In today’s ever-connected world, it’s rare to find a blind spot. Discovering a new talent or influence of an artist you love is a wonderful feeling that everyone should experience. Luckily for you, I have just the thing. The World According to Allee Willis, the 2024 Documentary directed by Alexis Spraic, invokes a unique feeling of discovery. You realize that so many small aspects of your life are not only connected but are a part of someone else’s beautiful story of creativity and self-discovery.
Comprised of mostly found footage from her numerous TV appearances and an extensive archive of home video footage, this documentary tells the story of your new favorite person, Allee Willis. While you may not know her name, you will most certainly know her work which ranges from being a frequent collaborator and co-writer of numerous hit songs to being one of the original co-authors of The Color Purple musical, and so much more. This documentary ensures you not only get to know her work but also get to know Allee personally as the film showcases decades of home footage shot by Allee and her friends. These moments are the heart of the film as they provide a window into the personal life of one of the most dynamically unique artists of the last 50 years.
As much as I’d love to tell you more about the film, I’m going to leave that to the Director of the film Alexis Spraic and Executive Producer/Former Allee Willis’ former partner Prudence Fenton who were lovely enough to sit down and talk to me about the film.
When we started our conversation, I wanted to be clear with them that before seeing The World According to Allee Willis I had never heard of Allee Willis before this. When I was assigned to cover this, I made the creative choice to not look into the subject of the documentary. To be fair, I did read some of the press material, but aside from that, I went into this completely blind and ready to let the film wash over me. This turned out to be for the best! Each time the documentary presented something Allee worked on, It felt like unraveling a Swiss army knife. Her story became more and more spectacular and inspiring as you learned more about her work, personal life, and numerous creative endeavors. Naturally, I was curious how the actual filmmaker came to discover this underappreciated icon.
mxdwn: How did you stumble upon Allee and her work, and what drew you to making this documentary?
Alexis Spraic: All of it was serendipity, I was friends with Paul Rubeins, better known as PeeWee. And of course, he and Allee were lifelong best friends…So he connected me to Prudence and Allee’s estate after she passed away, Prudence was looking for someone to fulfill out one of Allee’s requests after she passed, which was that somebody take this massive archive she left behind, and “put together the trail she left behind and make a documentary.” I had a similar experience to you, I didn’t think I knew who she was, and then I googled her. and I was like oh, she’s basically been a part of my life the entire time… I’m from LA, I recognized Allee, I read profiles on her, she’d been in the ether, but it was a whole other world getting into her archives, and realizing how rich and deep the story underneath it all was.
Along with showcasing her diverse portfolio, The World According To Allee Willis features dozens of Allee’s closest friends and creative collaborators many of whom you would recognize like Paul Reubens, Lily Tomlin, Pattie LaBelle, and Mark Cuban. When watching the testimonials, you can see how excited and happy everyone is to not only see Allee’s story be told but be a part of telling that story. Everyone spoke about Allee with such reverence and love and just looked radiant whenever they got to tell a story about her. You can feel that Allee is remembered as both a great artist and a beautiful friend.
mxdwn: Can you talk about her collaborators and the people that she got to work with over the years?
Prudence Fenton: Well certainly for The Color Purple, she was actually scoring a cartoon we were doing together, and she brought in Stephen (Bray) and Brenda (Russell). You know it’s like Brenda says, she wanted something bigger because their collaboration was really clicking. I think it didn’t matter who Allee collaborated with, she was an amazing collaborator and clicked with a lot of people. But that (The Color Purple) was especially amazing, and when they sent in the demo songs for The Color Purple it went through the roof with the producer.
Alexis Spraic: “One thing that I was really struck by because I got to interview Brenda Russell and Steven Bray, her co-writers on The Color Purple, and just the love between them, you know having that much success you could imagine a different outcome or more competitiveness. They were heartbroken that Allee wasn’t alive to work on the movie version of the musical, and they have been so supportive coming to festival premiers and screenings, as well as the producer, Scott Sanders. I think that was a real strength that Allee had as an artist. I mean people would walk into her and, we have footage it in the footage it was amazing, they’d walk in with like the seed of an idea for a lyric or a sound or a little chord and Allee would just transform it into a hit song it was mindblowing.”
While she may not be a household name, Allee Willis’ art is. Whether it’s numerous chart-topping songs, hit musicals, or fascinating experiments on the early World Wide Web, Allee’s voice and style have touched so many places it’s bound to have rubbed off on artists of today, even if they never noticed it.
mxdwn: Allee may not have had like, super mainstream success, per se about being a super well-known name, but has been so influential in all these little pieces of culture, do you think she really resonates? Do you think there are any artists who are really inspired by her that you can really see her influence on them currently working today?
Alexis Spraic: I mean so much. I feel like she broke down so many barriers about how women present themselves… I don’t know. Like to say, “Oh this one artist saw her then they went and did this specific thing,” But she changed the culture. When you see her aesthetic that did through the 80s or the way that she wrote lyrics that were just so personal and direct and sort of simplistic but, really connecting. I think we’re seeing an entire era right now of female powerhouses that are doing that. Allee was at the beginning of that, but she understood the commercial side of it, you know. She wasn’t like a folk singer, she was doing it in pop music really early on.
Prudence Fenton: I think you can look at Billie Eilish and Lorde, and well I don’t know. If you talked to them, I don’t think they’d go like, “Oh yeah I knew who Allee Willis was”. But I definitely felt… you know I felt her influence in their music, whether they were conscious of it or not. You sort of recognize certain patterns and lyrics. I think she did, but without, you know… As you create, you don’t necessarily realize that you’re ripping someone else off.
After watching this film, I had a thought of how Allee Willis would fare now in 2024. Over the last few years( and especially this year) there’s been a meteoric rise in popularity and pure star power of female pop stars like Chappelle Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Taylor Swift. With this in mind, I then wondered if Allee would not only fit in with this crowd but possibly be one of its most beloved members. I listened to her album on Spotify called Childstar and was reminded that while she was a great performer, her lyrics were the real gold. While she could have kept that gold to herself, Allee preferred to spread the wealth with others. This led to a new thought…
mxdwn: If Allee were around today, who do you think she would want to work with now?
Alexis Spraic: That’s a tough one, cause there’s – I mean there’s some people that I think Allee would really…there would have maybe been really well-known artists, but i think she really did like discovering people too and fostering talent, especially people who might be overlooked. In a way, the answer to that question might be someone that would be needing that little extra boost that she would have love to have given.
Prudence Fenton: She liked this woman Butterscotched, I don’t know where Butterscotched is right now but someone who was really on her horizon before she died. I agree with Alexis, she was interested in the young, up-in-coming ones.
Alexis Spraic: We have someone in the film, Andrae (Alexander), who’s a good friend of hers and a collaborator. Shortly after she passed away he was the Grammy for John Baptiste’s ‘We Are’ album as a producer. So she had a good ear for it, and I think Ray Charles who said, “There’s only two types of music, good music, and bad music, and Allee had a good ear for music.” She liked to work with good musicians so you know, that would have gotten her so excited if she could have been there to see Andre get that award and also to have found the next person that she could have helped see themselves and see their abilities so that they were putting themselves in that kind of position.
The World According To Allee Willis is loaded with so much, yet somehow fits comfortably into a 90-minute window. This film felt like a breeze to watch even when it is given the Herculean task of telling Allee Willis’ entire life story and then some. It’s stated that in the film Allee never threw any records away which included receipts for pianos, record deals, journals with old songs in them, and so on. When the movie shows her home it is littered, both metaphorically and literally, with decades of documents, trinkets, and treasures all of which Allee collected over the years. This is to not even mention that she housed hundreds of hours of video footage, photos, and more some of which is shown in this film.
mxdwn: Obviously, there’s a ton of things you probably couldn’t fit in this documentary. Was there anything you wish you could have spent more time on or could have reflected more upon?
Prudence Fenton: It’s one of Alexis’ biggest challenges was fitting it all into 90 minutes. In doing that you leave about 25hrs of that on the floor.
Alexis Spraic: Yeah I mean there’s just so much that I think, you know in another project, there’s chapters in her life that would warrant an entire documentary. We wanted the elegance. Making it a 90-minute feature film gives access to a broad audience, which would have been also would have been important to Allee. I think right now we’re in such an interesting time with media and the way that different things are packaged. I hope that there’s an opportunity in the future. You know, when we come out on VOD and DVD we’ll be releasing bonus material, but I also think there might future prospects as you know the film builds awareness of Allee.
After finishing the film, I not only felt enlightened by this artist I discovered but also inspired to find more of Allie’s work. As I mentioned earlier, I immediately started listening to her album Childstar and started going down the rabbit hole of her various works.
mxdwn: If someone were to watch this documentary and be like, “WOW! I love Allee Willis, I wanna see more!” What would you recommend they start with first? Her album, The Color Purple, what aspect of her art do you think they should start with first after watching this documentary?
Prudence Fenton: I would go to AlleeWIllis.com there are 20,000 web pages all of her moving art, art, her songs, every rock video she ever did, you know ever piece of press, it’s very complete and we’ve tried, you know, we’ve had to transfer it over 3 times to keep it updated on the web so it still works.
Alexis Spraic: One thing that we thought we were gonna struggle with in the film when we were putting it together was that we didn’t have this like interview with Allee where I knew I was making the film and she was there and we were gonna sit down together and have this heart to heart and she was gonna answer questions or talk about things in her archives that she hadn’t talked to anybody about, That we wanted to reveal in the film and I felt like God we don’t that vulnerable fragile side of her cause that wasn’t what she was recording and then I went to her song lyrics, and it’s just incredible I mean she talks a bit about this about putting really honest. authentic heartfelt material but setting to infectious upbeat hooks so people would think they are listening. You know Boogie Wonderland is a really heartbreaking song when you listen to the lyrics but that’s not what anyone thinks about it. She loved to lift people up but at the same time be giving them a message so if you’re coming at it from a music point of view, definitely the lyrics in the color purple, definitely the lyrics in her album Childstar, or any of it, Allee was an open book, people weren’t really realizing that she was saying everything the whole time but it was just hidden in these great songs.
The World According to Allee Willis goes out of its way to not only show you what Allee Willis did, but who Allee Willis was. Throughout the documentary, we are shown that underneath all the elaborate outfits and eccentric parties, Allee was a deep person with a lot going on in her personal life. I won’t spoil that, as I believe you should go on that journey of discovery with Allee.
While all of us have our own pantheons of artists who inspire us, it’s always important to remember to venture outside and be open to finding a new potential icon to join them. And so, I implore you go forth and venture to see The World According to Allee Willis. This film is a beautiful love letter to someone you should know about already, and my hope that you enjoy this discovery as much as I did.
The World According to Allee Willis is a 2024 documentary Directed by Alexis Spraic and tells the life story of beloved songwriter and artist Allee Willis through a mixture of Allee’s personal home video archive and interviews with her friends, family, and collaborators. The film explores her numerous artistic ventures as well as her personal journey of self-discovery and self-expression. The film releases on November 15, 2024.
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