“Raffaella basically called in a bunch of favours which meant we were able to go and shoot in Italy for 10 days for virtually nothing,” says Kroopf. Dad may not have quite understood the appeal – “He didn’t get it,” laughs Kroopf – but Raffaella’s smart call meant not only that the Wyld Stallyns would come to life, but that they’d even go on tour. Or, more specifically, his daughter, Raffaella, who was running production for her father’s company. “We didn’t get a lot of bites.” But one that they did was from Agostino ‘Dino’ De Laurentiis. “I’ll be honest,” laughs Kroopf of then taking the property out to market. It might never have seen the light of day, says Kroopf, if (we) hadn’t “sweet-talked” Mark Canton into letting it go. It was Steve Herek who came up with the idea of the phone booth, basically because of the old college gag about how many people you could stuff in one.” Despite the change, the studio put the project in turnaround.

“So, we did a draft where we 86’d the van. “Originally Bill & Ted time-travelled in a van,” remembers producer Steve Kroopf.

Set up at Warner Brothers, the studio started to get cold feet when Back To The Future was released in ‘85, the suits concerned that its time-travelling plot shared too many similarities. Excellent it may have been, but Bill & Ted’s road to the big screen was famously complicated from the start.

The tor project ted