Official Summary
Bill S. Preston Esquire and Theodore 'Ted' Logan (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) were the stars of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey. The anarchic, charming movies about two school kids from San Dimas, California who travel across time and save the world became cult classics and are still cited today as favorites and influences for subsequent generations of fans. The hotly anticipated Bill & Ted Face the Music will be out in September 2020 and stars Winter and Reeves as well as rising stars Samara Weaving (Ready or Not) and Brigette Lundy-Paine (Atypical). This bodacious companion to all three movies will feature hundreds of photographs, script excerpts and quotes: a most excellent publication.
Review
This book is great! It's full of absolutely wonderful Behind the Scenes photos from all three movies, and I loved reading the interviews with the creators and actors that did a lot to elaborate on the conception of Bill and Ted and the way the three movies developed and filmed. There's a lot of little insights into the characters scattered throughout that are so fun to read for how neatly they distill the essence of Bill and Ted into simple statements, starting with the Foreward reading, "Even though our first impulse was to make fun of them [...], the instant they landed on our shoulders we knew there was nothing to make fun of. They were sweet, big-hearted, very tolerant, very intuitive. They had crazy ideas that sort of bizarrely worked out. They found pretty much everything in the world excellent."
There's so much interesting stuff in this book! It's fascinating to me that Bill and Ted started off as characters in an Improv group, and that Matheson and Solomon continued on with them by writing in-character letters to each other after the group had split and they went on to things like graduate school or industry jobs. I'm sure the characters have changed a lot since that initial improv work, but it would still be really fascinating to see some of those letters LOL. I think it's interesting how that initial improv work didn't really delineate between Bill and Ted yet, but just evenly split the characters between Matheson and Solomon -- a more literal edge to the 'two people, one soul' way the characters still navigate through life all these years later, it feels like a really great starting point that absolutely carries through to today.
It was also really fascinating to see all the little glimpses into the industry tribulations that the films went through -- Excellent Adventure's original production company going bankrupt and getting a saving grace when the previous company's head of legal got a new job at Nelson Entertainment and picked the film back up. Bogus Journey got kind of rushed through production (a good and bad thing, according to the writers, who say that the third act is a little sloppy, but also that if the studio had spent more time dwelling on some of the elements, they might not have pushed them through lmao). Face the Music lost half their financing just two weeks before they were about to start shooting when some of the investors got cold feet about it. It's crazy how many trials and tribulations this franchise had to fight through, but the way it made it through time and time again just by how much love and effort the creators and everyone on those sets had for the films is so, so sweet and I love reading about it.
The middle of the book also has several pages dedicated to highlighting a bunch of merch -- the trading cards, some of the action figures, and other promotional material (including a poster I hadn't seen before that now I kind of wish I had a full version of LOL). It also has a bunch of the Bill & Ted fanclub stuff featured!! Their ordering brochure, postcard, and the cover of their second newsletter all get their own corner of the display, which is so much fun!
The Face the Music section is my favorite though! Compared to the first two movies, it seems harder to find Behind the Scenes photos and information about Face the Music, but this book is full of it and that makes it completely excellent. I love that the section opens with a quote from the Doctor of Philosophy and Applied Mathemetics that consulted on the film that reads, "What Bill & Ted end up accesssing is not different points in space and time, or even different paralllel realities. They're accessing a super deep level of reality, a quantum source code. By changing their point of view, they change the source code, and the rest of reality changed to accommodate that. In the end, what they need to do to save the world is show how all these different points of view can come together and harmonize, creaeing a new type of reality, built from relationships between things, not things in themselves. A world where empathy is as important as truth." -- I LOVE THAT!
As Solomon puts it, Face the Music started with the question of, "What would happen if you were told as a teenager that your aspiration, and your joy -- for them it was heavy metal -- was going to save the world. And you were actually tasked with this. What happens if that never panned out and now you're middle-aged? How would you relieve that burden?". Kind of a Christmas Carol kind of story, and then the idea that Rufus got the wrong Preston/Logan came about around 2008, and the first script was finished in 2010. It's actually really interesting to me that the studio was reluctant to pick it up at first because they were already working on a Bill and Ted reboot, unbeknownst to the writers, and I am endlessly grateful that Solomon, Matheson, Winter, and Reeves were able to convince them eventually to drop that idea and work on Face the Music instead, even if it took a crazy long time to pull it off.
Besides the financing disaster, Face the Music had a lot of smaller hiccups throughout production -- awful weather, physical exhaustion, Alex Winter almost collapsing after getting overheated in his prison-era muscle suit, the Dennis costume for Anthony Carrigan accidentally being an inch too short for him, and more, but once again, the love for the franchise is what kept things pushing on. "Every one of the investors is a fan," Alex Leibovici from Hammerstone Studios says, "Everyone on the crew is a fan." and director Dean Parisot said, "I was able to bring in a group of people I've worked with over many, many years who all just said 'We don't care what happens. We're just gonna keep making this until someone tells us to go home.' It's lovely to see how the love of the characters and the films was able to motivate everyone to give it their all and make sure that the work got put in to make Face the Music the excellent production that it turned out to be!
Alex Winter's summation of the Be Excellent to Each Other catchphrase is similarly lovely: "Be Excellent To Each other is at once odd and perfectly relatable. So it gives you pause, makes you sit up and listen a little and at the same time it's light and not grandiose. But mostly I love it because it's actionable, it's asking us all to do something that's simple and beautiful. It's not saying we should be perfect or saint-like or 'better than', just that we should take the action of being our better selves to those around us. And that's something we could all benefit from in these very stressful times." As is Keanu Reeves' on the Party On addendum: "... And Party On! It's a profound statement. Do the best of yourself. Treat each other with kindness, respect, with love, with appreciation. It's a wonderful sentiment. It's one of the best, right? Yeah, and it feels good. It feels good to be excellent to people! It feels great to be treated excellently. It's the gold standard for our humanity, our humanness, our connection to everything."
I don't want to completely spoil the entirety of this book, so I'll stop myself here before I go any further -- while there's still a lot I haven't covered. If you love these movies, I highly recommend giving this book a look-over, it's absolutely Fantastic and I love every inch of it!!