming self. But it’s been a long time between pirouettes for Gene Kelly, at least on the screen.
He is going to do some dancing in a film called “Xanadu,” which is now shooting here. It is more of a ’70s or ’80s musical than a ’30s or ’40s musical, but there is an echo of those golden oldies here and there.
Choreographer Kenny Ortega says that, in one sense, “Xanadu” is a throwback. It is a fantasy, Ortega says, and he thinks it may remind people somewhat of the fantasy quality that musicals like “One Touch of Venus” had.
The fantasy element was being shot as I watched. Kelly and a young actor named Michael Beck have acquired (I won’t burden you with too many of the plot twists and turns) an auditorium. And each one fantasizes what he would like to do with it.
Big Band
Thus, Kelly daydreams up a big band of the ’30s and the daydream is also populated by figures out of that era, who come to life and dance a rousing jitterbug number.
Simultaneously, Beck, strictly a the modern man, imagines auditorium turned over to today’s music, contemporary sounds and contemporary types of artists.
This way, of course, the producers hope to entice everybody into the theater not just the kids who went to see “Grease” and “Saturday Night Fever,” but also their parents who used to go and enjoy Astaire and Rogers and, of course, Kelly.
They were shooting the Jitterbug number. Ortega, the choreographer, and Robert Greenwald, the director, had invented a wild and amazing dance sequence. While the band members in the background played (or made believe they were playing) the dancers in the foreground did their wondrous things.
It was climaxed by one of the lead dancers, Jeff Osser, leaping over a bunch of his colleagues, landing right in front of the camera and popping a bubble-gum bubble in his partner’s mouth.
“I just hope I don’t land on the camera,” Osser said, as he prepared for one more take. Не didn’t, but he did fall a few times as he landed badly.
Olivia Newton-John stars with Kelly and Beck in the film. And she goes back and forth between the two fantasies, seemingly as much at home in Kelly’s daydream as in Beck’s.
Greenwald, the director, is so young looking that at first I mistook him for somebody’s go-fer. This is his first movie, but he has directed many stage productions on Broadway and elsewhere.
Naturally, he is pleased at having Kelly in his first feature film. He says, with a grin, that he has been showing Kelly a few things “and he seems to be catching on.”
Greenwald says that Kelly, who knows which way show biz is going these days, has told him that “the movie is just a trailer for the record album.”
That may be an exaggeration, but only a small one. With Olivia Newton-John and an original score (five songs by Jeff Lynne of The Electric Light Orchestra and five songs for Olivia by John Farrar) the album could be a biggie, but that depends, first of all, on how the movie does.
One interesting note is that the contemporary music, in Beck’s half of the fantasy, will not be disco. It is the collective feeling of the writers, producers and Greenwald that they would be a lot safer, economically, to steer away from disco.
“We feel,” Greenwald says, “that disco has been done and overdone. And we worry about disco’s future. We have a film that won’t be released until August, 1980, and we don’t want to take a chance that, by then, disco will be dead.”
But he believes and so do Kelly and everyone else connected with this project that musicals are coming back and that “Xanadu,” when it comes out next summer, will face a market eager to see films with songs and dances in them.
For many of us, though, it will be the re-emergence of Gene Kelly that will be exciting. As Kenny Ortega says, “He is still a genius - I learned more from him than I taught.”