HAIR 1979

Not having been a huge fan of the original stage production of Hair (Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt MacDermot’s legendary “American Tribal Love - Rock Musical”), I think I’m one of the few to find Milos Forman’s screen adaptation—which deviates significantly from the source material in that it actually has a plot—to be a flawed but vastly superior improvement upon the original. The music was always great, but only the movie version got me to care about who was doing the singing.

Evolved from the free-form, counterculture, guerrilla theater experience taking place on college campuses across the country in the late '60s, Hair debuted on Broadway to great acclaim and much brouhaha in 1968 (nudity, swearing, hippies…on Broadway?) almost a year after 1967s so-called "Summer of Love" signaled both the pinnacle and simultaneous pop-cultural co-opting of the hippie/flower-child movement. Yet, much like A Chorus Line, Hair, when viewed today, is one of those Broadways shows whose reputation as a groundbreaking cultural phenomenon may be a little hard to fully comprehend.

As a 10 year-old living in San Francisco’s Haight St. district in 1968, I was too young to have been a participant in the whole Flower Power scene, but when it came to bearing witness to all the social and political changes afoot, I have to say I had the best seat in the house. Even then it was odd to think of one's neighborhood as the hub of a "movement" the entire nation was talking about. Mostly I remember the poster stores, the head-shops, the buttons with slogans, the streets full of panhandling hippies, and vibrant color everywhere...especially in the clothing. (Sartorially speaking, the hippie movement hit my older sister pretty hard. Once recognizable by her Catholic School uniform, virtually overnight, sandals, love-beads, headbands, tie-dyed tops, and tinted granny-glasses became her standard mode of dress. It was like a Timothy Leary reversal of The Stepford Wives.)

Ren Woods (Sparkle, Xanadu) sings the hell out of "Aquarius" in the film's visually explosive opening sequence.

Never fully the blissed-out, flowers & freedom era depicted by the nostalgia-prone, I recall the late '60s as a time undeniably colorful and charged with a kind of “winds of change” electricity (each day brought something new in fashion, language, ideologies, music), yet also a time seriously untethered and terrifying. I’ll always remember how confounding it was to be surrounded by so much talk of peace and love while the TV filled my head with nightmare images of Vietnam, the Zodiac Killer, assassinations, riots, and Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. I suspect the hopeful message proffered by Hair's anti-war themes struck a chord with a disheartened America favoring the promise of a Utopian “Age of Aquarius” over what seemed to be the existing dark specter of Barry McGuire's “Eve of Destruction.”  

Treat Williams as George Berger

John Savage as Claude Hooper Bukowski

Beverly D'Angelo as Shelia Franklin

Annie Golden as Jeannie Ryan

Dorsey Wright as Layfayette (Hud) Johnson

Don Dacus as Woof Daschund

Had Hair been granted a film adaptation back in the late '60s or early '70s - when Hollywood awkwardly courted the youth market by green-lighting any and every druggy, nonsensical, counter-culture script that came along (Skidoo; Head; Alex in Wonderland; Angel, Angel,Down We Go); there’s a good chance the show’s somewhat meandering free-form structure would have reached the screen intact. Mercifully for me, the passage of ten years and one flop 1977 revival contributed to the perception of Hair as a timepiece too dated for unaltered big-screen transitioning. This precipitated the enlistment of playwright Michael Weller (Moonchildren) to fashion an honest-to-god storyline around Hair’s marvelous score of songs, and, in lieu of the then-requisite bearded twenty-something fresh out of film school to helm the project, we have Oscar-winning director Milos Forman (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), a man who was actually making films about '60s youths in the 60s (his 1971 comedy Taking Off is a favorite). Certainly in the late '70s the climate for Hair was right, what with the proliferation of films being released dealing with the '60s and the Vietnam War: Coming Home (1978), The Deer Hunter (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979).

If one goes into Milos Forman’s Hair with any expectation of the film being a faithful adaptation of the Broadway show, watching the movie is likely to be a disappointing experience. The order of the songs has been rearranged, their intent altered, and many of songs are sung by totally different characters. I think the best and most rewarding way to view the film is to look at is as a completely different animal; an artistic expression unique unto itself. Where the play invited us “outsiders” into the world of the hippie tribe onstage, getting to know them through vignettes and pantomimes draped over a thin schematic structure. Foreman’s film maintains the perspective of the outsider and tells the story of Claude Hooper Bukowski (Savage), a naïve Oklahoma farm boy let loose in Manhattan for two days prior to his induction into the army. Depicted as an innocent adrift in a strange land, Claude is taken under the wing of a small band of hippies (their unofficial leader, Berger [Williams] first seen burning his draft card) and introduced to drugs, the girl of his dreams, and, most likely, the most fun he’s ever had.

Forman and Weller fashion a very entertaining and ultimately moving film out of what could have been just a timepiece jukebox musical. The film maintains the play's irreverent tone and captures rather well the generation gap conflicts and authority figure clashes that exemplified the era, but (and this is a big plus for me) never resorts to the kind of ageist oversimplification of that whole "don't trust anyone over 30" sensibility. Forman's Hair has an originality that far surpasses most adapted screen musicals, and a powerful and sensitively rendered final act that gets to me each and every time.

I Got Life
Berger (Williams) disrupts a dinner party to the consternation of all but an admiring Charlotte Rae (seated, dressed in pink).

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

The experience of seeing a film based on a musical you’re very familiar with can be like going over a check list. You find yourself subconsciously keeping tally of how the film measures up to what you are already know. Hair destroys all of that from the first frame. It’s one of the most ceaselessly surprising musical adaptations I’ve ever seen. Whether structurally, musically, or visually, Hair consistently goes in directions different from where you think it’s headed. Just as things seem as if they will remain rooted in realism (the film makes great use of Manhattan locations), up pops a surreal or stylized sequence that totally blows you away. And the effect is exhilarating and exciting. All of a sudden the old feels brand new and you’re actually listening and watching, not comparing.

In one of Hair's more charming examples of an unexpected twist; an anticipated violent confrontation between loitering hippies and mounted police turns into a challenge dance routine.

PERFORMANCES

In populating his cast with relative newcomers to film (Savage, Williams, D’Angelo) and those making their screen debut (Dacus, Golden, Cheryl Barnes) Milos Forman succeeds in bringing a kind of ragged freshness to the film that’s perfect for the material. The more experienced do most of the heavy lifting, although newcomer Annie Golden is surprisingly good and a standout in her scenes. John Savage, fresh from The Deer Hunter, sidesteps the obvious clichés and makes his more reactive character into someone a great deal more dimensional than I would have expected possible. Treat Williams, saddled with an unfortunate wig, does the impossible by making an otherwise insufferably smug character into someone sympathetic and likeable. I think perhaps I’m fondest though of Beverly D’Angelo who is always such an offbeat and fascinating comedienne. I always wondered how Robert Altman ever passed her up. She seemed tailor-made for his ensemble pieces.

Making her film debut, Cheryl Barnes walked away with unanimous raves for her searing rendition of "Easy to Be Hard." 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Of all the numerous delights and surprises in Hair, the film’s one true inspired stroke of genius was in getting Twyla Tharp to do the choreography. An unassailable talent and legend in the world of dance, I’ve never cared for her work either before or since; but here, with her loose-limbed, eccentric, wholly stylized flailings evocatively capturing the look (and, more importantly, the feel) of the era…her work is beyond perfect. Nothing else would have worked. Not jazz, not literal recreations of dances of the era. Tharp's choreography (and whomever was responsible for the clever staging and some of the witty visual concepts) are ideally suited.

Ellen Foley(above center) sings the virtues of "Black Boys" while below, Charlayne Woodard, Nell Carter (center), and Trudy Perkins give equal time to "White Boys." The surprise twist given this number is hilariously ingenious and thoroughly audacious.

Melba Moore and Ronnie Dyson (members of the original Broadway cast of Hair) perform "3-5-0-0" at an anti-war demonstration staged in front of the Washington Monument.

Frequently, musicals have trouble sustaining their momentum through the third act, but Hair is one of the few movie musicals that come to mind that lack any downtime. It's extremely well paced and never lags for me. Even after multiple viewings. For every sequence of note I've mentioned, there are about three others that I don't have room to go into. Suffice it to say that the "Hare Krishna" number is one of those "worth the price of admission" sequences, and that it's more fun to discover the myriad actor cameos and conceptual surprises on your own.  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The highest compliment I can pay Milos Forman's adaptation of Hair is that he has succeeded in excising virtually everything I never cared for in the play (chiefly its morally superior proselytizing and romanticizing of the young) and created a film of considerable heart and maturity. More even-handed than the theatrical production, I find in Forman's version of Hair to be a film that sees the past with a clarity born of distance. Sentimental, yes. Idealistic, yes. But the one thing it isn't is nostalgic. I like how it looks at the '60s: it holds both hippies and the Establishment to task, yet still finds it to be an era of optimism and hope.

THE AUTOGRAPH FILES

Nell Carter - 1980

Copyright © Ken Anderson

SPARKLE 1976

Perhaps it's because I'm too old to know precisely what a Jordin Sparks is (it's not, as initially presumed, a small town in Virginia, but a recording artist). Still, I had no idea there was to be a remake of this cult-worthy 1976 Irene Cara film (slated to star said Ms. Sparks) until I began to do a little Internet research for this post.

Maybe this is a harbinger of some kind of covert Hollywood covenant to redo the entire Irene Cara oeuvre (we've already had a reboot of The Electric Company and a limp remake of Fame). If so, I'm going to seriously lose it if somebody announces a remake of 1985s Certain Fury—itself a kind of a gender-flip remake of Sidney Poitier's The Defiant Ones—which featured Oscar winners Tatum O'Neal and Irene Cara as a pair of mismatched ex-cons handcuffed to one another. (I kid you not.)

So now there's to be a remake of Sparkle…

If Hollywood is so concerned about piracy, you'd think they might first start "in-house" and set an example by ceasing this endless plundering of their own past successes and begin to cultivate a little originality. But I digress.

Sparkle. The place and time is Harlem/1958. The girl-group plotline evokes The Supremes and all they represent as conflicting symbols of aspirational Black success and crossover assimilation. The small-time show-biz milieu of Harlem jazz clubs and the seedy R&B/soul circuit pay homage to the Black roots of rock & roll while the music prefigures the emergent voices of inner-city youth and the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement.

Irene Cara as Sparkle Williams

Lonette McKee as Sister Williams 

Dwan Smith as Dolores Williams

Philip Michael Thomas as Stix Warren 

Dorian Harewood as Levi Brown

Sparkle is a '50s girl group take on the oft-told show-biz saga of gifted performers from humble beginnings who discover, only too late, that the road to fame is paved with heartbreak, disillusion, and tragedy. "I want the big time!" conveniently asserts beautiful, self-assured, and headed-for-certain-trouble Sister Williams (Lonette McKee), one-third of the gospel-singing Williams sisters, consisting of woke, budding Black-Power radical, Delores Williams (Dwan Smith); and sweet-natured, self-effacing Sparkle Williams (Irene Cara)…i.e., the obvious heroine of the film.

With the help of neighborhood pals Stix (Philip Michael Thomas), a dreamer who longs to write songs, and Levi (Dorian Harewood), always on the hustle, this trio of starry-eyed schoolgirls dubs themselves "Sister & the Sisters" and become regional nightclub overnight sensations.

But of course, since Sparkle is both a cautionary tale on the price of fame and a morality play on the importance of integrity, things go wrong in a big hurry. Cue in the drug abuse, dashed hopes, romance troubles, death, racketeering, and familial discord. Will Stix ever realize his dreams of becoming a songwriter? Will the tragedies visited upon Sparkle instill a newfound maturity in her singing? Is talent alone enough to lift a bunch of hopeful but naive teens out of the ghetto? 

If you don't know the answers to these questions, you've likely never seen a rags-to-riches show-biz movie before.

Soul Sisters

Those looking to Sparkle for gritty, '70s-type urban realism will have to look elsewhere. Although released in the same year as Taxi Driver, Sparkle is more of a direct descendant of those old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney "Let's put on a show!" musicals, crossed with the inner-city slum dramas Warner Bros. specialized in during the '30s. Like Rocky, another film released in 1976, Sparkle is really just an updated old movie.

In fact, Sparkle's melodramatic yet ultimately uplifting plotline and its virtually all-Black cast most closely resemble the heyday of the "Race Film." Race Films were independent motion pictures made between 1915 and 1950, created exclusively for and often by Black filmmakers. During the era of segregation, these films, popular in Black neighborhoods across the country, featured all-Black casts and were the first movies to portray African Americans in heroic lead roles central to the plot.

Sparkle's backlot depiction of Harlem, populated with characters going by the names "Stix," "Satin," and "Tune-Ann," harken back to The Harlem Tuff Kids (Black cinema's answer to The Bowery Boys), a pack of late 1930s comic delinquents with names like "Icky," "Stinky," and "Shadow."

Brownstone Socializing: (l. to r.) Levi, Dolores, Sister, Stix, & Sparkle

I wonder if the online commenters criticizing the so-called silly names of Sparkle's characters have the
 same problem with Grease's "Putzie," "Doody," & "Frenchy"; or Laverne & Shirley's "Squiggy"?

The '70s were certainly boom years for Blacks in film, but by 1976, I personally had grown weary of the decade's pimp & prostitute /Kung Fu-Badass Blaxploitation overkill. The fascination all those sassy Black female crime-fighters and morally dubious Super-Flys held for the white suburban male teens who filled the local theaters where these films played (was Quentin Tarantino among them?) was lost on me. Nor was I much fonder of the parade of Noble Slave dramas or other parades of Black suffering that seemed to represent the only other alternative view of Black life Hollywood seemed interested in exploring.

With '70s America deep in the throes of a nostalgia craze that romanticized the past as a simpler, gentler time (tellingly, devoid of people of color): The Summer of '42, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, The Way We Were—the arrival of Sparkle on the scene felt like a small kind of miracle and a very welcome change of pace. The screenplay's approach to the material may have been a tad trite, the direction amateurish and ill-serving of its young cast, but Sparkle gave Black kids (the film was rated PG) a nostalgic taste of their own history for a change. It's not a perfect film, but even with the clichés stacked higher and higher with each scene, I find something irresistibly likable and naively charming about Sparkle.

Sparkle is at its best when it stops propelling its predictable plot forward and pauses long enough to provide keen-eyed details of African-American life in the late '50s. Growing up in a household with four sisters, I recall very well the Sunday evening kitchen ritual of hair straightening with a hot comb straight off the burner.   

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

As a fan of musicals, Sparkle's primary appeal for me has always been Curtis Mayfield's catchy musical score and the sleek, '60s girl-group choreography of Lester Wilson. Mayfield's songs are pop/funk, '70s-style riffs on the early R&B/Soul sound of Motown, while Wilson's choreography captures the stylized, often witty, gesture/posing dance style that became an identifying staple of girl-group performances for years.
The songs, as sung by the film's cast, are all so well-performed that there was an outcry from fans when the soundtrack album for Sparkle was released, with Aretha Franklin taking over the vocals exclusively. Although I've read conflicting accounts over the years as to the whys of this decision, and while I personally prefer the film's cast interpretation of the songs, one has to imagine that, to the studio, the financial prospects of an Aretha Franklin album must have appeared a great deal more lucrative than that of a soundtrack album to a modest film with no stars in its cast.

Choreographer Charles "Cholly" Atkins
Exclusive Motown choreographer whose routines for musical acts like The Supremes and The Temptations were the inspiration for Lester Wilson's work in Sparkle

PERFORMANCES

Although the delectably fresh-faced Irene Cara emerged the bigger star in later years as actress, recording artist, and Academy Award-winning songwriter (for "Flashdance…what a Feeling"), it's Lonette McKee who gives my favorite (and the most narratively grounding) performance in Sparkle. She is so electrifyingly good that the temperature of the film drops several degrees for every minute that she's off-screen. A more intuitive director than Sam O'Steen (editor of Rosemary's Baby, making his feature film directorial debut) might have sensed how strongly the prolonged absence of the film's most dimensional and dynamic character would have on Sparkle's overall impact.

 Indeed, had Lonette McKee been given the opportunity to be the kind of dominant presence in the film that she is in the lives of her sisters, I believe the audience would have mourned her absence alongside the characters on screen much more than they're allowed to. McKee's sad eyes and well-executed tough-girl persona convey a sense of authentic emotional gravitas. Without McKee, Sparkle becomes slightly too light for its own good.

Mary Alice as Effie Williams

On the subject of meeting her daughter's new suitor, small-time gangster Satin Struthers (Tony King)-
Effie: "He's just gonna drag you to the gutter with him."

Sister: "The gutter? How can you say that? He's as big-time as you can get."

Effie: "I've lived in Harlem all my life…I know a rat when I see one."

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

In the impressive array of talent (both young and veteran) that appear in cameo and bit roles, Sparkle pays homage to pioneer African-American entertainers:

Veteran comic actor Don Bexley (best known as Bubba on the TV show Sanford & Son) appears in Sparkle as the raunchy emcee for the Simmons Hall amateur contest

Legendary comic Timmie Rogers as the M.C. of the Shan-Doo Club
 where Sisters & The Sisters make their debut.
Back in the days when African-American comics habitually appeared in blackface, spoke in dialect, and wore sloppy clothes; Rogers was the first to appear in a tuxedo, as himself, and daring to speak directly to white audiences (a practice unprecedented in Black comics during the '40s ).
With his emphatic catchphrase, "Oh, yeah!" He was my father's favorite stand-up comedian.

Tony Award-winning choreographer Michael Peters (Dreamgirls) also created the iconic dances for Michael Jackson's Thriller and Beat It music videos. In Sparkle, he appears as an outrageous R&B singer in the style of Screamin' Jay Hawkins

The performer shown briefly in Sparkle, portraying a singer in the mode of Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker, is Renn Woods. Woods portrayed Dorothy in the 1976 National Tour of The Wiz and appeared in the films Hair and  Xanadu

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Sparkle is set in the late '50s, but the film's footing feels too uncertain for me to determine whether its resemblance to an actual movie made in the 1950s is entirely intentional. If I have any complaint about its storytelling structure, it's that Sparkle's plot is so eager to reach its destination that it rushes these interesting and unfamiliar characters along at too rapid a pace. 

Nevertheless, the film is a lot of engaging fun in its small, slice-of-life moments. The mother ironing in the living room; the kids having to change out of their "school clothes" when they come home; the ever-present neighbor lady who constantly butts into other people's business; the young men sporting "conk" hairstyles (relaxed-hair pompadours).

Black American Graffiti
 As earlier stated, Sparkle is at its best when just showing us glimpses of life in late-'50s Harlem

All of the above are more compelling than the straight-as-an-arrow course that Sparkle's conventional rags-to-riches storyline  races us through (I've seen the film many times and I'm still unclear as to how long the girls get to enjoy their success before things start to go wrong. It feels like a week.) Watching Sparkle - written by Joel Schumacher and Howard Rosenman - I'm left with the feeling that it would be a much better film had the characters and their behavior been allowed to move the plot forward...not the other way around. Too bad. The people populating Sparkle seem like folks I would be interested in getting to know better if only they'd been granted the time to be fleshed out more. 

Where Sparkle's footing feels most assured is in its atmospheric depiction of the squalid glamour of the Harlem nightclub scene. These sequences, along with the musical numbers, give the film a moody grit that the screenplay lacks. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees (Night Moves, Lenny) paints Sparkle with a dark, Gordon Willis-like palette of claustrophobic shadows, creating some of the most atmospherically seedy nightclub sequences since Cabaret.

Sparkle is one seriously DARK movie (and I'm not referring to its themes); it's almost unwatchably so on VHS. Now, with HDTV and a digitally remastered DVD, Sparkle looks better than ever. A few years ago, I recall reading somewhere that the low-exposure look resulted from having a cinematographer who was inexperienced in lighting People of Color.

Sparkle was released in 1976. The same year as The Omen, King Kong, A Star is Born, Family Plot, and Marathon Man; all films with advertising budgets that probably exceeded Sparkle's entire production costs. I stood in lines to see each of the above films, but I was practically the only person in the San Francisco theater where I first saw Sparkle. As a PG-rated, small-scale period musical drama with a Black cast of virtual unknowns and but a few easily-exploitable elements (no kung-fu mamas or jive-talkin' daddies to promote); a film as atypical as Sparkle was a hard sell in the '70s market.

I have no idea if Sparkle was successful enough to ever show a profit, but I'm glad to know it has become something of a cult classic over the years. Because, flawed as it is, Sparkle is a rarity. Not only in being a female-centric Black film, but the first to dramatize the formation of an R&B girl group, using the formative years of the African-American music scene as a narrative backdrop. Since no film before this had ever tackled the subject matter, it's my guess that in some small way Sparkle went on to inspire the 1981 Broadway musical Dreamgirls. 

Although the current track record for remakes is pretty shabby, I'm going to keep an open mind about the Sparkle remake and wish it well. If nothing else, it's sure to bring more attention to the original.

ADDENDUM: January 20, 2014
Watched the 2012 remake of Sparkle on DVD. Because this is a blog devoted to movies I love, perhaps the kindest thing I can say about the remake is that the original is in no danger of being replaced in anyone's memory. Indeed, by comparison, the Sparkle has the 1976 original looking like the Citizen Kane of Black Cinema. 

I genuinely couldn't believe how weak the effort was. I enjoyed seeing Whitney Houston but was dismayed by the fact that, with $17 million and over thirty years of advanced motion picture technology, they couldn't produce a film with even a fraction of the competence of a low-budget feature from the '70s. It was a seriously depressing endeavor on so many fronts.

Clip from "Sparkle" (1976)

AUTOGRAPH FILES:
               The signatures of Phillip Michael Thomas (L.) and Lonette McKee (R.) I got way back in 1978 and 1980, respectively.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

XANADU 1980

8/8/80. These cryptic numbers jumped out at me from posters, billboards, and newspaper ads all over Los Angeles during the summer of 1980. Was it apocalypse? Armageddon? Well, yes and no. The numbers represented August 8th,1980: the theatrical release date of the roller disco movie musical, Xanadu.  

The tale of a legwarmer wearin', sundress rockin', rollerskatin', glow-in-the-dark muse (the heavenly Olivia Newton-John) who comes to earth to inspire a disillusioned artist (the uncomfortable-appearing Michael Beck) and retired bandleader (the ever-charming Gene Kelly) realize their dream of opening a roller rink/disco/nightclub; Xanadu is like nothing I've seen before or since. It's a law unto itself.  

The cast of Xanadu recreates the reaction of the nation's film critics in the summer of 1980

Widely panned on its release, the detonated bomb that was Xanadu had a catastrophic effect on the screen careers of its promising young stars, temporarily decimated the musical legitimacy of its composers, and single-handedly lay waste the roller-disco fad; all in one fell swoop. Yet, like a phoenix rising from the ashes (or a zombie that refuses to die even after you've fired a bullet into its brain), Xanadu has gone on to become a genuine camp/cult classic and is perhaps the most beloved bad film since Valley of the Dolls (which, by the law of averages, really should have been turned into a stage musical by now).

Olivia Newton-John is Kira

Gene Kelly is Danny McGuire

Michael Beck is Sonny Malone

Given the lengths to which the film's participants and Universal Studios have gone to distance themselves from it over the years, many would be surprised to learn that back in 1980, Xanadu was released with the kind of massive advertising blitzkrieg usually only afforded sci-fi & action films. Ostensively poised as the next Grease (a film I absolutely loathed that surprised everybody by becoming the largest grossing film of 1978), Xanadu was almost obnoxiously ubiquitous.  

Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

On the contrary, the glut of TV specials, radio promos, magazine articles, comic books, merchandising tie-ins, and cross-promotions mirrored my own excitement when I learned that my favorite rock group of all time (The Electric Light Orchestra—the preferred band of all the stoners at my high school) would actually be collaborating with Little Miss "Have You Never Been Mellow", Olivia Newton-John (arguably the most white-bread singer on the charts next to Debbie Boone).

This was before the days of pop stars changing their images with each new album release, so the prospect of the new-and-improved, 1979 model ONJ of "Totally Hot" (the terrific album that prompted a music critic to cite: "The tight pants Olivia wore at the end of Grease must have gone to her head") cutting loose in an original movie musical scored by a band known for its deliriously theatrical bombast, had me thinking that Xanadu had the potential to be another cinematic mind-blower like Ken Russell's film of The Who's Tommy. To say I was stoked to see Xanadu is a monumental understatement. I was so excited I practically gave myself a nosebleed.

Starry Eyed
One of the things I liked most about Xanadu was its sweetly optimistic vision of the 80s as a multi-generational, cross-cultural utopia where differences are accepted and originality encouraged. Lady Gaga would be proud.

I saw Xanadu on opening night at Mann's Chinese Theater with an audience that apparently hadn't read the reviews telling them that they weren't supposed to be having a good time. The theater was packed and the air was full of the excitement of attending an event. Every musical number was met with thunderous applause, catcalls and whistles greeted various names during the closing credit crawl, and (probably for the first and last time) only the intentional humor got laughs. 

As for me, I had passed through the looking glass somewhere around the time Gene Kelly, age 67, danced on an oversized pinball machine, displaying a beatific smile and the same effortless grace of that young man who made his screen debut in For Me & My Gal (1942).

I don't know what hit me (perhaps I was kissed by a muse myself), but I left the theater that night a different person from the one I was when I went in.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

It's ironic that the dominant design motif in a movie as unwieldy as Xanadu is the sleekly economic elegance of Streamline Moderne. Real and studio-enhanced examples of Streamline Moderne architecture appear throughout Xanadu, as befitting the film's blending of music and design styles from the 40s and 80s.

Both critics and audiences were at a loss to figure out what Sonny Malone's dream of being a serious artist had to do with the opening of a roller-disco nightclub. The script drops the ball in making this clear, but close inspection of the film reveals that Sonny's artistic dreams come imaginatively true in his designs for Xanadu.

The model of the Hollywood Bowl "Muse" fountain in Sonny's apartment...

...becomes a fountain for real-life muse, Kira, to dance in front of in the realized Xanadu of Sonny's dream

One of Sonny's earlier discarded sketches (top) is realized as a modernist Greek column (behind Beck in the photo above) in his final design for Xanadu.

The Streamline Moderne appliances in Sonny's apartment (top) find whimsical expression in Xanadu's metallic chairs (center) and the oversized waffle-iron stage that Ms. Newton-John is perched on above.

PERFORMANCES
Save for Gene Kelly's, there are no performances to speak of in Xanadu, so I'd rather not waste space by bashing the leads. There are plenty of sites online for that. What I would like to address is the matter of onscreen chemistry (or the lack of it) which provides Xanadu with many of its unintentional laughs and much of its homoerotic subtext. First off, not since Can't Stop the Music has a film worked so strenuously to establish the heterosexuality of its hero.

Perhaps the filmmakers thought Kira's neutered sexuality (until the smoking-hot finale where she sings something like 28 songs in succession) and Sonny's penchant for tight jeans and skimpy shorts, made Xanadu even gayer than it already was (not possible really, but let's go with that); so within the film's first half-hour, we have every third line of dialog reminding us that Sonny is a babe-magnet who's irresistible to women. Friends offer to fix him up, women flirt outrageously, and for the really slow-witted, an annoying co-worker (just the sort who would be the first to be killed off were this a horror film...which it kinda is) just comes out and flatly makes a comment to that fact. Later, when Sonny meets up with a buddy whose van he painted, the friend is given insipid post-dubbed dialogue relating to the sexual allure of mini-van murals --Hey, and the chicks love it!"-- calculated to dispel all viewer suspicion that muscular guys in short shorts roller skating along the Venice boardwalk are anything but skirt-chasing, sexually hyperactive heteros. 

Real Men Roller Skate

What throws a monkey-wrench into all this over-emphatic machismo is the fact that Beck and Newton-John exhibit zero screen chemistry, while Beck's scenes with Gene Kelly fairly crackle with magnetism and unintentional sexual innuendo. While everybody was making sure that every female in the cast was hailing Sonny Malone as some kind of roller-skating Super Fly, someone failed to notice that they gave Gene Kelly too many lines that make him sound like a genial sugar-daddy on the make. As Beck and Kelly develop an across-the-generations friendship, Kelly has one line after another where he's comparing business partnerships to marriage or sex. And wouldn't you know it, Michael Beck and Gene Kelly have an easier, more natural screen rapport than Beck has with his fluorescently glowing love interest.

Sonny and Danny, moments before yet another ill-timed interruption from Kira

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

It's no accident that Xanadu's soundtrack album took on a life independent of the failure of the film. The music by John Farrar and Jeff Lynne is some of the best ever composed for a musical. "All Over The World" is a lasting favorite (it always makes me feel happy inside) and the much-anticipated (by me) teaming of ONJ and ELO on the song "Xanadu" makes for one of the best pop singles to come out of the 80s. The unique musical qualities of each artist seem to bring out the best in both. ELO's soaring, overreaching orchestrations have always cried out for a voice as ethereally sensual as Olivia's, and Lynne manages to get her to shed some of the saccharine from her voice to deliver a solidly virtuoso pop performance. Nobody could maneuver the rhythmical twist and turns of this elaborately arranged piece the way Olivia Newton-John does. I think it's the best vocal performance of her career.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

August 8, 1980, is a date that has more significance for me than the release of a lovably awful musical that nevertheless captured my heart and imagination back when I was a young student filmmaker hoping to break into the movie business.

8/8/80 represents the day I decided I was going to become a dancer.

A revelatory decision made all the more astounding when taking into account that, after studying film for nearly 4 years and being exposed to some of the greatest cinematic works ever created, the motion picture that inspired me to change the course of my life at age 22 was none other than that much-maligned muse of a musical, Xanadu. (This should give hope to producers of flops the world over.)  Maybe it was the music, the choreography, the visual style, or maybe the film's theme about the importance of following your dreams...who knows? It makes me ask myself: is the emotional experience of seeing a "good" film more valid than the emotional experience drawn from seeing a "bad" one, and should it matter so long as they make us feel something? Whatever the reasons, I left the theater that night convinced that there couldn't be a life more blissful or fulfilling than a life spent dancing.

The dancers beckoned, and I said YES!

Briefly summarized, I wound up quitting film school and threw myself into several intense years of dance training. Never looking back, nor regretting the decision, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I have been a professional dancer for over 25 years now and I'm happy to say that it has far exceeded my expectations of what I thought it could bring to my life. I never before believed that dreams could come true like they did in the movies. And like it or not... Xanadu is the film I have to thank for it all. Although I must confess that I wasn't as happy about that fact as I am now. Until about the year 2000, it really wasn't "cool" to say you liked Xanadu. Whenever anyone would ask me about the Xanadu license plates on my car, I would lie and say it was in reference to Citizen Kane. Such disloyalty!

I'm in my 50's now and still dancing. And I only hope that should I be lucky enough to make it to my 67th year, my heart contains even a glimmer of the joy that Gene Kelly's smile radiated in that pinball sequence that still knocks me for a loop after all these years. It's funny.. who'd ever guess that one of the worst films ever made would lead me to my very best life? Worst film ever made? Don't you believe it.

You Have To Believe We Are Magic

*Footnote: To coin the title of another Olivia Newton-John hit, in an odd "Twist of Fate," I was invited to appear and tell my story in the retrospective documentary "Going Back to Xanadu" included as a special feature on the 2008 Xanadu DVD release. Talk about full circle. Me on the DVD of the movie that changed my life, talking about how it changed my life! You can't tell me that a muse didn't have a hand in all this...Magic indeed!

I participated with Don Fields of the Xanadu Preservation Society in the "Xanadu" 40th Anniversary podcast via "Stuck in the '80s."

Xanadu's Impact on My Life

Hollywood Bowl Muse Statues

The Pan Pacific Auditorium

Further Proof of Xanadu's Lasting Impact on My Life

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2013