Kramer Vs Kramer
Take some chirpy music, pretty faces and an easy-to-understand plot and you’ve got a critic-resistant movie. ‘Xanadu’, starring Olivia Newton-John, was probably the most popular choice for worst movie of 1980. Paradoxically, it was a hit at the box office.
This points to the fact that many people may have gone to see the movie to find out if it really was that bad, or that 13-year-old children do not read film reviews.
Maybe the reviews should have been done by teenagers trapped in the fantasy, thrills, music sic and smiles that “Xanadu” offered. A teenager would probably have been kinder than one reviewer who said: “The illustrated record album ‘Xanadu’ is so bad it makes Olivia Newton-John’s previous ‘Grease’ look like the good oil.”
Another said: “Mostly, ‘Xanadu’ turns out to be like walking through a pinball machine that is also a dread-fully boring way to spend 93 minutes.”
Lee Kramer, the executive producer of the movie, defended the plot, Newton-John’s acting and the music, but conceded there were things that should have been redone.
“It was a very good-looking movie, but it lacked a few things. The application was just a little bit off,” he said.
Kramer, in Melbourne to research the local film industry and make a documentary about whales and dolphins, said he would have liked to shoot certain scenes again.
“One sets out with a very clear motive when you’re making a movie, but that can become clouded as shooting begins,” he said. “But basically I was happy with the end result.”
‘Xanadu’ was a packaged product with a plan that was carefully executed. The soundtrack album reached the top of the charts before the movie was released, always a million-dollar move if it works.
Olivia Newton-John’s popularity was exploited. As Lee Kramer says, she was both a big name and suited the part.
“Olivia is one of the few female artists in the world who has that kind of mass appeal, so she was a natural for the part. There are very few actress/singers who could have done it.”
Olivia’s five-year relation-ship with Kramer was pruned recently to business manager only.
‘Xanadu’ is the story of nine “muses” whose job it is to make people’s dreams come true. Olivia, as one of the muses, does her best to perform that feat for an amateur artist (Michael Beck).
His dream, together with a young-at-heart Glen Miller fan (Gene Kelly), is to create a discotheque incorporating modern and 1920s style music. The dream is realised to the strains of Newton-John’s singing and Gene Kelly’s parading.