Review: ‘The World According to Allee Willis,’ starring Mark Cuban, Lily Tomlin, Cyndi Lauper, Patti LaBelle, Verdine White, Paul Reubens and Pamela Adlon

December 1, 2024

by Carla Hay

“The World According to Allee Willis”

Directed by Alexis Manya Spraic

Culture Representation: The documentary film “The World According to Allee Willis” features a predominantly white group of people (with some African Americans), who are mostly entertainers, discussing the life and career of songwriter/visual artist Allee Willis, who died from a heart attack in 2019, at the age of 72.

Culture Clash: Willis struggled for years with going public about being a lesbian and had other insecurities because of turmoil in her family and her failure to become a famous singer.

Culture Audience: “The World According to Allee Willis” will appeal primarily to fans of pop music from the 1970s to 1990s and people who are interested in documentaries about underrated artists.

“The World According to Allee Willis” is an engaging tribute to songwriter/visual artist Allee Willis, who wasn’t a household name, but much of her work is world-famous. The documentary has her quirky charm and empathetically details her personal struggles. People who consider themselves to be aficionados about pop music can still find new things to learn from watching this documentary because so much about Willis is unknown to the general public.

Directed by Alexis Manya Spraic, “The World According to Allee Willis” has its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival. Several people are interviewed for this 97-minute documentary, but it does not feel overstuffed or long-winded. Long before the Internet and reality shows existed, Willis filmed much of her adult life from 1978 onward. A great deal of this personal footage is used in the documentary.

Allee Willis was born as Alta Willis in Detroit on November 10, 1947. She was the youngest of three children born to scrapyard dealer Nathan Willis and elementary school teacher Rose Willis. Allee, who was raised Jewish, was heavily influenced by the music of Motown Records, which had its original headquarters in Detroit.

According to interviews shown in the documentary, Allee said she knew from an early age that she was “different” from most other girls. She didn’t like to wear dresses and was attracted to doing things that were usually considered only appropriate for boys. Her mother accepted Allee for who she was, in contrast to Allee’s father.

According to Allee, she always had a difficult relationship with her father, who expected her to be more “ladylike.” In an archival interview, Allee says her father only wanted her to get married. And if she had a career goals, he only wanted her to become a teacher. “I was an outrageous tomboy,” Allee comments.

As she got older and became a teenager, the conflicts between Allee and Nathan increased. They would argue about what radio stations she enjoyed listening to, which were usually stations that played R&B music. Allee said she would often find comfort by going to Motown headquarters and hanging around outside the building when she didn’t want to be at her house, just so she could listen to the music coming out of the Motown building.

The Willis family turmoil went from bad to worse for Allee after her mother died when Allee was 15 years old. Within a year, her father remarried. Allee’s stepmother had daughters who were more feminine than Allee. According to Allee, her father turned his attentions to his new family, and she became an outcast.

When Allee’s mother died, Allee’s older siblings—brother Kent and sister Marlen, who are both interviewed in the documentary—had already moved out of the family home. Marlen (whose married surname is Frost) comments in the documentary: “My mother was my sister’s protector. When she died, that protection was gone.”

The documentary makes it clear that a great deal of the friction between Allee and her father Nathan had to do Nathan being a racist who disliked that Allee had a passion for music made by African American artists. Allee tells a story in the documentary about a note that her father wrote to her before she left home to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the note, he warned her: “Stay away from black culture.”

Far from taking that racist advice, Allee became involved in civil rights activism when she was in college. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, she moved to New York City and worked as a copywriter for Columbia Records, while actually wanting to be a songwriter at a time when songwriting was still very much a male-dominated field. Through her connections at Columbia Records, she got a record deal with Columbia’s sister label Epic Records, which released her first and only album as a solo artist—1974’s “Childstar.”

“Childstar” got good reviews, but it was a sales flop. Many of the people who reviewed Allee’s performances at the time made sexist remarks about her androgynous and unconventional performance style, even though male artists at the time such as David Bowie, Alice Cooper and the New York Dolls were getting praised by critics for being androgynous and unconventional. In archival footage, Allee also talks about how interviewers sometimes mistook her for a man because of her deep voice.

Allee was dropped from Epic after “Childstar” bombed. She decided to start over as a songwriter by relocating from New York City to Los Angeles. And it was in Los Angeles that her luck and her career changed.

Allee was introduced to Earth, Wind & Fire lead singer/songwriter Maurice White by A&R executive Carole Childs, who is one of the people interviewed in the documentary. Maurice White died of Parkinson’s disease in 2016, at the age of 74. However, Maurice’s younger brother Verdine White, who is Earth, Wind & Fire’s bass player, is interviewed in the documentary.

Maurice White and Allee had an instant connection and ended up co-writing (with Al McKay) one of Earth, Wind & Fire’s most beloved songs: the 1978 smash hit “September.” Allee would go on to co-write two more Earth, Wind & Fire songs: “Boogie Wonderland” and “In the Stone,” both released in 1979. The hits set her on a path to becoming an in-demand songwriter.

Ruth Pointer of the Pointer Sisters (whose Grammy-winning 1984 hit “Neutron Dance” was co-written by Allee) says in the documentary that Maurice White told her that he felt Allee was “put on this earth to be a communicator.” “Neutron Dance” was one of the songs on the “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack, which also featured another song co-written by Allee: Patti LaBelle’s “Stir It Up.” LaBelle is one of the people interviewed in the documentary. Allee was among of the songwriters who won a Grammy Award (her first Grammy) for the “Beverly Hills Cop” soundtrack, which took the prize for Best Soundtrack Album Background Score from a Motion Picture or Television.

“The World According to Allee Willis” actually begins by telling a true story about how “Neutron Dance” briefly caused controversy in Russia because the Russian government misinterpreted the song as encouraging people to rebel by using neutron weapons. For a while, Allee was described in Russian media as “the most dangerous woman in America.” The documentary has archival footage of Allee being interviewed about this controversy and laughing about it.

Allee was a prolific songwriter who claims to have written hundreds of songs per year, many of which were not recorded by artists. The list of hit songs she’s co-written is long, but among her other best-known hits are the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” the Emmy-nominated theme song from the 1994 to 2004 sitcom “Friends”; the Pet Shop Boys’ “What Have I Done to Deserve This” (featuring Dusty Springfield), released in 1987; and Maxine Nightingale’s “Lead Me On,” released in 1979. Allee also co-wrote the Tony-nominated songs for the stage musical “The Color Purple,” which was made into a 2023 movie.

The documentary dutifully notes Allee’s success as a songwriter, but the movie is much more interesting when it takes a look at her personal life. Allee had a uniquely eccentric style that was reflected in her choice of friends, her fashion wardrobe, how she decorated her house, and how she liked to entertain. She loved to collect kitschy art, which has been kept preserved by her custodian/archivist Sean Welch, who gives a tour of Allee’s pink house (designed by William Kessler) where things have been left intact. One of her quirks was that she liked to collect saddles shoes and had hundreds of pairs of these shoes.

Not content to rest on her songwriting laurels, Allee also became a prolific visual artist who made paintings, sculptures and set designs. She was also successful in visual arts, with her artistic style best described as maximalist and flashy. Her art always conveyed that she seemed to be a kid at heart, bursting with a lot of creative and vibrant energy that was very offbeat but uniquely her own.

Still, Allee had lingering frustrations over two areas of entertainment that she wasn’t fully able to break into as an artist: First was her short-lived career as a recording/performing artist. She also battled sexism in her attempts to become a successful music producer, which is an area of the music industry that is still overwhelmingly dominated by men.

“The World According to Allee Wills” has numerous friends and colleagues of Allee talking about her generous and welcoming personality and her parties where people were encouraged to be as pleasantly weird as they wanted to be. One of her closest friends who’s interviewed in the documentary is actor Paul Reubens, who died at age 70 of respiratory failure in 2023, after living with lung cancer for several years. Reubens was best known for creating the Pee-Wee Herman character for children’s television.

Other friends and colleagues interviewed in the documentary include actress/comedian Lily Tomlin; singer/songwriter Cyndi Lauper; entrepreneur Mark Cuban; writer/director/producer Paul Feig; writer/director/producer Michael Patrick King; musician/former Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh, who composed the music for this documentary; actress Lesley Ann Warren; writer/comedian Bruce Vilanch; singer/songwriter Brenda Russell; Pet Shop Boys singer/songwriter Neil Tennant; producer/songwriter Andrae Alexander; comedian/actress Lunell; writer/director Stan Zimmerman; director Jeff Stein; musician Stephen Bray; actor Tim Bagley; humorist/historian Charles Phoenix; singer/songwriter Siedah Garrett; and actress/writer Pamela Adlon, who was Allee’s art assistant when Adlon was in her late teens; and actress/comedian Julie Brown, whose 1980s MTV series “Just Say Julie” had a production set designed by Allee.

Although she had plenty of success and friends in the entertainment business, the documentary doesn’t gloss over that Allee was deeply hurt by her fractured relationship with her father. She remained estranged from her father for years. On the rare occasions that she and family reunions with her father, their conversations remained tense. The documentary includes footage of one such family reunion, where Nathan Willis seems to have a condescending attitude toward Allee, who is clearly bothered by it, but she’s trying not to let her feelings show too much on camera.

Allee was afraid to tell her father and many other people about being a lesbian. At times, she would outright deny her true sexuality because—according to friends in the documentary—she was fearful that it would ruin her career at a time when LGBTQ people weren’t as accepted in the entertainment industry as they are now. Singer/songwriter Lauren Wood, who dated Allee in the early 1980s, says that Allee abruptly ended their relationship out of fear of being “outed” as a lesbian.

Adlon comments, “Allee was an open book, but everyone has a private side.” Cuban, who worked with Allee on Internet ventures in the early years of social media, says about how Allee handled her public image and what she chose to film about her life: “Her life was a movie, and she was always rewriting the script.”

According to what people say in the documentary, Allee didn’t feel completely comfortable about coming out as a lesbian until she became involved with animator/producer Prudence Fenton, who was her partner from 1992 until Allee’s death. Fenton is interviewed in the documentary but she doesn’t get as much screen time as you might expect for someone who was Allee’s partner for 27 years.

“The World According to Allee Willis” is not a pity party for Allee’s problems. Rather, it’s an inspirational look at how someone who had a lot of obstacles and insecurities was able to turn a lot of her pain into bringing joy to other people. It’s a story of resilience and how she found a level of self-acceptance that came with a lot of hard-fought battles. Most of all, “The World According to Allee Willis” stands as great testament for celebrating people for who they are and not what other people expect them to be.

Magnolia Pictures released “The World According to Allee Willis” in select U.S. cinemas, on digital and VOD on November 15, 2024.