After her star turn in "Grease", the sexy makeover of Olivia continued with her "Totally Hot" LP of 1978. Her next challenge came with the promise of appearing with the legendary Gene Kelly onscreen. While she now describes the film as a "character building bomb", the music it contained was "da bomb"! The first single from the soundtrack was "Magic" and it spent four weeks at #1 in the summer of 1980. Her musical Svengali was John Farrar, a fellow Australian who wrote three #1 singles for her and produced every album she recorded from 1971 to 1989. " The premise of "Xanadu" was simple, a disenchanted artist finds a roller skating muse that inspires him to greater heights, loses her and then gains her back. The disco roller skating craze had died off by the time the film was released so the selling point vanished. The best thing about it was Olivia. She was at her most beautiful and seeing her costume changes was the most exciting thing about it. At times, it seems like Olivia is not entirely comfortable with the skating routines and that lack of confidence was another point in the con list. The camera angles during the performance scenes did not convey the energy and precision of the performers and did nothing to draw the viewers in....there was no depth to it visually or emotionally. The choice of Michael Beck who had starred in "The Warriors", took him out of his element and his portrayal of the artist is wooden and contrived. Too bad, he had a smouldering appeal that would have contrasted nicely with Olivia's persona, but his role may have also been played by Wally Cox with the same result. It could have stood a few more rewrites and the acting seemed contrived more often than not. I still love to watch it, a deservedly guilty pleasure....usually fast forwarding through the dialogue and right on to the music. But it sounds oh, so glorious on a home theatre system...as I gorge myself on other guilty pleasures, popcorn, milk duds and lots of pepsi.