How Phoenix’s Metrocenter had a starring role in 'Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure'

Later this summer, iconic Phoenix mall Metrocenter will get the wrecking ball treatment when its demolished. Thanks to “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” though, the legendary Valley landmark will live on, albeit in cinematic form.

Scenes from the popular sci-fi comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter were shot at Metrocenter, which doubled as San Dimas Mall in the flick. It was one of several local businesses and locations that appeared in “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure," which was largely filmed in the Phoenix area in 1987.

It's one of Metrocenter's biggest claims to fame and serves as a snapshot of the mall at the height of its popularity when it was brimming with shops, people, and attractions like its famed ice rink.

The cast and crew of the movie took over Metrocenter during a four-night stretch in March 1987, filming after the mall had closed for each evening. Scenes featuring Bill S. Preston, Esq., and “Ted” Theodore Logan (respectively played by Winters and Reeves) and the legendary figures they recruited to help with a history report — including Genghis Khan, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, and Joan of Arc — were shot in Metrocenter’s food court and its shops and stores.

For extras and crew members alike, it was both a fun, exhausting, and even chaotic experience setting up and shooting the movie’s various scenes.

In honor of this weekend’s farewell party for Metrocenter, Phoenix New Times spoke with Valley residents who worked as crew members and extras on “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” about their memories of filming at the mall.

“It’s not Metrocenter … it’s Metro Hell.”

The cast and crew of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” filmed at Metrocenter from March 10 through March 14 in 1987. Shooting took place after the mall closed each night in the food court and inside several stores. Hundreds of extras were hired through local talent agencies and newspaper ads. Wrangling them, though, wasn’t an easy task.

Connie Hoy, production assistant: We had to shoot there at night when everything was closed. And we were there for almost a week so it was like several nights of … keeping a vampire schedule.

Rick Rothen, location manager: [We] had to make arrangements with all the individual store owners to have an employee there and pay them to monitor their places. Sometimes they wouldn’t show up, so we’d have to adjust camera angles so we wouldn’t see stores that had their security gates down. If you look closely, you might see some stores in the movie that had their gates down.

Wes Bloom, electrician and lighting tech: We'd come in late in the afternoon, rig, prep, do everything, and then we had to be out of there by a certain time every morning to appease the landlords so the shopping center could still function. So we had to be on our best behavior and do things right.

Hoy: I had been to Metrocenter a couple of times before, just cruising as a teenager or I'd go to Castles 'n Coasters. But once you realize how massive that place was in your mind. I must have been putting at least 10 miles a day of walking around.

Bloom: Another time we were filming, I think, in the courtyard in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden we heard this kaboom, kaboom. The AD gets on the radio, "What the hell is that noise?" Well, they decided to re-roof and work at night because it was getting so hot. So, they had to go and pay them off and hold up doing the roof work at night until we could get done.

Larry Bartels, production assistant and stand-in: There was a lot of work to do at Metrocenter because they did a lot of scenes there with a lot of people involved: the skating rink, the food court, the sporting goods store, and the music store.

Aaron Scofield, extra: It was probably my junior year in high school and they were doing calls [for extras]. Me and my friend, Chris McSpadden, were both starting to DJ at the time, so we were used to being up late anyway. We said, “Fuck yeah, let’s do this.” I think the call time to be at the mall was 10 p.m. and we worked till like 5 in the morning.

Hoy: There was a lot going on and I was running around that place from end to end for 14 hours a day. And Eric Heffron, the second [assistant director] was teaching me how to be a good set person, but covering Metrocenter up and down and extras, holding them back to wherever the set was, and you bring them in a group of 20 at a time and I was just like, “Wow, this is nuts walking all around the place.”
Bloom: In the food court area we had lots and lots of extras. It was a zoo.

Scofield: I think they kind of gauged how they placed you in what scenes based on something spurious, like whatever you were wearing or something like that. They had some old people here, some adults here, some black kids, some white kids, that kind of thing.

Hoy: There were some really long days. But we made it through every single day, which is the goal. One time, I looked at Eric Heffron and I'm like, "Dude, it's not Metrocenter ... it's Metro Hell." And he put it as quote of the day on the call sheet, because it was just logistically a really huge endeavor, which came off pretty well.

Scofield: We were having a blast. It might have been different for people that were maybe older that were just smoking a cigarette saying, "I want to get the fuck out of here, just pay me." That kind of thing. But for a lot of the local youth that were there, they were having a good time. Literally, some of the kids were freestyle rapping during the breaks in the restrooms. They were just having a good time. It seemed like it was a good time as well, typical of extra work, where it's a lot of hurry-up and wait stuff.

Hoy: We had so many extras, and they can get sick of things after spending so many weird hours in one [place]. Things got a little weird at times, like extras not going to the bathroom in proper places. Like, “C’mon man, you’re in a locker room and there’s bathrooms everywhere. What is going on with that?”
[image-8] Bill Roberts, production assistant and stand-in: There were a few incidents like that. One of the other stand-ins, who I won't name, pissed in one of the uniform lockers in the back hallways. People did get impatient. You're trying to keep 200 to 300 extras entertained enough to not fuck up for hours on end, but it's just human nature to be upset. And a film set is not really conducive to that. So, yeah, people were running wild at points.

Hoy: We had a lot of fun times, too. Watching the filming of what was essentially one of the film’s best moments, [like] Sigmund Freud picking up girls with a corn dog ... it was a lot of great scenes in a short amount of time. And he was a bit reserved in doing that. He almost didn't want to, but I mean it's Freud, right? You have to do it.

Bartels: I was around the same age as Alex [Winter] and Keanu [Reeves], so we hung out a lot on set waiting for the next shot to happen. They were great. Keanu was probably more of a character than anything. One time, the three of us were sitting at the food court and these girls came up and asked us for our autographs, even me. I said, "I'm not anyone; I'm just with them."

Scofield: It was fun. We were just these lowly extras that decided it was fun to be at the mall overnight, I enjoyed it. It was a little bit of extra money for a kid and I could buy some records with it for eight hours of work. By the time 4:30 rolled around, you're like, "Fuck, I just want to go to bed."

Mayhem at the mall

One of the film’s most action-packed sequences involves most of the historical figures going on a chaos-filled romp through the mall set to Extreme’s speed-metal track “Play With Me.” Genghis Khan trashes a sporting goods retailer. Beethoven performs an impromptu jam session at a music store. Joan of Arc takes over an aerobics class. And Billy the Kid and Socrates lead mall security on a merry chase that ends on the mall’s famous ice-skating rink.

Hoy: We shot the stuff with Beethoven in the keyboard store at like three or four in the morning. We’re all barely awake and all the extras are asleep.

Roberts: They needed extras, people to double for extras who came once but didn’t come back the next night. I wound up in a few scenes, like when Beethoven was playing all the keyboards. I was one of the people rocking out in the background. I doubled for an extra who didn't show up.

Scofield: I was put in the [music store] scene. And also, just any of the shots with people walking around. There was a bunch of stuff to where the camera was literally in our faces, straight up, but a lot of that just hit the floor. [image-9] Hoy: [Beethoven actor Clifford Davis] was really intimidated by playing that organ and figuring out what to push. I remember him saying, “I don't want to be pressing the wrong buttons on the organ.” And the manager of that music store helped him through that process, which was amazing to watch, because it made Cliff more comfortable onscreen.

Larry Bartels, production assistant and stand-in: The stuff in the sports store was absolutely hilarious. [Genghis Khan actor] Al Leong had a blast going in there and trashing the place. It was almost like [director] Stephen Herek would say to him, "Just do it." And he did it.

Hoy: Al [Leong] found that aluminum bat was an improvisation on set with director Steve Herek, and he had to find something to really wield to knock the mannequin head off. And he's like, “I don't want to use the wooden one, give me the aluminum bat.” I love Al Leong.

Wiley Stewart, Phoenix resident: My family was working for a local talent agency at the time and we were hired as extras. We were in the sporting goods store [scenes] and when Genghis Khan knocked the head off the mannequin, it didn't go up in the air and into the basket like in the movie. It flew straight across the store and hit my dad in the head. He thought it was funny.

Roberts: When Genghis Khan is in the sporting goods store and ends up shooting a basket with a mannequin head, I'm actually in that scene, but I'm hiding behind a clothing rack.

Stewart: We met the guy who played Genghis Khan; he was really cool. Seeing them set up for the skateboard scene where he does the flip on a trampoline and landed on the skateboard was kind of cool. That was actually real. It wasn't a stuntman, it was the actual guy playing Genghis Khan. That one scene took nine and a half hours to shoot.
Roberts: Every shot took a lot of setting up. While they were setting up the shots for Joan of Arc on this aerobics stage they built in Metrocenter by the elevators, they had me and my buddy Larry stand in for [Joan of Arc actress] Jane Wiedlin and the instructor she pushes off the stage. It was a long set up and there were hundreds of extras involved, standing around bored while they set up the cameras, so Larry and I started improving some jokes, some characters, and we got some chuckles. And when we looked up, there were bats flying down the mall coming right at us. Like three or five bats just hanging out in the rafters.

Bartels: It was funny watching everybody in the aerobics scene do those moves without any music, which they added in later. There were people on [Metrocenter’s second level] looking down and watching the filming like, "What's going on?"

Roberts: I wound up in the final cut when Joan of Arc is doing aerobics. I think you can see me leaning on the stage.

Hoy: I was very excited to meet Jane [Wiedlin] because just loved the Go-Go's. I remember she was really trying to get her [aerobics] routine down. When the cameras started rolling, she just dove into doing that exercise session. She was into it, man. It was the funnest, funnest thing to watch.

Bartels: Jane Wiedlin was sweet. I got to watch her dog during a couple of scenes.
Hoy: The ice rink scene was quite interesting to do. It was particularly fun trying to get the [actors] out there on the ice. And one of our PAs, Steven Feinberg, was an ex-hockey player and was out there helping the actors get around the rink and skating laps with him.

Bartels: The part we did at the skating rink was a lot of fun. I remember trying to get the talent out on the ice was absolutely hilarious. I'm a skater, but most of the [actors] weren’t.

Hoy: Al [Leong] was comfortable on the ice because he's worked as both a stunt guy and actor.

Roberts: I was in the ice-skating scene where [Billy the Kid] and Socrates get rounded up. I was actually on the ice for 10 hours that night. It was rough just trying to stay on skates for that long and my feet had blistered. I remember there were two 18-year-old girls out on the ice as extras, one of [whom] was Sandra Collins, who’s gone on to be a pretty famous DJ.

Bloom: I remember one specific thing we were filming on the ice skating rink. We were pre-rigging lights and we hear the little pitter-patter of feet and little kids talking, and this hockey little league team has a game [planned] and nobody knew anything about it. It got nuts. We had to get locations involved and, as a courtesy, we had to pull all that stuff off the rink so those kids could play in their leagues. These are the little hiccups that happen on movie sets.

Roberts: The ice-skating stuff took 10 hours to shoot and winds up being like 30 seconds of the movie.

Metrocenter’s excellent legacy

After “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” was released in February 1989, the movie became the mall’s biggest pop-culture moment. Hoy and other Valley residents who worked on the film say it will always be an indelible part of the mall’s legacy.

Hoy: When people think of Metrocenter, the film almost always comes to mind. It really captured a moment in time at the mall.

Roberts: I lived not too far from Metrocenter and that place was my playground. It was practically my backyard. So it was great to be able to film a movie there.

Bartels: It felt like kind of a rinky-dink movie at the time. No one thought it would go anywhere or even get released. Maybe that's why we had such a good time because everybody took it very lighthearted.

Bloom: All of those scenes at Metrocenter from the film were memorable.

Bartels: I basically grew up with Metrocenter, so it has a lot of memories for me, especially filming "Bill & Ted's" there. It was probably the most fun I've ever had working on a shoot. When I heard they were going to tear down Metrocenter, it really broke my heart. It's going to be missed.