Who gets to be called a genius?
Allee Willis, the subject of the documentary “The World According to Allee Willis,” newly released to Hulu, qualifies half a dozen times over, without exaggeration — but few would have known it until now.
With decades of incredible work under her belt, though her name remained largely unrecognized, Willis co-wrote “I’ll Be There For You,” the song that opened 10 seasons of “Friends.” Willis co-wrote “Neutron Dance” by the Pointer Sisters — and as a result of the latter, was declared to be the world’s most dangerous woman by the Russian newspaper Pravda — although her friends are all 100% certain Willis herself made sure that information made it into U.S. news coverage, all of which we see within the first few minutes of the documentary about her life. Willis also co-wrote both “September” — the fifth most successful song in the history of the music business — and “Boogie Wonderland” by Earth Wind and Fire, both of which still rule the dance floor at weddings and bar mitzvahs.
“She’s d**n near written half my memories,” Questlove declared when Willis was a guest on his podcast.
Willis co-wrote the music and lyrics for “The Color Purple” on Broadway. She designed sets for MTV and for videos by Blondie and the Cars. She was a visual artist who painted and created kinetic sculptures. She invented the Metaverse under the name “Willisville” in 1995, and was convincing enough to get Mark Cuban to invest in her idea when the rest of the world was still dialing in on 9600 baud modems.
Allee Willis’ name and her seemingly endless talents have been known to people in or adjacent to the music business for decades, but she never received the kind of attention and accolades that this level of accomplishment should have provided. “The World According to Allee Willis” is here not just to attempt to rectify this information vacuum, but also as a manifestation of Willis’ own wishes: minutes into the film’s opening, Willis is on screen stating, “I’ve always known that my final art piece would be someone putting together the trail I’ve left behind.”
Allee Willis’ name and her seemingly endless talents have been known to people in or adjacent to the music business for decades, but she never received the kind of attention and accolades that this level of accomplishment should have provided.
Director Alexis Spraic — who had a mutual friend in Paul Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman, one of Willis’ closest friends — got the nod to take on this project following Willis’ sudden and unexpected death from cardiac arrest in 2019 at age 73. Spraic assembled the film from Willis’ vast archive combined with contemporary interviews with her retinue of loyal (and very famous in some cases) friends. The film is energetic and frenetic, moving forward at a pace that matches its subject’s intense energy. There’s a lot of ground to cover in 97 minutes.
Willis began filming her life in 1978 and kept absolutely everything. The film shows her going through file cabinets in dusty closets where she retrieves coffee-stained drafts of songs she’d written in her 20s, boxes and boxes of tapes in various formats, containers of shoes and clothes and random leftover lipstick blots on sheets of paper.
“I look at that and think, ‘Well, she was saving that for something,’ because I end up seeing these in other places,” her archivist explains.
Allee Willis at Old Trapper’s Lodge in 1986 (Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures/Bonnie Schiffman)Born in Detroit at the height of that city’s power and influence, Willis moved to New York City and got a job at a record label. First, she was a secretary, then she became a junior copywriter, working on liner notes and snappy ad copy. But she knew that she wanted to write songs. So she went out and bought a piano (the film shows us the actual classified ad for said piano) and a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and finally, she submitted a stack of songs to her boss and didn’t tell him who wrote them. That led to a recording contract and her first album, 1974’s “Childstar.”
“It actually got great reviews, but it had zero sales,” Willis says in the film. But the exercise confirmed to her that she wanted to write songs, so she moved to LA and got to work.
“If I’m going to starve to death, I’m doing it in the sun,” she said of her relocation.
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If you’re at all acquainted with Willis’ work in one area, the film is probably how you’ll learn about everything else that you knew about but didn’t realize was her, or discover that amongst her many other talents (for example), she also designed furniture.
She began to paint — and became an accomplished artist, with gallery shows and exhibitions — because she was disillusioned by the music business, which she felt didn’t take her seriously because she was initially primarily a lyricist, even though she clearly had talent and had written multiple hit songs.
Willis explains in the documentary that her answer to that problem was to not just teach herself production, but to build her own home studio so that when she was out shopping songs, she’d be presenting a completely written, performed and produced recording so that there could be no question that she wasn’t “just a girl songwriter.” And the film repeatedly tells these kinds of stories because Willis was always moving, always working on her next project.
She was disillusioned by the music business, which she felt didn’t take her seriously.
Part of Willis’ legacy is an incredible 1937 Streamline Moderne house in the San Fernando Valley in California that she bought with the royalties from “Boogie Wonderland.” She painted it pink, turned the backyard into a sculpture garden, and it became not just her home but a headquarters for infamous parties, footage from which is included in the documentary, because, again, Willis kept everything. The house — which is still preserved exactly as Willis left it — was also filled with a vast, intensely curated collection of trinkets and curios that she’d accumulated over the years, creating an experience that felt — at least to close friends and romantic partners — a little like living in either a fantasyland or a junkyard. Her long-term partner, Prudence Fenton, explains in the film that she was allotted “this much” drawer space and two coat hangers when she moved in. Fenton’s solution was to have her own place nearby.
But “The World According to Allee Willis” isn’t just a puff piece celebrating Willis’ achievements. Willis’ childhood, where she lost her mother at age 15 and found herself relegated to second-class status after her father quickly remarried, is the origin of much of her drive and tenacity. Her father wanted a more conventionally feminine daughter, while Willis was happier as a tomboy. She delighted in the music coming out of her hometown of Detroit, especially (but not only) Motown. In the film, she talks about how she’d sit on the lawn in front of Motown Records, listening for any magic escaping out from Studio A. When she graduated college, her father wrote her a note that read: “Stay away from Black culture.” Willis kept the letter, framed it, and displayed it in the basement of her house.
“Even then, she cataloged that, she knew this is a significant direction in my life right now. I’m being told not to be me,” relates friend Michael Patrick King.
Allee Willis and Paul Reubens at the Grammy Awards (Courtesy of the Estate of Allee Willis and Magnolia Pictures)Allee Willis’ unconventional sense of personal style is probably the thing she’s best known for, besides her hit songs. In family footage from the ’50s, we see a cute girl with a bobbed haircut and dressing the same way as everybody else until she graduated. Willis says, “Before that, I was like, ‘What would a college girl wear?’ I was not expressive at all. And then someone took me to a thrift shop, and my life changed.”
Another element the film doesn’t shy away from discussing is Willis’ struggle with gender norms and societal expectations around them. Willis’ partner of the last 28 years of her life, Fenton, is an executive producer and appears in the film at length, talking about their life together, and specifically how Willis was not open about her relationships or her sexuality. Her friend, director Stan Zimmerman, offers, “We would just hear rumors but she wasn’t really open, and people were not open then. Coming out was a big deal. Allee was still a songwriter [who] had to sell herself and get in there and sell her songs. So perception of how people felt about you was important back then.” It’s an honest reckoning and also a heartbreaking one that someone who appeared to be 1000% herself in everything she did was also still dealing with her personal challenges and struggles.
Whether you’re learning about Allee Willis for the first time or coming to this film believing you already know about her, you’ll still come away wanting to know more about this artist, her vivid and utterly fascinating life and all of her myriad art projects, including herself. “The World According to Allee Willis” is a worthy element of that legacy.
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