Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is a 1989 American science fiction comedy film directed by Stephen Herek and written by Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon. The first installment of the Bill & Ted franchise, it stars Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and George Carlin. The film follows two metalhead slacker high school students, Bill (Winter) and Ted (Reeves), who travel through time to assemble historical figures for their high-school history presentation.
It received positive reviews and was a modest box-office success, grossing $40 million against a $10 million budget. Winter and Reeves reprised their roles in two sequels: Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) and Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020).
Plot In 2688, humanity exists as a utopian society due to the inspiration of the music and philosophy of the Two Great Ones: William "Bill" S. Preston, Esq., and Ted "Theodore" Logan. One of the citizens, Rufus, is tasked by the leaders to travel back to San Dimas, California in 1988 using a phone booth-shaped time machine to ensure that the young Bill and Ted, two dim-witted high school students, successfully pass history class. The boys are on the brink of failing the course and out of school, and their only hope of passing is if they get a perfect score on their final history report, in which they must give an oral presentation on how historical figures would view the present San Dimas. If they fail, Ted's disagreeable father, police Captain Logan, plans to ship Ted to a military school in Alaska, ending Bill and Ted's fledgling band, Wyld Stallyns, and altering history.
Rufus finds the duo at a Circle K, struggling to finish their report and offers help before another phone-booth time machine arrives and future versions of Bill and Ted step out. After assuring the present-day Bill and Ted that Rufus's claims are valid and that they can trust him, they disappear in the time booth.
Rufus shows Bill and Ted how to operate the time booth, taking them back to 1805, where they find Napoleon Bonaparte leading his forces against Austria. As Rufus, Bill, and Ted return to the present, Napoleon gets thrown by a cannonball explosion into their wake and gets dragged through the Circuits of Time along with them. Rufus explains that time will progress normally for Bill and Ted and that they cannot miss their class presentation the next day. He then departs, leaving the empty time booth for them. As they discuss where to go next, they discover Napoleon stuck in a nearby tree, inspiring them to abduct historical figures and take them to the present for their school presentation. They leave Napoleon with Ted's younger brother Deacon and ask him to take Napoleon out to town before they go.
They befriend Billy the Kid in the Wild West and Socrates in ancient Greece before stopping in 15th-century England, where they fall in love with princesses Joanna and Elizabeth. Their father tries to have them executed, but Billy and Socrates help them escape. The booth, its antenna damaged by an attacking knight in the process, takes them to 2688, where they discover that society reveres them and their future band. They are inspired to complete their report with "extra credit" by abducting Sigmund Freud, Ludwig van Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan, and Abraham Lincoln. After a brief stop in prehistoric times to repair the antenna, they program the booth to return to the present, but end up outside Circle K the night before, where Rufus first introduced himself. They convince their earlier selves of Rufus's trustworthiness before he explains how to get to the next day; he further warns them that they have only two hours left before their history report is due.
When they arrive at the current time, they leave the historical figures at the local mall to learn about San Dimas while looking for Napoleon. After learning that Deacon has abandoned Napoleon at a bowling alley, Bill and Ted track him to a local water park. Back at the mall, the historical figures become fascinated but also overwhelmed by San Dimas culture, and are soon arrested for inadvertently causing mayhem. Captain Logan, determined to break up Bill and Ted's friendship, refuses to release their historical figures and orders Ted to start packing up for military school.
The boys execute an escape plan based on using the time booth in the future to set up what they need in the present. They break their friends out of jail, then present each to the assembled school using stage lighting effects and rousing music. Their "report" earns a standing ovation, they pass the course, and they return the historical figures to their own times.
Sometime later, Rufus returns, accompanied by the two princesses he has rescued from arranged marriages. He says that they will also be part of Wyld Stallyns and that the four of them will change the world with their music. He asks to jam with them, but on hearing their fledgling attempts to play, he turns to the movie audience and assures them "They do get better."
Cast
Alex Winter as Bill S. Preston, Esq., a member of Wyld Stallyns Keanu Reeves as Ted "Theodore" Logan, a member of Wyld Stallyns George Carlin as Rufus, a man from the future who is sent to help Bill and Ted Terry Camilleri as Napoleon Bonaparte Dan Shor as Billy the Kid Tony Steedman as Socrates Rod Loomis as Sigmund Freud Al Leong as Genghis Khan Jane Wiedlin as Joan of Arc Robert V. Barron as Abraham Lincoln Clifford David as Ludwig van Beethoven Hal Landon Jr. as Captain Logan, Ted and Deacon's father who works as a police captain Bernie Casey as Mr. Ryan, Bill and Ted's history teacher Amy Stock-Poynton as Missy/Mom, Bill's stepmother J. Patrick McNamara as Mr. Preston, Bill's father Frazier Bain as Deacon Logan, Ted's younger brother John Karlsen as Evil Duke Diane Franklin as Princess Joanna Kimberley LaBelle as Princess Elizabeth Clarence Clemons, Martha Davis, and Fee Waybill as The Three Most Important People in the World, three future people seated in thrones
Production Writing
The screenplay was written by Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson in early 1987, based on a comedy stand-up routine they had performed in college. Director Stephen Herek called the screenplay "incredibly laugh-out-loud", but recognized that because some of the humour targeted a specific audience, the film was "either going to be a huge hit or a huge flop". He has said that shopping the film for distributors was difficult; Warner Bros. wanted to produce it within a budget, but could not figure out how to fund it. The film was eventually picked up by Dino De Laurentiis through the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group (DEG).
In a 1991 interview, co-writer Ed Solomon said the characters of Bill and Ted were originally seen as "14-year-old skinny guys, with low-rider bell-bottoms and heavy metal T-shirts" who were despised by the popular kids at school. Casting Reeves and Winter changed the filmmakers' images of the characters because "...once you cast Alex and Keanu, who look like pretty cool guys, that was hard to believe".
Originally as a spec script, the film was called Bill & Ted's Time Van. The core plot was similar, with Bill and Ted on the verge of failing their history class, ruining their plans to form a band. However, it deviated from the film version when they borrowed a van from their 28-year-old friend Rufus. While driving the van, they end up in Nazi Germany; and after some hijinks, bring Adolf Hitler back to present-day San Dimas before continuing to collect other historical figures. Solomon said this approach became problematic, and Hitler was switched out with Napoleon in their final script. Other ideas in the spec script that were dropped included more involvement of Bill and Ted's classmates, including having them time-travel with them; visiting Julius Caesar in the Roman Empire and ending up causing his death; and helping a prehistoric caveman invent fire so that they could light up a joint. The van, a 1969 Chevrolet, was abandoned as it was considered too similar to the DeLorean used in the Back to the Future trilogy. It was later replaced with a phone booth—which, contrary to common belief, was not intended as a reference to the TARDIS from the British sci-fi show Doctor Who. (Matheson said, "All of us were so clueless and knew nothing about Doctor Who.") In earlier drafts of the script, other historical figures Bill and Ted plucked from history included Charlemagne (whom they referred to as "Charlie Mangay"), Babe Ruth, and a non-famous medieval person called John the Serf (who is nonetheless listed in the credits).
Casting Herek screened between 200 and 300 actors for the main roles, asking actors to try for both parts during auditions. Pauly Shore and Gary Riley were among the hundreds of actors considered for the role of Ted, while Matt Adler, River Phoenix, Donovan Leitch, Gary Riley, Sean Penn and then-upcoming actor Brendan Fraser reportedly auditioned for Bill.
Keanu Reeves was one of the first to audition, and Herek quickly identified him as their Ted, making much of the rest of casting to find a match against Reeves. Alongside Reeves, 24 actors were called back and auditioned in various pairs to find a good chemistry. On that day, Reeves was one of the first to arrive along with Alex Winter, and while waiting for the auditions to start, found out they had a lot of personal details in common, such as a common interest in bass guitar and motorcycles. They quickly developed a rapport between each other during auditions, which earned them the title roles. A longstanding urban legend has it that Reeves auditioned for Bill and Winter for Ted. According to Winter, the story emerged because the characters are so similar, and even he and Reeves sometimes became confused about who was who.
Through rehearsals, Winter and Reeves worked on developing their characters to move them away from being stereotypical comedic slackers and insert sincerity and other more human elements into them. Although they developed mannerisms outside of the script, influenced partially by British comedians like Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, the pair kept to the dialogue written by Solomon and Mathseon, with Winter calling it "very floral, so paradoxical to how you think dumb Valley guys would speak". Winter said that to develop Bill's character, he borrowed from the looks and trends along Venice Beach, California, where he had been living, including wearing a baseball cap backwards and pulling part of his hair through that opening.
Winter described the casting of George Carlin as Rufus as a "very happy accident". The role of Rufus had not been established when filming started. Herek stated that their intention was to have Eddie Van Halen as Rufus, given the frequency of Van Halen references in the screenplay, but this was not possible because of the low budget for the film. They started looking at other actors who would fit the rock motif, making a short list that had included Ringo Starr, Roger Daltrey, Sean Connery, and Charlie Sheen. They soon recognized that no one on this list was a comedian, except for perhaps Starr. Producers Scott Kroopf and Bob Cort had just finished filming Outrageous Fortune, which co-starred George Carlin, and, with the film's production nearly complete, were able to get him to complete filming.
The Three Most Important People in the utopian society were envisioned to be portrayed by the band members of ZZ Top. However, Solomon had connections to the E Street Band, The Tubes and The Motels, and were able to get Clarence Clemons, Fee Waybill, and Martha Davis, respectively, for the Most Important People.
The film's writers, Solomon and Matheson, appear in the film's ice cream scene as the "stupid" and "ugly" waiters, respectively. When Rufus plays his guitar solo, the hands in the close-up are those of Stevie Salas, who composed the film's guitar music.
Filming