Bill & Ted Co-Creator Ed Solomon on 35 Years of Excellent Adventure and the Possibility of Bill & Ted 4
As the original film hits another milestone, Ed Solomon looks back on its enduring popularity and reveals he and Chris Matheson now own the rights to the characters.
35 years ago this month, two dudes from San Dimas, California, were introduced to the public, as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was released in theaters. Directed by Stephen Herek and starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, Excellent Adventure and its iconic characters were the brainchild of screenwriters Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson and the duo would return to write both the sequels, 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and 2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music.
It took us a few days to work out the logistics, because he’s currently in the UK, but a few days after the actual 35th anniversary (Excellent Adventure opened February 17, 1989), I spoke to Solomon about the film’s enduring popularity and the often rough road getting there, which included the original studio, DEG — formed by the legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis — going out of business and the film sitting on the shelf for a couple of years.
Solomon, whose credits include much larger films like Men in Black, Charlie’s Angels, and Now You See Me, spoke about how Bill & Ted became the little film that could, with an intensely loyal fanbase that’s grown through the years. We also discussed the Bill & Ted projects he and Matheson were not involved with, including two different TV shows (one live-action, one animated) and a show at Universal’s annual Halloween Horror Nights that ran for decades.
As for the future of the franchise, Solomon revealed something very notable: He and Matheson now own the rights to the characters and no new Bill & Ted project can be done without their participation or approval. So does that mean a fourth movie is on the way? Not necessarily. But Solomon does elaborate on Alex Winter’s recent comments about how Winter, Keanu Reeves, Solomon and Matheson have had conversations about a potential Bill & Ted 4 story idea that they all are enthusiastic about. And while Solomon is pessimistic it will actually happen, you never know… One day, strange things could be afoot at the Circle K once more.
Regardless though, we have three excellent Bill & Ted movies to enjoy, and Solomon gave me a lot of insight into what it’s like to co-create two characters that have become so beloved and iconic. Yes, this is a lengthy interview, but Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted Theodore Logan deserve it!
At this point, you've celebrated so many Bill & Ted milestones, so you must have long understood this thing is gonna keep sticking around, but still, it has been 35 years since it came out. Do you sometimes kind of take a step back and think about the longevity of Bill & Ted and that people are still connecting to it?
It's remarkable. I don't even know how to process it because it was such a lark when Chris and I started doing Bill & Ted just for fun, just screwing around doing the characters. When we were writing the script, we were writing it on spec in this coffee shop in LA called Ships, which is no longer there. I remember sitting there after midnight one night and Chris was looking at me going, "Someone might even read this script!" Like we had no idea that anything would ever happen, let alone that it would sort of catch this small and subtle wind that's just kept blowing in a very faint but very meaningful way. It's one of the strangest things... And I think part of it was doing Bill & Ted Face the Music turned it from being a kind of a youthful lark to a kind of life project in a certain way, because suddenly here we were 30 some odd years later, doing this again. But Excellent Adventure, which started it, feels like a little seed we planted one day that we just threw out the back window of our second floor apartment and then there it was growing into this tree that you constantly can sit under and gives you shade. And I've always felt surprised and moved.
And the people who have embraced the movie... I've had other movies that have been more “successful,” that have had more box office or had a better release. The first Bill & Ted hardly had any. It had a domestic release that lasted briefly but no international release. But unlike any other film I've ever worked on, even though the pool of people who liked the film isn't very wide — it’s a small pool, but it's deep — the people who like it, the people who've responded to it, tend to have taken it on in a way that we never anticipated. And I think a lot of it has to do with what Alex and Keanu bring into it. Their true real life friendship, the sweetness that it evokes in them as people. As you know, they're wonderful. They're really lovely guys, really good guys and good partners and good friends. But also, I think there was the sort of aspirational quality that Chris and I were holding on to about whatever parts of ourselves could live inside these characters. And so whenever we were inside these characters, it just felt good to be in and I'm wondering if that somehow carried on.
I remember when the movie first came out, I was really disappointed. I'd had such higher hopes for what I thought this thing could be. I wanted it to be kind of rougher and pack a bigger, immediate punch and be more shattering, you know. [Laughs] And when it first came out, critics just pounced on it. They just hated it. Thankfully, there was a bit of revisionist criticism that happened over the years. A lot of people who really trashed it went "Hey, maybe we shouldn't have trashed this thing. It has a sweetness and maybe it wasn't written by idiots for idiots. It was really written by idiots for smart people." So we had a journey on its own that was surprising. The first script got me fired from my agents, then it got picked up. And then it got put in turn around. And then it got picked up again and it was put in turnaround [again] and then it was picked up and then it was made and then it was shelved. And then it was picked up! And then it was released to these terrible reviews. And then it just stayed. It just stayed on. It made not a lot of money by today's standards, and it's not even that much by 1989 standards, but it made like $6 million on its opening weekend. Not too bad, not great. Then I remember it made $3 million it's next weekend. But then it kept making $3 million. And we were like, "What the heck is going on?" It just plateaued there. People were coming back. And that was when I first went "Maybe it's not an abject failure." But we would have never never never expected that weirdly, without any advertising, without any further releases, that it would just kind of grow over the decades. It was very strange. Sorry, that was probably a much longer answer than you probably wanted!
Heh, no, I’m happy to have you dig deep like that! As you're well aware, there are so many writers who originate something and then that's it. The studio hires other people to rewrite it or they do a sequel with other writers. You and Chris have had this very different experience writing all of the films through the years.
It's due really to Alex and Keanu that we stayed involved. Because after the first movie, there was a guy named Rick Finkelstein, who was part of Nelson Entertainment - they are the people who purchased the rights from DEG or somehow they got it in a fire sale. They got the rights to Bill & Ted and they were the ones hiring people to do a sequel.
Actually, let me back it up. The first director we met with [for Excellent Adventure] was this guy named Rick Rosenthal and he had just directed Halloween II. I don't know why they thought he'd be right for it. We had a meeting with him and he had some ideas. And I remember Chris and I saying we didn't think those ideas worked. This was the first meeting we had on the script. And he goes, "Well, if you don't like it, we'll find other writers who do." And I don't know what happened but he was either fired or he dropped off. I don't remember what.
But then when it came to do the sequel, I remember Rick Finkelstein saying “This is a take it or leave it offer. If they don't do it, we'll get other people to do it.” Just like that. And then, over the years, when it became an MGM property, as you know, Chris and I wrote Bill & Ted Face the Music on spec, starting in 2008 or 2009, working in conjunction with Alex and Keanu. Simultaneous to that, MGM was developing other Bill & Ted movies with other writers because they owned it and they were trying to milk the franchise as best they could. Thankfully, those scripts never got made, but they had a bunch of them. There was one where I believe the phone booth was now a cell phone or something. Some harebrained idea about “modernizing it.” I don't know who wrote it. There was a Bill & Ted television series on the FOX network that we were not allowed to write on. There was a comic and a Bill & Ted cartoon we had nothing to do with. So there was a lot of Bill & Ted stuff that Chris and I weren't involved with. And I remember watching part of one episode of the TV series and just retching. I was like "Oh, my God, they don't understand this." But, you know, I guess those things sort of died away.
You mentioned DEG, who were originally going to release the first movie. Bill & Ted took a long time to come out because they went out of business. I’ve told you before how I first saw Excellent Adventure as a kid at one of the movie’s test screenings during the long period between production ending and it finally coming out via Orion. Were you around for those screenings?
I was walking somewhere in a mall somewhere and somebody approached me. One of those people that approached you in a mall to go see a test screening. "Would you ike to come to a free screening of the new George Carlin movie?" That's how they described it. I was like "Wait, I didn't know he had done another movie." I knew he'd done Outrageous Fortune and I knew he was doing this but was like "What other movie did he do?" I asked "What's it about?" and I think they presented it like "George Carlin plays a guy who helps people time travel" or something. And, like a stupid idiot, I said, "Oh, I can't go because I'm one of the writers of that. Ha ha hah." What I should have done is go "Yeah, of course I'd like to go!" and then just given it a rave. But like an idiot, I didn't do that, and I wish they had.
But yeah, the DEG of it, that shelved it for a while. We had some wonderful times with Raffaella De Laurentiis. And even Dino De Laurentiis. There was a story meeting with Dino De Laurentiis and I said "Okay, any other questions?" and Dino De Laurtentiis, who's sitting at the head of the table, he’s like "I have a question!" Picture this in a really thick Italian accent, which I can't do. "I have a question. What's all this about the War of San Dimas?" Everyone's like, "What do you mean the War of San Dimas?" He's like "The War of San Dimas!! They keep talking about the war! The War of San Dimas! Every time they come back and they're in the middle of a war." And we're like, "What? What are you talking about? There's no war!" "It's in my script. The war!" He's getting really mad. And then Raffaella goes up to him, looks over his shoulder at his script. And then I hear her like in Italian saying to Dino something like "No, no Papa, not guerra! Il mondo, il mondo!" His translator had mis-translated it from "the world of San Dimas," which is how we wrote it. "The figures return to the world of San Dimas." That's how we had it. The whole time he read the script he thought it took place during war time in San Dimas, California.
[Laughs] Well, that would be amazing. With San Dimas, for any of us who grew up in Southern California, the actual water park, Raging Waters, was the thing they were best known for. But you guys have given San Dimas this whole other pop culture identity and I know whenever I drive through there, I think of Bill & Ted. That’s kind of the power of cinema - that city is now Bill and Ted's home forevermore.
It's one of the sweetest, loveliest things in my writing life, honestly. When you go to San Dimas, there’s a sign that says "50 Years: An Excellent Adventure" from when Sam Dimas turned 50 years old, and that makes me really happy. And the fact that San Dimas High School sometimes uses "San Dimas High School football rules!" which is a line that Chris wrote during some rewrites. That kind of thing to me is one of the greatest treats of having things that kind of go out and seep into the public in little ways. They trickle in and you get to see its effect. Those are the most meaningful to me. Silly, odd ones like that. Every once in a while someone will shoot me a text or put something on Twitter or something, some picture they caught somewhere... They were up in some back country in Wales, and some bar says "Be excellent to each other, and party on" or something and I'll see that and that's the coolest thing. One of the blessings of Bill & Ted is that if I had to leave anything behind with my footprints it would be that Chris and I got to add the phrase “Be excellent to each other” into the lexicon. It's not such a bad thing, with all the disappointments that one has in one's career and with any one particular project.
I recently rewatched all three movies and one thing that really stood out to me is that these movies are rather delightfully weird. I imagine it must be pretty freeing writing a Bill & Ted script that you can pretty much go anywhere and create what are, if you describe them out loud, some very strange situations.
It's one of the fun things about working on them. I didn't realize how weird they were until I really thought about it. I have only seen Excellent Adventure three times total. I've seen Face the Music a bunch in editing, but I haven't seen it in its completed form except maybe once I think and I've only seen Bogus Journey two times, maybe three. And I remember each time I saw it thinking it's pretty weird. They're weird! They're weird as hell. And I remember at the time I don't think we thought it was as weird as it actually is. We were just trying to make each other laugh and our antecedents, things that we were really aspiring to – which we didn't achieve – but were at least aspiring to were pretty weird. Whether they were the Python films or early Mel Brooks or some of the, conceptually, really bizarre movies that preceded the Bill & Ted era by a decade and a half. So we were already thinking we're not as weird as some of them.
The second movie – which we wanted to call Bill and Ted Go to Hell, but they asked us to change the title because they thought it wouldn't go well on a marquee – there was a time when that movie could have been a lot less weird. There was real pressure to make it like "This time, they have to pass an English test! And they go into literature, they go into fiction." And it would have been the same movie just rehashed. We both really felt like “This is lame, isn't it?” And I remember Chris going "What if we just kill them? Just kill them and send them to Hell." And I was like, "Dude, that's amazing. Could we ever do that actually?" So we pitched both versions. And the buyers and the producers, they all liked the more conservative version. But we had to pitch it to Alex and Keanu, because they were gonna be the decision makers because they were the big stars.
We flew out to Massachusetts, where Keanu was doing a summer Shakespeare thing. It was Alex, Chris, me and Scott Kroopf, the producer. And Scott liked the Bill & Ted Go to Hell version too. That was his preference. And we say, "Okay, guys, we have two versions we want to pitch you." But it was pretty clear, I think, which one we wanted. I think we, let's say, undersold one of them. But they were like, "Definitely, we die and go to Hell!” They wanted to play evil robot Bill & Ted. They wanted to kill each other and themselves. They responded to that. And I kind of always liked the idea that the Teds never get along with each other. Even in Face the Music, the Teds hate each other, but the Bills always appreciate each other.
One scene that made such an impression on me as a kid was when they figure out how to get Ted’s dad’s keys by simply promising to time travel back in time later and leave it for themselves right where they want them to be and then keep getting other things they need to appear that same way. It was pretty ingenious. There's so many time travel movies with so many different rules, and you're doing this wacky sci-fi comedy, but how much were you thinking about the rules of how it all worked?
We were always thinking of whatever internal rules each movie seemed to tell us they had. And we always tried to stick with them in the same way that if you're writing in a certain musical key, you try to stay within that key unless you consciously change keys. There were a set of internal rules that I know we tried to stick pretty closely to. That specific sequence, I remember where it was. We had, for a little while, an office at Warner Brothers, because they made an overall deal [with Chris and I] which we regretted and then got out of. But for the time being, we had this office because Warners had optioned the script - and ultimately put it in turnaround at the end of the year. But we were doing a rewrite for them and we had the historical figures all in jail and had to come up with a way to get them out of jail. But we weren't allowed to spend any money. We couldn't couldn't do anything that had any budget attached to it. We couldn't do anything that involved special effects. But we didn't want to have it just be a fight scene. That seemed silly. And we were really down to the wire. I remember it had to be turned in the next day and we didn't have an idea because everything we came up with, we really hated. So I remember actually pitching Chris, "What if they don't see any of the time travel. But it's like they go, ‘What if, after the report, we take the phone booth and we go back and we put the things we need?’ And then Chris and I just started riffing on these ideas. I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We had a lot more. We wrote a scene that was two or three times as long. And I remember that the producers asked us to trim it way back. The same people that said “Don't call the second movie Bill & Ted Go to Hell,” they basically said "It's too complicated. People won't get it. It's too cerebral. it's too abstract." And I was like, “That’s my favorite thing!”
The other scene that they made us trim way back was when Bill & Ted see the other version of themselves at Circle K. Which was originally 7-Eleven, but 7-Eleven didn't give us the rights so it became Circle K. But we had so many more jokes about them trying to trick themselves. Conceptual mind games they were trying to play to mess with their other selves and little easter eggs they'd left for their future selves. A whole lot of that got trimmed out. I was really bummed about that stuff getting trimmed out. It got pared down to probably 40%. We had so many more conceptual time travel jokes that involved no actual time travel, but oh well!
You brought up how appealing Alex and Keanu are in these roles and obviously they have also been great creative partners for you and Chris. You two came up with these characters and were the first people to perform them. When you saw Alex and Keanu performing scenes on set, did you pretty quickly realize “Oh, this this is working. These guys are embodying these characters”?
Absolutely. Right away. There's a story I've told before, which is Chris and I weren't involved in the casting at all. Just at the very end, we were given a bunch of really crap quality VHS tapes of the finalists. And I remember we went "These guys!" But it was very hard to see them [on the tape]. We said "These guys, but we'd flip them,” because they originally had Alex playing Ted. So they did flip them. But I wouldn't have known what they looked like if I saw them in real life. And then two months later, or whenever it was we were in Arizona for pre-production, we were bemoaning the fact that nobody was going to really play Bill & Ted the way we'd want them played. And whoever they ended up casting, we're like, ‘There's no way they're going to get this right.” And Chris and I were at this McDonald's in Arizona, and there's these two guys messing around in front of us, just goofing off in line. And we're like, "Those would be the best Bill & Ted! Those guys would be great." And when we got to the rehearsal later that day, we realized those were the actual guys. That was Alex and Keanu in front of us in line. From the beginning, they had that… I remember in the first movie, we had designed it so that Bill & Ted walk into every scene and walk out of every scene talking. They're always in the middle of talking to each other. And Alex and Keanu were like that. They'd always just be talking, talking, talking. And they'd go, "Okay, come on to set" and they'd be talking and talking and laughing and goofing on each other. "Okay, action!" They’d finish and they'd keep goofing off and talking to each other.
We talked about how they did these other versions of Bill & Ted without you, like the TV shows. And for many years, between the second and third movie, the only new regular Bill & Ted content was the show they would do each year at Halloween Horror Nights. Do you know anything about how that came about?
I didn't even hear about it until it had been on for more than a decade or a decade and a half. I wasn't even aware until it had been running for quite a long time. And it was a little like, "Wait... somebody bought the rights to do that?!" We've had this somewhat ongoing difficulty with the people who own the rights to the merchandising on Bill & Ted, who have yet to actually pay us a royalty for anything ever. And I was like “Somebody must have made a lot of money on that thing.” And, in fact, when Face the Music was coming out, we went to them and we said, "You've got to make it right. You've got to make a better merchandising deal where you actually pay the creators a percentage.” It's not a huge amount. A couple percent is nothing. And they did make a better deal but they kind of weaseled around it by basically only merchandising stuff from the first two movies. They didn’t do much Face the Music-specific merchandising, which allowed them to basically use their old deal. But we said "You know you owe us money." And they said "Yeah, we probably do. But if you want to sue us, you can, but it'll cost you more money than you'll ever get back. But you're welcome to try."
It became a somewhat ugly situation until someone from the Writers Guild pointed out to us “You know, you're in that window between 30 and 35 years, since you wrote the original spec script, that you could get the copyright back.” And had it not been for the people who own the merchandising rights and their absolute intransigence in making any kind of a deal with us, we wouldn't have realized we could get the rights back. We hired an attorney and we got the rights back. So Chris and I actually own the rights to Bill & Ted again for the first time since we wrote it on spec. We don't own anything that's original to the movie. What we own is the things that were original to our first script. Bill & Ted, Bill & Ted time traveling... But we don't own the phone booth. Because they time traveled in a van [in our first script]. We turned it into a phone booth at the behest of Steve Herek, the director, when Back to the Future was coming out and Warner Brothers was worried that people would think it's too much like the DeLorean. So Steve Herek had this idea to turn it into a phone booth. I didn't know what Doctor Who was. There was no internet and I wasn't versed in English television culture at all. Had I known, I would have been like "It's too much like Doctor Who," but I had no idea what that even was.
But we own Bill & Ted as characters. Nobody can do another Bill & Ted now without us or without our approval and that’s good. We can't do it with Death or the phone booth or with things that are new to the movie [or sequels] since other people own the copyright. But in a way, I have to thank the people who own the merchandising for inadvertently making it known to us that we actually could have the whole thing back. It was much more valuable than whatever $6,000 or so... I'm not kidding. It probably added up to $10,000 or $15,000 over the years in merchandising, whatever it was they were withholding from us. It's much more worth it to have the property back.
Alex recently got fans excited when he said that you and Chris were having some conversations with him and Keanu about potentially doing another Bill & Ted movie.
Well, Chris had a really great idea for a fourth movie. We thought we never would never do another one. We actually thought it was over. And Chris had a really great idea. Whether anyone will actually finance a fourth film is anyone's guess. I think probably not. I haven't done any Bill & Ted since Face the Music. There's no script or anything like that. There's no money to make it. It's just, there's an idea. Alex and Keanu really like the idea. Chris came up with the idea. He and I tossed a bunch of ideas about around that idea. But for the most part, it's mostly his. It's really funny. It's a great notion. I don't know if we'll ever get a chance to really write that script. If it does happen, then Chris and I will either do it in a sort of serial way where he'll write it up and I'll write it up or we'll co-write somehow. But I don't anticipate that actually. If you ask me, if I were a betting man. I'd say I don't think it's going to happen. I know that none of us wants to do a Bill & Ted movie that we don't really believe in. There's no point. It's not worth it. We've never been paid that much money, ever, for Bill & Ted. Almost all the money I got for Face the Music went back into the movie, and I didn't get that much money for Face the Music. It's not a project that we've ever done for money. It's just for the love of doing these characters and trying to make something weird and that makes us laugh and that makes us have fun writing and playing around in that world.
But there's an idea. Chris has an idea. I think it's a really good idea. There's no script written as of right now. There's nobody paying for a movie that I'm aware of. If someone is, I'm not involved. [Laughs] So I'd be I'd be surprised if someone was!. But if somebody ever decides they actually want to make that movie, then sure, we'll all start talking about whether it can be done well. Because I feel like we barely made it in under the tag on the third one. And I don't want to tempt fate. I'm proud of Face the Music. It's a sweet film. I'm proud of some of the weirdness, especially the middle of that movie. I think the middle of that movie is sort of the best step. I think we struggled in the first part, we struggled in the last part. I just don't want to do a Bill & Ted movie that we don't believe in. I don't want to do a Bill & Ted movie that I can't be proud of. I don't want to make fans of the movies go through the process of getting sort of high hopes for something and then getting their hopes dashed. That would be a bummer to me. If we could get it into shape where it feels like something really worth making, then I’d be up for it, but, you know… the high bar.
Well, if not, you have a great trilogy. But if it happens, I welcome it. Keanu has done four Matrix movies and four John Wick movies, so maybe there can be a fourth Bill & Ted.
That’s true, yeah!
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This was the best interview and now I want to know what the idea for the fourth movie is.