Trailer
Plot summary
Sonny Malone is a freelance illustrator in Los Angeles who has lost his enthusiasm for drawing, and he works again for the record company where he once painted reproductions of album covers. His boss Simpson hands him a cover for a group called the 9 Sisters, and the artwork carries the face of a woman he saw only briefly: she appeared uninvited in the photographer's shots. Sonny returns to the spot where he first met her and finds Danny McGuire, a onetime big-band clarinet player who became a construction magnate and once loved a singer who resembled her. Kira then stands before him, gives her name and refuses to say more, and when he follows her to a disused auditorium she urges him and Danny to open a nightclub there called Xanadu.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Xanadu (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A double feature of Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music inspired John J.B. Wilson to create the Golden Raspberry Awards; Robert Greenwald won the first Razzie for Worst Director, and the film was nominated for six other awards at the 1st Golden Raspberry Awards.
- Gene Kelly's character, Danny McGuire, had previously appeared in Cover Girl in 1944, and Xanadu proved to be his farewell: Kelly retired from acting after the film's release and died in 1996.
- Even though the film flopped, the soundtrack album reached number two on the UK Albums Chart and number four on the US Billboard 200, and has been certified double platinum in the US and gold in the UK.
- The Pan-Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles was used for exterior shots of the nightclub; Sonny calls the venue "a dump", and the real building had indeed fallen into disrepair before being destroyed by fire a decade later.
- One musical number, ELO's "Don't Walk Away", is a romantic animated sequence in which Sonny and Kira shapeshift into fish and birds, with the animation by Don Bluth.
- Decades after the film flopped it reached Broadway: the original cast recording was released in December 2007, and the production closed on September 28, 2008 after 49 previews and 512 performances, with a successful national tour following.
- The plot of the 1947 film Down to Earth was used as the basis for Xanadu; in that film Rita Hayworth plays Terpsichore, with Larry Parks as stage producer Danny Miller.
