“I’m the world’s best-kept secret,” Allee Willis says at the start of a new documentary about her. Willis, a songwriter and artist, is being hyperbolic, but only a little: Unless you’re a music trivia hound, Willis’s remarkable career may have escaped your notice.
I, for one, didn’t know until I watched “The World According to Allee Willis” (directed by Alexis Manya Spraic and in theaters starting Friday) that the same woman was a co-writer of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” and the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” better known as the “Friends” theme song. She wrote dozens more hits, too — sometimes lyrics, sometimes music — and occasionally produced them as well. She even contributed music and lyrics to the Broadway version of “The Color Purple.”
It’s unfair but axiomatic that the most influential people are often the ones who fly under the radar, and that’s Willis, who died in 2019 at 72. Spraic’s approach is two-pronged. There are interviews with Willis’s many friends and collaborators, so many that I couldn’t jot them all down, but here are just a few: Lily Tomlin, Pamela Adlon, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, the comedian Bruce Vilanch, the singer-songwriter Brenda Russell and Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, one of Willis’s closest friends.
Somewhat unexpectedly, the mogul Mark Cuban appears a lot in the film, speaking warmly and earnestly of Willis’s expansive imagination. She spent much of the 1990s, in the still-nascent days of the internet, developing a collaborative social network and story-driven interactive platform called Willisville, and Cuban was her business partner.
A lot of this was captured on video by Willis, who turned on a camera as a girl in Detroit in the 1950s and filmed constantly throughout her life. That is the other prong of Spraic’s film: There is a lot of Willis’s footage, which fills in details of her life, the ups along with the downs.
“The World According to Allee Willis” presents its subject as an enigma, someone who wasn’t fully known even to herself. Willis was gay, and her sexual orientation was a source of inner conflict, as friends and Willis’s longtime partner, Prudence Fenton, explain. And as with many songwriters, fame didn’t necessarily come with wealth and happiness. Willis’s life was full of creative friction as well as joy, and the documentary fleshes that out.
It’s tricky to tell a story like this, which doesn’t present the kind of clear arc that a more straightforward rags-to-riches tale might. Like “Piece by Piece” — the recent documentary about the producer and musician Pharrell Williams, told in Lego form — the movie struggles a bit to find its narrative groove. At the start, the film suggests that we’re going to discover some secret about Willis buried in the mountains of paper, art and video that she left behind.
But this is not really a documentary about revealing secrets — and thank goodness for that. You don’t need to leave behind revelations to have lived a life worth knowing about. Willis’s archives were evidence of a mind and heart bursting with ideas, energy and talent, and the obstacles that the industry and the culture threw in her way.
Yet I think the real story of “The World According to Allee Willis” isn’t just about Willis: It’s about the community that she formed, the friendships and relationships she maintained, and the way that art, imagination and love can make a life.
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