The creation for the characters of Bill and Ted originated in 1983, when UCLA classmates Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson started a student improv workshop with a few of their peers. “One day, we decided to do a couple of guys who knew nothing about history, talking about history,” Solomon recalled to Cinemafantastique in a 1991 interview. “The initial improv was them studying history, while Ted’s father kept coming up to ask them to turn their music down.” (Solomon played Ted, Matheson was Bill.)
Actually, in the initial skit there was a third character, Bob. Not making this up, I swear. However, “Bob” wasn’t as into the improv as much as Solomon and Matheson, so the trio dropped to a duo.
Damn, what a loss for Bob’s everywhere.
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Keanu Reeves playing Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan, or another actor besides Alex Winter as Bill S. Preston Esquire, but ironically both actors auditioned for the opposite role. Thankfully, after Solomon and Matheson saw their audition tapes, they concluded that the opposite would work better. In an online chat with Moviefone, Reeves claimed that he didn’t even know their roles had been switched until after he had been cast. “I got a call saying that I got the part,” Reeves recalled. “So I went to the wardrobe fitting… assuming I was playing Bill, and I get there and Alex Winter, who eventually played Bill, went to the wardrobe fitting thinking he was playing Ted. Then we were informed that that wasn’t the case.”
Pauly Shore was among the hundreds of actors who auditioned for the role of Ted way back when. A couple years after the film’s release Shore hosted an MTV special, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Premiere Party, in which Shore cornered Reeves in a back room to talk about his failed audition. Lucky for America, Shore went on to do ‘Encino Man’, ‘Son in Law’, and ‘Bio-Dome’. I’m at least half serious about that fact.
Speaking of Pauly Shore, for years rumors circulated that the script for 1996’s Bio-Dome was actually written to be the third film in the Bill & Ted franchise. Thankfully, in 2011, Winter squshed that rumor when he told /Film that the story is a “total urban legend as far as I know. No one involved in that movie had anything to do with Bill & Ted. So unless they were just going to try and reboot the franchise with that concept and different actors, I can’t see a connection.”
The casting of Reeves and Winter actually raised a pretty serious issue, according to Solomon who told Cinefantastique, “Bill and Ted were conceived in our minds as these 14-year-old skinny guys, with low-rider bellbottoms and heavy metal T-shirts”.
“We actually had a scene that was even shot, with Bill and Ted walking past a group of popular kids who hate them. But once you cast Alex and Keanu, who look like pretty cool guys, that was hard to believe.”
According to a 2013 Reddit AMA, Alex Winter explained that the casting of George Carlin (a.k.a. Rufus, Bill and Ted’s mentor) was “a very happy accident. They were going after serious people first. Like Sean Connery. And someone had the idea, way after we started shooting, of George. That whole movie was a happy accident. No one thought it would ever see the light of day.”
In Solomon and Matheson’s original script, it was not the iconic phone booth but rather a 1969 Chevy van that served as Bill and Ted’s time machine. However, during early rewrites of the script there was concern by Warner Bros. that a motor vehicle as the time machine would seem like a rip-off of ‘Back to the Future’. A wise decision, indeed. It was director Stephen Herek who eventually suggested a phone booth, as he thought it could lend itself to something similar to a roller coaster in the visuals.
Interestingly enough, the phone booth’s similarity to Doctor Who’s TARDIS was not nearly as big a concern to the studio, with American audiences at least.
As part of a promotion for 1991’s ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Video Game Adventure’, Nintendo Power magazine actually gave away Bill & Ted’s phone booth as a contest prize. The incredibly lucky winner was one Kenneth Grayson, who Reddit tracked down for an AMA in 2011. Grayson spent most of the time answering questions about whether or not any X-rated activities ever took place in the phone booth.
Solomon and Matheson wrote the entire script over the course of just four days, in 1984. They also wrote it all by hand, on notepaper, during a series of meetings at a couple of local coffee shops. The 2005 box set, Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Collection, features some of their original handwritten notes.
Despite Matheson being the son of legendary sci-fi writer Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend, he never intended for Bill & Ted to be a science-fiction movie. “I try to consciously fight it, out of a desire to break away, but maybe I have a predilection toward that because of my dad,” Matheson told Starlog Magazine of the inevitable fantasy elements that he crafted. “He’s a great writer and craftsman, and always has suggestions.” In fact, it was Matheson’s father who had the idea that the time travel story be its own movie. “We were going to write a sketch film, with this as one of the skits, but my dad said, ‘That sounds like a whole movie,’” Matheson recalled, “And he was right!”
Shortly after principal photography on the film was completed in 1987, the film’s financiers, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, went completely bankrupt. A straight-to-cable release was the most likely outcome for the comedy until Orion Pictures and Nelson Entertainment swooped in last minute and bought the rights in 1988 for a 1989 release. However, because of the delay to theaters, references to the year, which had been filmed as “1987”, had to be re-dubbed for 1988, resulting in a few scenes where the actors’ lips don’t quite match the sound.
As a tie-in to the animated series, you could, at one point, actually start your morning with a big bowl of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Cereal, which was touted as “A Most Awesome Breakfast Adventure.”
For years there had been rumors about a third Bill & Ted movie coming to theaters and thankfully it’s now been confirmed that ‘Bill and Ted Face the Music’, will film this summer for an August 2020 release!!
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Matheson and Solomon co-wrote the script and Dean Parisot (Galaxy Quest) is attached to direct. Reeves and Winter will, of course, be reprising their roles, which “will see the duo long past their days as time-traveling teenagers and now weighed down by middle age and the responsibilities of family. They’ve written thousands of tunes, but they have yet to write a good one, much less the greatest song ever written.”
This GIF is the only way to properly end this gallery.
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