Allee Willis: The Most Famous Songwriter You’ve Never Heard Of

The life of a professional songwriter can be wonderfully resistant to cookie-cutter narratives. Performers like Freddie Mercury or Amy Winehouse have humble beginnings, massive-hit highs, and tragic/triumphant ends that can fit all too neatly into boilerplate biopic arcs.

A pro songwriter with heavy behind-the-scenes experience, on the other hand, might piece together a mind-blowingly eclectic career by working on compositions as disparate as, say, “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire; “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” by the Pet Shop Boys; the songs for the Broadway version of The Color Purple; and the ubiquitous Friends theme, while constantly sharing the credit (and money) with the performing artists, co-writers, and, in some cases, meddling sitcom producers who insist they deserve royalties.

This isn’t a hypothetical: All of those aforementioned accomplishments are on the CV of Allee Willis, subject of a new documentary that hits theaters Nov. 15. The World According to Allee Willis offers a crash course in her life and career—a tribute to her unruliness in more ways than one.

In terms of pure information and music-world trivia, World has plenty of great “wait, what?” moments for viewers unfamiliar with Willis. Director Alexis Spraic expertly buries several killer ledes, allowing the film to offhand, around the hour mark, mention that Willis had a hand in the best-known TV theme of the ’90s, just as her contribution to an iconic song from The Karate Kid is mentioned in passing as something that maybe wasn’t as big a smash as she had hoped.

Dropping these bits and pieces throughout the film is especially smart because the movie doesn’t stick strictly to a chronological arrangement; though it broadly follows Willis’s career in music and art from the 1970s to her 2019 death, it jumps back and forth to fill in details about her origin story and personal life.

Part of her whole vibe included a less traditionally feminine presentation than was common at the time, and her father’s reaction to her early tomboy leanings discouraged her from coming out as gay, even when she was in a decades-long relationship with Pee-wee’s Playhouse producer Prudence Fenton (who is a credited producer on this film, too). Her dad also warned her, in writing, to “stay away from Black culture.” Later, she notes that he died shortly after her telling him she’d be working on The Color Purple, the umpteenth instance of her not heeding his advice.

The World According to Allee Willis is most instructive when it illustrates Willis’s struggles as a woman in the industry, particularly one who wasn’t focusing on performing after her first and only solo album, Childstar, sold poorly in the early ’70s. Willis instead becomes instrumental in the creation of hit after hit for other artists, yet never quite ascends to the level of a top producer —or even a producer at all, as she continues to be treated more as a workaday collaborator than a true visionary. It’s a portrait of the music industry’s middle class, forging endless creative relationships that nonetheless feel fleeting, no matter how many timeless songs they produce.

At the same time, the movie is often vague about the precise nature of those relationships, especially how Willis works with her fellow co-writers. World isn’t even especially clear about whether Willis is primarily a lyricist or contributes to musical compositions as well, taking more of a room-where-it-happened approach to her body of work (though several collaborators, like Patti LaBelle, do speak highly of her in the talking-head interviews).

Though the film has access to plenty of her own footage from throughout her life, sometimes appearing as if it’s finishing a documentary Willis herself worked on in fits and starts among her many neverending art projects, it’s not exactly a deep dive into her actual work process. Spraic seems more concerned with how this enforced nomadic nature of the work affects her subject emotionally, leading Willis to find other artistic outlets in set and visual design for TV and music videos, which grow out of her kitschy collecting habits.

The gendered undervaluing of figures like Willis is a worthy subject, but maybe not enough to support the fullness of a 95-minute feature film. It’s hard not to think of the all-killer Behind the Music this could have been, shining a light on a less familiar figure rather than burdening her with carrying a whole movie. Famous friends like Paul Feig and the late Paul Reubens offer lovely insights into Willis’s personality, but both her philosophy and her process feel underserved.

Despite its playfully personal title, The World According to Allee Willis doesn‘t fully express its subject’s particular worldview, and how it affects her songwriting, any more than it implies that The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” (another of her soundtrack-based hits) functions as a window to her soul. There’s a little more implication that her work on The Color Purple gets closer to the core of her feelings, but the section on that musical spends just as much time on the search for recognition as the actual creation. The movie wants to affirm that recognition; as with a lot of great pop hits, digging deeper seems like a secondary concern.