‘The World According to Allee Willis’ Review: The Songwriter Who Stretched From ‘September’ to the ‘Friends’ Theme Song Gets a Lively Doc

Showbiz has always made for strange bedfellows. Still, it’s hard to fathom any single personality linking talents as diverse as Pet Shop Boys, Bob Dylan, Fishbone, John Tesh, Diana Ross, Dusty Springfield, Toto, James Brown, TLC, Lulu, Stephen Stills, Tanya Tucker, Bette Midler, Gladys Knight, Scott Baio and Richard Simmons. Yet that list is just the tip of a collaborative iceberg for the subject of “The World According to Allee Willis,” about the late songwriter estimated to have sold over sixty million records. 

Among many other accomplishments, Willis was also a compulsive archivist of her own very full life, so Alexis Manya Spraic’s documentary feels like a colorful sampler drawn from near-inexhaustible source materials. Magnolia is opening this entertaining tribute to a hugely successful yet highly idiosyncratic artiste in limited U.S. theaters on Friday. 

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Greatly influenced by the Motown sounds of her Detroit area youth, Willis was best known for co-writing Earth, Wind & Fire’s ginormous “September,” then the inescapable “Friends” theme song “I’ll Be There For You” eighteen years later. But in between she had a hand in numerous other hits, as well as extended artistic relationships with fellow songwriters and musical acts including Cyndi Lauper and The Pointer Sisters.

A purported mistranslation got her branded “the most dangerous woman in America” by the Soviet Union (they somehow thought her “Neutron Dance” advocated global warfare), yet she considered herself “the world’s best-kept secret,” a hitmaker that was nonetheless seldom in the spotlight. She kept it that way, for the most part, being “absolutely terrified of being onstage.” But she was a flamboyant extrovert in other respects, from her singular crazy-quilt sartorial sense to famously throwing parties for “all the beautiful freaks” in the kitsch-collectible “theme park” she’d made of her San Fernando Valley home. 

The audiovisual fun she surrounded herself with was designed to spread a happiness that she never stopped chasing. As an “outrageous tomboy” from childhood, she’d constantly been urged to dress and act more “feminine.” Abruptly losing her mother at age 15, she felt the brunt of disapproval from a father who all too quickly transferred his affections to a new wife and step-daughters, never ceasing to find fault with his oddball progeny. No wonder she fled to the West Coast shortly after finishing college in 1972.

Not much concerned with dates or chronology, “The World According” at first creates a certain amount of confusion by suggesting her career basically began in 1978, the annum of “September.” Only later does it note she’d released a solo album (her first and last) four years prior, and already had songs recorded by artists like Bonnie Raitt and Patti LaBelle. But then Willis’ output in that field alone was stupefyingly prolific — she sometimes cranked out three or four songs per day — and the sheer volume of her work in various media forces leads the doc to being a glancing survey of that complicated catalog rather than a definitive summary. 

Willis eventually burnt out on a biz in which she was usually typecast as the lyricist, stymying her flair for melody and desire to handle production. So she began turning towards visual art, from paintings and mixed media to furniture design, as well as art direction on music videos. Such ventures introduced her to Prudence Fenton, who devised imaginative animated and live-action segments for MTV segment breaks, “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” and other adventuresome platforms. The two would be a couple for nearly 30 years, until Willis’ fatal heart attack in 2019. Yet they remained a semi-closeted pair, thanks largely to the subject’s stubborn resistance to identifying as gay. “It’s a constant struggle to maintain belief in yourself” she observes, in one among myriad clips culled from her endless self-documentation — Willis was videotaping herself as early as 1978. 

While at first glance the subject here appears all exuberance, there are increasing glimpses at the insecurities that fed her “intensely private side.” Despite extraordinary success, Willis came to think songwriting wasn’t “being creative” enough. Among the other endeavors she branched out into was an early adoption of the internet, for which she developed an interactive “fictional community” site called Willisville with Mark Cuban as her CEO; though well ahead of the cyberspace curve, it never got past prototype stage. More fulfilling in the long run was her return to songcraft with “The Color Purple,” a Broadway triumph in 2005, then again via an even more successful revival a decade later. 

In the end, Willis seems an exemplar of that kind of driven creative spirit for whom no achievement can ever be enough, but whose restlessness fuels both the quality and quantity of their art. Even if she occasionally felt trapped by her role in the industry, few could’ve been more suited in talent and taste to the breadth of Top 40 pop in an era when disco, New Wave, R&B and more comingled in the pursuit of fun. 

The documentary dwells at length on the preserved sensory delights of her home, whose tchotchke collections, prankish artwork, lawn-embedded bowling balls etc. are like a habitat specially curated for Devo, Church of the Subgenius and “Earth Girls Are Easy.” It was an ironic-Americana sensibility that peaked in the Reagan years, even if Willis’ talents in different media stretched beyond those bounds. 

The variety of archival errata here (ranging from childhood home movies to televised award shows) heightens that sense of pleasing clutter, which Spraic and two co-editors keep under control… barely. One gets the sense “World” might easily have run twice as long without taxing viewer patience, making room for a boatload of anecdotes from even more celebrities than the ones that get brief screentime here. Among those who appear to have been the closest to the subject are Lauper, actress Lesley Ann Warren, and Pee-Wee himself, the late Paul Reubens. Devo’s own Mark Mothersbaugh provides the original background scoring, while playful design and animation elements are contributed by Good Radar’s Grant Nellesen.