Showbiz has always made strange bedfellows. However, it is difficult to understand any single figure that connects talents as diverse as the 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. However, this list is just the tip of the collaborative iceberg of “The World According to Allie Willis,” which is about the late songwriter who is estimated to have sold over sixty million records.
Among many other accomplishments, Willis was also a compulsive archivist her entire life, so Alexis Manya Spraic’s documentary feels like a colorful swatch drawn from nearly inexhaustible source material. Magnolia This entertaining tribute to a hugely successful but intensely private artist opens in limited US theaters on Friday.
Heavily influenced by the Motown sounds of her youth in the Detroit area, Willis is best known for co-writing Earth & Fire’s massive hit “September” and then the inevitable Friends hit “I’ll Be There for You” eighteen years later. . But in between she had a hand in several other hits, as well as extensive artistic relationships with fellow songwriters and musical acts including Cyndi Lauper and The Pointer Sisters.
An alleged mistranslation caused her to be labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” by the Soviet Union (they somehow thought her “neutron dance” was calling for world war), yet she considered herself “the best kept secret in the world”, and a hitmaker who was with So rarely in the spotlight. She kept it that way, for the most part, as she was “absolutely terrified of being on stage.” But she was a flamboyant extrovert in other ways, from her unique sense of dress to her famous parties for “all the beautiful nerds” at the “theme park” she created at her home in the San Fernando Valley.
The audio-visual pleasure with which she surrounded herself was designed to spread the happiness that never stopped chasing her. As an “outrageous tomboy” since childhood, she was constantly urged to dress and act more “feminine.” She lost her mother suddenly at the age of fifteen, and felt the weight of rejection from a father who transferred his feelings too quickly to a new wife and daughters, never stopping to find fault with his strange offspring. No wonder she fled to the West Coast shortly after finishing college in 1972.
Not caring much for dates or chronology, The World According initially creates a certain amount of confusion by suggesting that her career essentially began in 1978, the year that marks “September.” Only later did I notice that she had released a solo album (her first and last) four years earlier, and already had songs recorded by artists like Bonnie Raitt and Patti LaBelle. But then Willis’s output in this area alone was astonishingly prolific – she would sometimes produce three or four songs a day – and the sheer volume of her work in various media-based forces leads to it being a cursory survey of this complex catalogue, rather than a mere definitive summary. .
Willis eventually became exhausted by the show business in which she was usually typecast as a lyricist, hampering her taste 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 for music videos. Such projects introduced her to Prudence Fenton, who created imaginative animated and live-action segments for MTV segment breaks, “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” and other adventurous platforms. The two remained a couple for nearly 30 years, until Willis’s fatal heart attack in 2019. However, they remained a semi-closeted duo, thanks in large part to one’s stubborn resistance to identifying as gay. “It’s a constant struggle to maintain your confidence,” she notes, in one of countless clips culled from her endless self-documentation — Willis was videotaping herself as early as 1978.
While at first glance the subject matter here seems lively, there are increasing glimpses of feelings of insecurity that have fueled her “intensely private side.” Despite the extraordinary success, Willis came to believe that his songwriting was not “creative” enough. Among other endeavors it branched out into was early adoption of the Internet, developing an interactive “fictional community” site called Wellsville with Mark Cuban as its CEO; Although it was well ahead of the cyber curve, it never went beyond the prototype stage. Most satisfying in the long run was her return to the hit industry with The Color Purple, a Broadway triumph in 2005, and then again with a more successful revival a decade later.
Ultimately, Welles seems to be an exemplar of the kind of driven creative spirit for whom no achievement can ever be enough, but whose restlessness fuels the quality and quantity of her art. Even if she sometimes felt trapped by her role in the industry, there were few people who were better suited in talent and flair to a collection of Top 40 pop in an era where disco, new wave, R&B and more mingle in the pursuit of fun.
The documentary delves at length into the sensual delights preserved in her home, whose tchotchke collections, wacky artwork, bowling balls planted in the grass, etc., resembles a specially curated habitat for Devo, Church of the Subgenius, and “Earth Girls Are Easy.” It was America’s cynical sensibility that reached its peak in the Reagan years, even if Willis’ talents in various media extended far beyond those borders.
The variety of archival errors here (ranging from childhood home movies to televised award shows) heightens this sense of enjoyable chaos, which Sprick and his two co-editors keep under control… just barely. One feels that “The World” could easily have gone on for twice as long without exhausting the viewer’s patience, making room for a plethora of anecdotes from more famous people than those who get little screen time here. Among those who seem to have been closest to the subject are Uber, actress Lesley Ann Warren, and Pee-Wee himself, the late Paul Reubens. Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh provides the original background scoring, while Good Radar’s Grant Nellesen contributes the fun design and animation elements.