Another friend, future Hollywood executive heavyweight Brain Grazer, convinced Rubel to take this idea to his boss, future Hollywood heavyweight #2 Joel Silver, who was working as a creative assistant to independent movie producer and future Hollywood producer heavyweight #3, Lawrence Gordon. A couple of months were spent with Rubel, Grazer and Silver hammering out the story in detail, where, much to Rubel’s protesting, it morphed from a comedy to a musical fantasy. Soon after the story was presented to Gordon, it was sold to Warner Bros. as, what Gordon would later called it, “a very low budget, no star, tiny small” project that would be made to strictly capitalize on the growing roller disco craze.
The fate of this “small” project would soon change significantly when Silver was hired away to Universal Studios as a VP and took Xanadu with him. According to Gordon, Silver loved musicals and was quite passionate about Xanadu to the point to claim that he would “stab myself in the back” just to get the musical off the ground.
....and Xanadu had to get off the ground pretty quickly as two other studios had just announced roller disco productions of their own, Skatetown USA and, considered to many the gender classic, Roller Boogie. Now, seriously pressed for time, Gordon and Silver decided to get a leg up the competition by hiring away a director from another roller disco film, Robert Greenwald. Greenwald’s resume up to this point consisted of many serious NYC theater productions and TV movie projects in both producing and/or directing chores. Sharon: Portrait Of a Mistress, Katie: A Portrait of a Centerfold, and Flatbed Annie & Sweetie Pie: Lady Truckdrivers was among his then-recent TV chores. Xanadu would be his major motion picture debut.
The scope of the production widened when Olivia Newton-John agreed to sign on after reading a 20 page treatment of the script. As part of the deal, her manager and then-boyfriend Lee Kramer became the film’s executive producer. Suddenly, thanks to Olivia’s star magnitude, the budget was increased and the original disco element was eliminated for more of a traditional musical fantasy fair.
The scope widened again when the producers soon began the long process of courting the legendary Gene Kelly, who was an energetic 68 at the time. Obviously, Mr. Kelly needs no introduction here....ah, what the hell....
Gene Kelly’s film biography contains countless classics such as An American In Paris, On The Town and his signature film Singing In The Rain. Along with his good friend Fred Astaire, Kelly defined cinematic choreography, and became a standard-bearer in the 40’s and 50’s against which all other musical (and some non-musicals) of the period were measured. When not dancing, Kelly showed relentless creative energy by producing and directing features like Gigot (the Jackie Gleason movie, not the beach flick) and Hello, Dolly and starring in non-musical films like the controversial classic Inherit The Wind with Spencer Tracy.
However, by the 70’s, he had voluntarily slowed his career down when his wife died in 1973 and needed more time to raise his family. When approached by Xanadu’s brain trust, Kelly showed some interest in the project mainly due to the fact that the production would be shot just a short distance from his Beverly Hills home thus not take too much time away from his home and family life. However, there was one catch: he wouldn’t dance. After a colorful meeting with the film’s choreographer Kenny Ortega, he immediately changed his mind.
By the time he signed on, Kelly’s character was officially named Danny McGuire, which, oddly enough, was the same name as Kelly’s role in his 1944 movie ‘Cover Girl’. Such influence (or “borrowing”) can be also said about Xanadu’s basic plot as it has been widely speculated that it’s quite similar to Rita Hayworth’s 1947 musical, ‘Down To Earth’, with Rita playing the central roll as a muse, which wasn’t lost to Silver as he was originally planning a disco version of this same film. Even the idea of putting Kelly on skates wasn’t that original either; he can be seen skating around a backstage version of a New York City street in the 1955 musical Always Fare Weather.
While names like a young Mel Gibson and David Naughton (of Dr. Pepper TV ad and Making It! TV fame) were tossed around for the other, more younger, male lead of Sonny Malone, Gordon and Silver instead looked no further than their last movie. Michael Beck was the lead in their 1978 film The Warriors, a street gang action flick written and directed by Walter Hill. This film caused a stir when near riots broke out, including a murder, during some screenings in major U.S. cities.
Born Michael Beck Tucker in Memphis, Tennessee, he grew up near Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas and attended acting classes at Millsap Collage. He took up an acting class as a bet but found his acting career taking him to England for five years, which helped him eliminate his “Old Arkansanian” speech accent. From here, he ended up in the 1978 TV movie ‘Holocaust’ and 1979 ‘Mayflower: The Pilgrims Adventure’ with Anthony Hopkins. When he got the Sonny Malone part, Michael offered to sing, but was turned down.