![]() ![]() Kubrick was nominated for The Shining! Never pay attention to the Golden Raspberries.) ![]() (At the first-ever ceremony, Xanadu auteur Robert Greenwald won the Worst Director award, beating out fellow nominees like Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, and Stanley Kubrick. The film helped inspire the creation of the Golden Raspberry Awards, the toxic irony-choked award show dedicated to recognizing the worst films of the year. But when it came out in the summer of 1980, Xanadu landed as a critical and commercial bomb, and it effectively immolated Newton-John’s chances at movie stardom. ![]() It also became a successful Broadway musical in 2007. These days, Xanadu has a rep as a camp classic, the kind of thing that gets shown at Alamo Drafthouse film parties. (I’m getting all this from Wikipedia forgive me if I’ve somehow mischaracterized it.) He’s a former big-band leader who has his own history with the muse. Hollywood musical legend Gene Kelly is in there, too, in his final screen role. Their relationship has religious implications, and it revolves around a roller-disco nightclub that turns out to be magical. She plays Kira, an actual mythical muse - as in, a daughter of Zeus. In Xanadu, Michael Beck, the guy who played Swan in The Warriors, is an album-cover artist who falls in love with Olivia Newton-John. I value my movie-watching time too much for that. I do a lot of research for this column, but I have never seen Xanadu. It makes less sense that the musical in question was Xanadu. It makes sense that somebody tried to build another big-budget musical around her. Newton-John wasn’t the same kind of electric screen presence that Travolta was, but Grease made her a whole lot more famous. Travolta was already a newly-minted movie star when he appeared in Grease, though the picture certainly cemented his status. “ You’re The One That I Want,” the Olivia Newton-John/John Travolta duet from the end of the film, was one of two songs from that soundtrack to hit #1. Its soundtrack was the #2 album of the year, behind the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Grease was the highest-grossing movie of 1978. It was the kind of smash that could, at least in theory, turn a British-Australian balladeer into a box-office sensation. Grease was about as big as a movie can be. Other than 1970’s Toomorrow, a Don Kirshner-produced psychedelic sci-fi musical that nobody saw, Newton-John’s first movie was Grease. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.įor a hot second, Olivia Newton-John was a movie star. ![]()
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