Ever since the 1989 cult comedy “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” sent them traveling through time in a cosmic phone booth, slacker friends Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winters) have explored some profound historical and philosophical questions.
For example, what would Genghis Khan do if you set him loose in a sporting goods store? If Billy the Kid, Socrates, Napoleon and Sigmund Freud were hanging out, what would they talk about? And who would win if you played the Grim Reaper in a game of Twister?
Now, nearly 30 years after their last outing, 1991’s “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey,” the dim-witted duo are back in an unlikely third installment in the series, “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” which hit theaters and premium video on demand Friday. And this time, there’s a new and most excellent brain-tickler to ponder: If you were recruiting a supergroup of the greatest musicians from history to help create a song that could save the universe, who would you choose?
In “Face the Music,” the heavy metal loving but musically inept Bill and Ted, now deep into the doldrums of middle age, are given the impossible task of creating the greatest song ever written in order to prevent the fabric of space and time from being ripped apart.
With no idea where to even start, the two begin a frantic dash through time in search of desperately needed musical inspiration. Along the way, they get critical help from their teenage daughters, Billie (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Thea (Samara Weaving), who assemble a group of legendary musicians from the past, including Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The 10-plus-year effort to get “Face the Music” to the screen has been as twisty and improbable as Bill and Ted’s onscreen journeys. From the outset, returning screenwriters Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson knew that the story of the third film would be centered on music. But over the course of the project’s development, as the creative team struggled to nail down financing, the script went through numerous wildly different iterations.
“Originally there wasn’t a supergroup — it was just Bill and Ted’s kids,” says Solomon, whose other credits include “Men in Black” and “Now You See Me.” “It was further down the road that we had this idea that the daughters, trying to help their dads, would put together this band. After that it was just throwing out names: What about this person? What about that person? We were looking for characters that were iconic but also embodied different styles of music and that when put together would be odd and interesting and hopefully work together.”
After kicking around possibilities like ragtime composer Scott Joplin and blues great Robert Johnson, Solomon and Matheson, along with director Dean Parisot (“Galaxy Quest”) and music supervisor Jonathan Leahy, zeroed in on pioneering jazz trumpeter Armstrong, rock legend Hendrix and Mozart.
“The conversation revolved around how recognizable we wanted the historical musicians to be,” says Leahy. “If you fill the movie full of extremely esoteric musicians, as brilliant as they might be, at some point are you losing the audience and not having as much fun? So we decided to stick with really well-known household names and just have fun with that.”
Though comic works like the “Bill & Ted” films are generally allowed some liberties when it comes to the use of historical figures, the filmmakers faced certain restrictions when it came to Armstrong and Hendrix.
To help round out the historical supergroup, Solomon and Matheson landed on the idea of incorporating Ling Lun, who, according to ancient lore, is said to be the founder of Chinese music and is credited by texts dating back to circa 200 BC with pioneering the use of the bamboo flute.
