BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC
Writers Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson on the wild three-film, 30-year ride they’ve had with their iconic creations, BILL & TED
The most excellent story of Bill and Ted’s creators.
THE FOLLOWING IS a definitive list of the only good things to come out of improv: that bit in Raiders where Indy shoots the Arab swordsman. Ryan Stiles pretending that Colin Mochrie’s hands are his own (and vice versa) in Whose Line Is It Anyway?. And Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted ‘Theodore’ Logan.
Better known, of course, as Bill and Ted, they are the beating heart of a beloved series that has spanned three films (and a short-lived cartoon show) and just over three decades. But there’s another duo without whom Bill and Ted simply wouldn’t exist: their creators, Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson.
College roommates-turned-best-friendsturned-fledgling writing partners, Solomon and Matheson had started dabbling in improv with the goal of “trying to push ourselves comedically and see if we could make each other laugh,” recalls Solomon. They, and some other friends, would riff and play around and goof off. Then, one night, their lives changed, though they didn’t know it yet. “It was Chris who said, ‘What if we do two guys who know nothing about history, studying for history?’” says Solomon. They did some funny voices to amuse themselves, quickly cobbled together those now-famous names, and the rest is, as they say, thingummy.
In a way, it’s hardly surprising that Bill and Ted are born of improvisational comedy. In the
three films charting the adventures of Alex Winter’s Bill and Keanu Reeves’ Ted, the loveable doofuses (doofi?) have travelled back in time, been killed by their evil robot twins, gone to heaven and hell, and, with the help of their daughters, Death, and virtually every living soul in history, saved the universe with the power of music. They have faced everyone, and everything, with both an indefatigability and a willingness to take everyone, and everything, they encounter at face value. Nothing fazes them. They are ‘Yes, and…?’ in human form. “I’ve never heard it explained that way,” laughs Solomon. “And you’re totally right. Even though they get hit really hard, and they feel things deeply, they’re immediately like, ‘Well, what if we do this?’ I like that. It’s a great way to live in general.”
And that class was just the beginning.
EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
Their improv sessions had led to dozens of different characters popping briefly into the world, but for some reason Solomon and Matheson kept returning to Bill and Ted. They wrote letters to each other, as Bill and Ted, and even Ted’s older brother. They briefly had an idea about using them in a Kentucky Fried Moviestyle sketch movie. Then they “bumped into” (Matheson’s words) the notion of Bill and Ted somehow being responsible for every bad thing that had happened in history. That went nowhere for a while, until one day Matheson’s dad piped up with a suggestion. “He said, ‘You could make a movie out of them travelling through time. So, he gave it a little bit of a push.” And when you get writing advice from Richard Matheson, aka the bloke who wrote I Am Legend, you damn well take it.
On the page, driven by Solomon and Matheson’s endless improvisations, Bill and Ted continued to evolve. Their unique language, full of “dudes” and “whoas” and “be excellent to each others” came fairly quickly, as did the idea that they were, perhaps, not the sharpest tools in the box. “Ed and I were pretty good students,” says Matheson. “Bill and Ted are kind of like weird little intuitive geniuses in a way, but they don’t know much.”
They were still possessed of sunny dispositions and a never-say-die attitude despite their relentless ineptitude. Notably, though people assume, or misremember, that they’re stoners, they never once take drugs. They get their happiness hit from being around each other. “We would have said they were potheads, initially,” says Matheson. “We had a joke early on about inhaling chalk, but we didn’t want them to be potheads because then it would be a stoner comedy. We didn’t want that.”
The real change agents, though, were Reeves and Winter. Solomon and Matheson, who hadn’t been involved in their casting, were invited to Arizona, where the film was shot, to be around for rehearsals and filming. One night, they were queuing up at Mcdonald’s, and found themselves distracted by the good-natured buffoonery of
a pair of dudes in front of them. “We were bitching about the fact that whoever they’d cast were never gonna be able to embody Bill and Ted the way we imagined they would be,” says Solomon. “And these two guys in front of us were fucking around, talking to each other. We were like, ‘Those are the guys that should play Bill and Ted!’ And then we showed up at rehearsal, and that was actually Alex and Keanu. Totally true.”
Once cast, they changed Solomon and Matheson’s perception of their creations. “Our original conception of Bill and Ted was that they were just kind of losers,” admits Matheson. “They were outsiders. Nobody liked them. You get a bit of that feel in Excellent Adventure, but then you bring in Keanu and Alex, who are very good-looking, charismatic young guys, and everything’s different. We got really lucky with those guys.”
Audiences agreed as well. In 1989, a few years after they wrote the spec script, Bill
& Ted’s Excellent Adventure, directed by Stephen Herek, made an impact in one of the most crowded years in movie history. A sleeper hit in the first real summer of blockbusters, it ended up with $40 million domestically. The journey had begun…
BOGUS JOURNEY
Although only two years separate Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey on the good ol’ IMDB, roughly five years lay between the writing of their respective screenplays. And when Solomon and Matheson reconvened to write the sequel, they found that two things had changed. One was that, suddenly, they were no longer writing for the idea of what Bill and Ted might be. They were writing, specifically, for Reeves and Winter. “Writing for those guys was different because they were better versions than what Chris and I had imagined,” says Solomon. “They are what Bill and Ted are, so we were writing towards that.”
The second thing, and perhaps the most fundamental, was that all was not hunky-dory in Camp Matheson-solomon. “We were not totally estranged, but we were not close,” admits Matheson. “The second movie is a lot darker, and maybe that has something to do with where our friendship was at, or where we were at. I don’t really know.” Solomon is, perhaps, even more candid. “By our mid-tolate twenties, we were, quote, successful screenwriters, and the pressure of that was tough. On a personal level, I couldn’t handle it all that well. I think it put pressure on our friendship. But we were always able to connect as writing partners.”
There was never a question of either of them continuing on without the other. Bill and Ted are a pair, and when it comes to writing Bill and Ted, so are Solomon and Matheson. “It’s purely a product of the two of us,” says Solomon. “It’s a meld of those two brains. I don’t think my solo version of Bill and Ted would be that good.”
Matheson says that he has, perhaps, more in common with Ted, but that doesn’t mean that either man had ownership of a particular character. It was a melange, governed by just one rule: no matter what the subject up for discussion was, the person who felt strongest about the outcome would prevail. The result, perhaps helped in part by a relentlessly tight studio deadline that gave them a freer rein than you would normally get on a movie like this, is one of the weirdest, most freewheeling, plain batshit-insane studio comedies, let alone sequels, of all time. Not many movies kill their heroes in the first five minutes. Fewer still then resurrect those heroes by having them beat Death at a game of Twister. “It’s my favourite of the three,” says Matheson. “I don’t think we had time to get Act 3 right. But I’m still amazed at some of the stuff we pulled off. They’re playing charades in heaven with Albert Einstein and a Martian named Station, and the movie they’re acting out is Smokey Is The Bandit. Those are really, really weird jokes.”
FACE THE MUSIC
Perhaps that weirdness contributed, in some way, to Bogus Journey failing ( just) to match the box office exploits of its predecessor. Although it took in a decidedly unbogus $38 million at the domestic box office in 1991, it wasn’t felt to be a big-enough hit to push ahead with a third part. There wasn’t a huge appetite on the part of Solomon and Matheson to come up with one either. “I remember at the premiere of Bogus Journey basically saying to Alex and Keanu, ‘Can you ever imagine wanting to play these guys again?’” says Matheson. And the vibe I got off of them was, ‘No!’”
And so, Bill and Ted seemed destined to linger forever in the ranks of the Two Movies And Out club, along with such luminaries as Wayne and Garth, Jack Reacher, and Paul Blart. Except, Reeves and Winter found that, no matter what project they were promoting, someone would find a way to ask about a return for Bill and Ted. Solomon and Matheson were continuously cajoled by fans desperate to see the Wyld Stallyns ride one more time. With willingness on the part of all four parties, in 2008 tentative conversations were had, potential storylines broached, bridges rebuilt. All they needed was an idea.
Time, in time, took care of that. Both writers had become parents over the years, and that was the nudge they needed. Instead of being a movie about how Bill and Ted save the universe, Face The Music would be about how the true magic was within their children, Billie and Thea, all along. “It had to be their kids,” says Matheson. “We knew that from the beginning.”
The desperate scramble for funding meant shooting didn’t begin until 2019. By then, the passage of time had lined our heroes’ faces, giving them crow’s feet and concerns even a blast of air guitar couldn’t wave away. Ted, in particular, is on melancholic form throughout much of Dean Parisot’s movie. One of its most memorable scenes sees Bill and Ted come face to face with their deathbed selves, and engage in heavy conversations about guilt and blame and forgiveness and regret. In a comedy. Whoa, dude. “We made a choice, all four of us,” says Solomon. “We weren’t sure people would accept it, that people might really want to see young Bill and Ted, just older, but still acting young. But we’re not going to dress them up like they used to be. This isn’t a late Marx Brothers movie where they’re doing the same characters and pretending they haven’t aged. And if people don’t like it, we’ll have to suffer that consequence.”
The pandemic means it’s hard to gauge overall reaction to Face The Music. According to boxofficemojo.com, it took just $6 million worldwide, but that doesn’t include its VOD figures. Certainly, it seems to have gone down well with the Bill and Ted fanbase, and serves as a more-than-fitting farewell. That’s if it is a farewell. “It’s over for me,” says Matheson. “Three is the right number. There’s a symmetry to it.” Solomon, meanwhile, is leaving the door ajar just a tad. “I thought Excellent Adventure would be the last time we write Bill and Ted,” he points out. “I don’t know what’s left. If we all wanted to do another Bill and Ted when we’re all in our seventies, that might be worth doing. But I don’t know what the hell that movie would ever be.”
If this does prove to be their last hurrah, at least Bill and Ted (and Chris and Ed) get to go out on their own terms, two most excellent dudes in their nineties, rocking it something fierce in a care home. As Chris Matheson’s dad might have said, they are legend. BILL & TED FACE THE MUSIC IS OUT ON DIGITAL NOW, AND ON 25 JANUARY ON DVD AND BLU-RAY
SHOT IN 17 days with very little money and no stars, Paco Plaza and Jaume Balaguero’s 2007 Spanish horror Rec instantly became a classic. The story of a TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her crew as they get trapped in an apartment building that just happens to be home to an apparent viral outbreak that turns the infected into feral cannibals, it’s inventive, relentlessly paced, convincingly ‘real’, and one of the most effective found-footage films. Via Zoom from Madrid, Plaza takes Empire back to that cursed apartment building to tell us how to do found footage right…
REC: GENESIS
“We had no expectations for the film at all,” recalls Plaza, who had previously co-directed a music documentary, OT: La Película, with Balaguero in 2002. “We thought it was something to do for fun, between bigger projects. We didn’t even think it would be released in theatres.”
That, according to Plaza, allowed the two directors to relax and take risks. “It wasn’t costing anything, and it was just like having a break with friends, like kids playing with a camera. We had a sense of freedom. It was liberating.”
Rec arrived eight years after The Blair Witch Project, by which point found-footage films felt passé. But its pace and savagery was a hit with audiences when it started playing on the festival circuit. “When you watched it in a theatre with a thousand people it was like a party or a concert,” he remembers. “Maybe it’s scary, but most of all it’s fun to watch. You share the experience with your friends. It’s a communal experience.”
REC: CONCEPT
Rec arrived in the same year as Paranormal Activity, part of the by now firmly established wave of found-footage horror. But this was coincidence, and much of Rec’s freshness comes from the sense of its directors inventing their own formal rules as they go along.
“Found footage hadn’t really been a thing in Spain, so our main influence was TV,” Plaza explains. “There’s a way of telling stories on television, like on the news, that qualifies as ‘true’. Jaume and I both remembered a programme where they were shooting from outside a psychiatric hospital with very long lenses. The images were blurry, the sound was really poor, and it was scary! You could imagine something terrible was happening but you couldn’t see it.”
REC: EXECUTION
Plaza and Balagueró’s lockeddown story was structured for the building it was set in, “like a video game with different levels, until you reach the top where the bad creature lives”. To maintain the real-time spontaneity they shot very long takes — some lasting upwards of 15 minutes.
“We rehearsed with the actors but sometimes we lied to them,” laughs Plaza. “We kept saying to them, ‘We’re not going to stop recording, even if you think it’s going wrong, because maybe it isn’t.’ There are moments in the film where you can see in their faces that they don’t know what’s happening. It gives a credibility to their performances that’s amazing.”
While Plaza says he doesn’t mind people calling
Rec a zombie movie, it’s really something else. “I tried to pull it towards being a demonicpossession film,” he says of Rec’s intriguing mythology, which brings the Vatican into play late in the day, “and Jaume was more into experimental science and the viral thing. We ended up combining those ideas into something about a virus that is a manifestation of evil, with the church trying to isolate and analyse it. It’s crazy!”
REC: LEGACY
Plaza and Balagueró immediately carried on to Rec 2: “We had so much fun together and everything worked, so it was just like, ‘Let’s do another one!’” And when American remake Quarantine shone even brighter international light on the Spanish original, a full franchise was assured — although scheduling dictated that the pair each directed wildly different solo entries. “Some people said Genesis wasn’t a Rec film,” he says of
Rec 3, a more comedic entry that largely drops the foundfootage approach. “A Rec film is what I say it is!”
Still friends and occasional collaborators, Plaza and Balagueró have discussed jointdirecting Rec 5 at some point, perhaps for the original’s 25th anniversary. But “the last time I spoke to him about Rec, we were saying that we don’t know if it’s meaningful to a young audience right now,” Plaza admits. “Maybe teenagers don’t know what Rec is.”
He needn’t worry. Rec’s influence can be felt from the gonzo creativity of the
V/H/S trilogy to the towerassault structure of The Raid. Director Rob Savage even used
Rec footage in the prank video that grew into Host, and has been talking it up all year. “Wow, I wasn’t aware of that; it’s very flattering,” Plaza beams. Thirteen years on,
Rec continues to play.
OWEN WILLIAMS REC IS OUT NOW ON BLU-RAY