[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Title: The World According to Award-Winning Songwriter Allee Willis

Tiffany Hansen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hansen, in for Alison Stewart. Coming up later this hour, for the last decade, comedian Lane Moore has been letting strangers control her dating apps, letting them decide who to swipe right on, who to swipe left on. She's going to join us to talk about the 10th anniversary of that show, Tinder Live, with special guest Janeane Garofalo. That's coming up later this hour. First-

[MUSIC - The Pointer Sisters: Neutron Dance]

Tiffany Hansen: -that, if you don't know, is The Pointer Sisters 1983 hit record Neutron Dance that was penned by the late award-winning producer and songwriter Allee Willis. She also, by the way, wrote the Friends TV show theme song, Earth, Wind and Fire's September. She won a Grammy for the musical score The Color Purple. We could go on and on. A new documentary explores the life of Allee Willis behind the scenes. Growing up in the 1950s in Detroit, she became a songwriting legend living in Los Angeles. The documentary is called The World According to Allee Willis, and Allee is most definitely the star of that film I mentioned.

It's the late Allee Willis. She died in 2019, but she left behind a treasure trove of videos, writings, photos, tapes, files, original art pieces, many of them featured in the film. Also interviews with people she worked with over the years, including the late Paul Reubens, Businessman Mark Cuban, Patti LaBelle, Cyndi Lauper. A review in the Los Angeles Times says of the documentary, "This zesty, illuminating film feels like what showbiz bio doc was meant for to give voice to someone who was so much more than a ubiquitous album sleeve credit." The World According to Allee Willis is now playing in theaters and the film's director, Alexis Spraic joins us to talk about it. Alexis, welcome.

Alexis Spraic: Thank you so much for having me.

Tiffany Hansen: Also joining us is Allee's partner and the film's executive producer, Prudence-- sorry, Prudence. Prudence Fenton. Prudence, welcome.

Prudence Fenton: Hello, everybody.

Tiffany Hansen: Glad you're with us. All right, let's talk about The World According to Allee Willis. Alexis, as I said, the LA Times said she touched so many people through her music and because all of the film that you have of her, it really is what a bio doc should be. I don't think that's an over-exaggeration. Let's just start by giving people a snapshot if we can. I know it's tough, but just a nutshell of who was Allee Willis.

Alexis Spraic: She was a multifaceted artist. I think one review referred to her as a polymath. She was a savant when it came to writing music as an artist. Culturally, she was a party thrower. That led her into the very early days of internet social networking. There were so many different things that she did. She documented her life. She wanted to let people in to see her creative process and I think also to see the internal and sometimes challenging struggle of living life as an authentic person and being yourself.

Tiffany Hansen: I mentioned just a few of the songs and I said to our listeners, "If you don't know Allee Willis, you probably actually know Allee Willis," and that's because so many songs that you could list and you would say, "Yes, Allee wrote that." People, I think, would be surprised to hear that.

Alexis Spraic: That was the experience for me coming into this project. I didn't think I knew that much about Allee and then I realized that she had been with me my entire life. The idea that the same person wrote September and Boogie Wonderland, What Have I Done to Deserve This? The Friends theme song, the musical, The Color Purple. I think a lot of it just speaks to this incredible ability she had to take her own emotional experiences and distill them into these beautiful lyrics that were so universal and far-reaching that she just was very commercial in her work and connected to people.

Tiffany Hansen: Prudence, a lot of the film comes from a time in LA in the '80s. The film for me was just a little nostalgic piece of candy because I was a young teenager in the '80s, and it just was so wonderful to see that footage of Allee and that slice of time. I'm wondering if you can just describe what LA was like at that time.

Prudence Fenton: Well, I was in LA at that time, but I did not know Allee. Actually, I think I was more in New York until about '87, '88, and then I was out in Los Angeles. I can only describe this sort of the end of the '80s. It was full of big shoulder pads and big hair. You were there. It was very expressive and the music was great and it was an unbelievable decade.

Tiffany Hansen: Well, you have-- Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Alexis.

Alexis Spraic: I was going to say Allee was part of this incredible social circle that included Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-wee Herman, and Mark Mothersbaugh, Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira Julie Brown, who had an MTV show and sort of Valley-girl persona. There was a lot of really creative and ironic things happening in terms of the art scene that I think flew under the radar that had a huge influence on '80s culture and MTV culture and so many things that I think when people see the film, they're surprised that that was the origin of them.

Tiffany Hansen: Well, it really is a snapshot of that kind of '80s artistic subculture that existed not only in Los Angeles, but to your point, Prudence, also in New York in the '80s and the '70s, I would argue. I'm just wondering if that's a nostalgia that you think people tap into when they see this film, Alexis?

Alexis Spraic: Absolutely. I think what's really striking is just how much cultural influence that she had. I think Mark Cuban has a line in the film where he says that people don't realize how much she touched their lives. She did. She honed in on an aesthetic that's been enduring. Then also with Gen Z, I think the way that all of those artists were playing with persona, they were finding a subversive way to be themselves. Now we're seeing Gen Z with the way that they're approaching identity, not just with gender and sexuality, but the idea that you could transcend those things. I think they're doing something really similar without the artifice.

We've had a lot of people also saying to us, "Oh my God, I want my kids to see this." I think she's a real icon for Gen Z that's waiting to be discovered.

Tiffany Hansen: Prudence, you wanted to add something?

Prudence Fenton: No. I think there's no question, she was part of the culture. I was working on Pee-wee's Playhouse, which we hired those artists to do the visuals. A lot of it was ripping Allee off, even though Allee was his friend. I feel like there's a window in the playhouse that she had in her rock videos that they just took. I don't know that it was a ripoff. I just think it was in the zeitgeist and--

Alexis Spraic: A lot of cross-pollination for her and Paul.

Prudence Fenton: Yes, cross-pollination.

Tiffany Hansen: I want to talk about, we've all mentioned it now a few times that how much video there is of Allee herself that she recorded throughout the years. Alexis, I'm wondering if you can just give us some insight into why you think she did this from the very beginning. It's almost like she was producing her own documentary.

Alexis Spraic: She really was. It's fascinating because we constantly had confirmation of that. If she bought a piano In 1969, we had the classified ad, we had her date books. I think it's a very unique personality type that even as a young kid is saving this material and has this idea that it might mean something one day. She was such a consummate artist and she was always creating and she was always reinvesting in herself. I think she really did live her life as an artistic process and saw that there was an opportunity there. In the end, the way that we chose to kind of complete it, I think her final art piece being someone putting together the trail she left behind, was just to try to give a window into that creative process, and again, into some of the vulnerability and fragility that didn't come across because she was so larger than life in person.

I think it's going to allow her to inspire and connect with more people. We were just at the movie theater last night, and the way that people respond to the film and come up to you afterwards and seem to want to take it and apply it to something in their own life and face their own inhibitions has been really gratifying.

Tiffany Hansen: You talk about vulnerability. There are some points of vulnerability with Allee that you explore in the film. I'm thinking specifically of her relationship with her father and her sexuality. I'm just wondering how you balanced those vulnerable moments with her very much larger-than-life persona.

Alexis Spraic: It was a constant challenge. I think we succeeded in that. When people leave the film, they say, "Oh, it was a blast. That was so much fun." I think, oh my gosh, but we went to so many deep emotional places and people always say that they cried in the film. I think the fact that the takeaway it still resonates in this incredibly joyous place that Allee managed to occupy and that the color and fervor with which she lived her life is what people walk away with. We were looking to always just-- every story is better with pathos and I think understanding that so much of the joy and color and art in her life was fueled by really human struggle to overcome her self-doubt and to love herself and to accept who she was, even though she didn't get the validation she should have gotten from her family when she was a kid growing up.

Tiffany Hansen: Talk about that a Little bit.

Alexis Spraic: Her father-- first of all, she grew up in the 1940s and '50s in Detroit, so there were a lot of expectations that she get married and have kids, marry a doctor. She didn't fit that mold. She also physically really took after her father, and he, I think, just kind of imposed on her a real self-loathing or alienation from her own body because she didn't feel that she met feminine norms or ideals and had a very deep voice, could be mistaken for a man. Those are things that set you off in the world when you're questioning yourself and wondering if that's why people aren't going to accept you.

That crossed over into her music career when she tried to have a career as a singer, songwriter. She was extremely talented, wrote great songs, but people couldn't connect her falsetto voice and these very sensitive lyrics with this person that presented in a much more masculine style that Allee had. That was something she worked her whole life to reconcile, understandably. Her album that I'm referring to, which is available now for the first time in 50 years, really exciting on Spotify and anywhere that you listen to music, is called Childstar. I took that when I started the project to mean kind of a very tongue-in-cheek thing of what we think of as a childstar.

When I was interviewing her brother for the film, he said that a lot of the lyrics on that album were written to her father. I said, "Like what?" He said, "Childstar. Did you know I was a childstar? You might have thought I was something less, but I was a really special kid and you didn't see it." I think that really encapsulates her lifelong battle or struggle with herself that I think many people can relate to because we're all trying to, I think, heal our inner child on some level.

Prudence Fenton: I think that was her main thing. She just wanted to be seen and she wanted to be seen by him. She couldn't be seen by him, so she wanted to be seen by the world to prove that she was the childstar. I think that was always going on.

Tiffany Hansen: What is it, Prudence, about that need to prove oneself that you think she really embodied and what did that do to her and for her?

Prudence Fenton: I really think it was a driver for her. I think it's a driver for everybody. It was really a driver for her because she knew the amount of talent and goodness she had to share with the world and she just felt all the time she wasn't getting the opportunity to do it, and so everything she did, she threw herself into 100% to try to prove and that maybe this time around, somebody would see her.

Tiffany Hansen: We have a clip from the film that I'd like to play. I also want to let you know we did get a text that says, from Jane in Montclair, says, "The World According to Allee Willis." She saw it at the Montclair Film Festival. Absolutely loved it. Highly recommend. Many exclamation points after that. That's good. Let's listen to a clip of The World According to Allee Willis.

Speaker 4: I only hired a finest improve.

Speaker 5: She was always rewriting the script.

Speaker 6: Maybe it makes sense now because you have everything.

Speaker 7: This room is my computer. There's a thousand terabytes here.

Speaker 8: She would have loved to have been sitting in that chair asking me about her--

Speaker 9: Dream come true. No question. I can practically hear her talking, telling people who's directing it and who's doing it and who's in it.

Speaker 4: All this that's going on, Allee is orchestrating all of this from above.

Tiffany Hansen0: Hey, Mark.

Speaker 4: Allee, I'm talking about you in your house. Have you ever been happier? You're gone, I'm in your house doing a documentary about you.

Speaker 7: Ready to roll.

Speaker 9: You're probably discovering things as you go along the way that she has given you and this movie license to find out parts of her that, for whatever reason, didn't feel comfortable or wasn't ready yet.

Speaker 6: I think there was a lot going on in here that nobody knew about.

Speaker 7: The camera's rolling. I've been under a lot of pressure lately.

Tiffany Hansen1: Allee was an open book, but everybody has an intensely private side.

Speaker 7: Put it on pause. I shut the camera. I always knew that in the end, I wouldn't let myself down and chicken out right before my death and destroy everything. I'm going to shut you off.

Speaker 9: She literally knew that this would be the process. Ta da.

Tiffany Hansen: Prudence. We heard there, of course, the voice of Allee Willis and a lot of her friends and collaborators, and we hear from them throughout this film. I just want to have you talk a little bit about her circle of friends and colleagues and the picture they paint of her there that she would be so happy to see everybody participating in her documentary.

Prudence Fenton: Oh, this was, I think, a dream come true. I really think the way Alexis has told the story-- I am on the edge of my seat a lot of the time. I think this is not the story Allee would have told. This is not how it would have been put together for her. I think Allee's documentary might have been 20 hours, but this is a dream come true for her. There's no question. The friends that we got, it's the perfect circle.

Tiffany Hansen: One of the friends that we hear from is the late Paul Reubens. As you said, Alexis, better known to some people as Pee-wee Herman. I want to talk about that, but we do need to take a quick break and remind listeners we are talking about The World According to Allee Willis. It's a documentary that's in theaters now. We're hearing from the director, Alexis Spraic, and the executive producer, Prudence Fenton, and they will stay with us and talk more after this quick break. Don't go anywhere.

[music]

Tiffany Hansen: This is All Of It. I'm Tiffany Hansen, in for Allison Stewart, and we are talking about The World According to Allee Willis. It's in theaters now. We're talking with the director, Alexis Spraic, and the executive producer, Prudence Fenton, about Allee Willis, who, if you don't recognize her name, guaranteed you're going to recognize some of her music. We heard Neutron Dance, of course, a hit from the '80s. She was the writer of the Friends theme. She wrote for Earth, Wind and Fire. Guaranteed, if you pull out some of your albums, you're going to see Allee Willis's name on the jacket cover.

Prudence, I was talking about Paul Reubens. I have to say, as a fan of his, it was very sweet to see him in this film again. He passed not that long ago. Describe their friendship and their relationship and how we see that in the film?

Prudence Fenton: They were so similar in personality. They had very similar tastes. We would go thrift shopping with him and they would have to agree to behave once they got in the thrift store, because they were-- It was a thrift store or an antique store because they would be going for the same item all the time. I was actually interviewed for Paul's documentary and a similar question came up. I would say they they were yin and yang. They were very much the same person, but Allee was female, Paul was male. It was so unusual that the two of them were so-- They were so alike in so many ways. The food they ate, their take on culture and certainly their taste. Their taste was very aligned.

Tiffany Hansen: Alexis, we see many-- Prudence mentions thrift shopping. We see many of Allee's collections in the film. She had hundreds of pairs of saddle shoes, which I just found to be a fascinating detail. Talk about her collections the way we see them in the film and what it says about her.

Alexis Spraic: She had incredible taste and she was really inspired by the things around her. I think she loved the way that people, especially when she started out as a collector, it was very focused on like 1950s Atomica and she loved kitsch and Americana. I think there were two-- one of the main things that she really was inspired by, and the word kitsch I think can have a loose meaning. For Allee, it was that somebody who made the object was so impervious to what other people would think and so clear on their own vision and desire and execution. She was like a vampire for that. She was always looking to create work in that kind of vacuum and always trying to get other people to let go of their own inhibitions as well.

I think that was why those kinds of objects excited her and she filled her house with them. I think they gave her constant inspiration. I'm recalling something she wrote in one of her diaries that-- she started writing music when she was living in New York as a copywriter for CBS when it was a big music label-- sorry, Columbia. When she came out to LA and she got this sunlit house and embraced color and all of the curves of this 1950s style, she said her music and just the rhythms that she wrote and the melodies and hooks that she came up with really evolved from that.

I think she really was somebody who was very influenced by her environment and so she was very dedicated. Her house is completely curated. It's sort of the original Pee-wee's Playhouse.

Tiffany Hansen: Talk about her house a little. It's a fascinating-- First of all, she moved to the Valley when everybody was like, what, the Valley?

Alexis Spraic: Yes, hilarious. She moved in a very straight part of the Valley. Just these little kind of cottage style homes all in a line and on a grid and then you pull up to Allee's house. It's a Streamline Moderne house. It's by William Kesling, who was a significant architect in LA in the 1930s when the house was built, and she painted it pink and she reimagined the backyard in this very '19, kind of '50s meets '80s, like atomic style, and started putting in her collections. She built her own furniture and bars and pieces out of vintage 1950s car parts. She grew up in Detroit. She was very influenced by that very sleek American car culture that existed at that time.

It's just one of the most original and creative places that you'll ever go. Even though nobody went to the Valley and living in the Valley was looked down upon, it was one of the hottest-- it was the hottest ticket or hottest invite in LA to get to go to one of her parties. She got people to come to her house.

Tiffany Hansen: Prudence, talk about those parties.

Prudence Fenton: Again. I didn't meet ally until like 1993.

Tiffany Hansen: Were the parties over?

Prudence Fenton: The parties, they were not like that. The '80s parties were something completely different. She had moved-- It wasn't that she moved on, but it was more historical. By then she was going, "I was the greatest party thrower in the '80s." She was not really doing those parties anymore. She would do parties once in a while, but instead of every year, it was like every four or five years and it was there was a fundraiser for a charity in Detroit. It was different. They had a different slant to them. Still incredibly interesting people. Always different kinds of food that you would find there that you wouldn't find elsewhere. Once the '80s was over, her party throwing took on a different direction.

Alexis Spraic: I would say, as someone who didn't get to go to them, that as parties go, I think they were still pretty astounding for most of us. Prudence is so creative herself as an artist. The footage of the parties to the very end, Allee would come up with these themes and they were very immersive. No matter what, you had to participate. She found ways to bring people out of their shell, which I think is what made them so unique, is that people would go and they'd end up dropping their inhibitions a bit in unexpected ways, which just really was the core of her vision for them.

Tiffany Hansen: Alexis, you did-- Go ahead, Prudence.

Prudence Fenton: No, no. She made people dress up in their nightgowns and pajamas, and there was a game of Pin the [unintelligible 00:25:57] on the Tail of the Donkey. It was just exposing people or people dressing in garbage bags and garbage bag couture. That did pretty much stay in the '80s and didn't spill quite over to the '90s.

Tiffany Hansen: Well, Alexis, I think we can see from-- we talked about her home and what we see in the film of her collections and her home, that she-- Actually, to Prudence's point, the way she dressed, that she lived a very well-curated life. I just wonder if you saw it that way. Go ahead, Prudence.

Prudence Fenton: No, no. She art-directed everything. Everything. It didn't stop anywhere. She didn't buy a car because it ran well. She bought a car because it looked good. She couldn't stop herself. Everything was art-directed.

Tiffany Hansen: Alexis, what does that say about her and her creative process?

Alexis Spraic: I think it was never ending. One thing I really had to wrap my head around when I was approaching this because we wanted to make a film that as many people would see as possible, so I had a 90-minute canvas, and Allee's life exceeded that by a lot, is, it didn't matter if she was sitting down with Maurice White from Earth, Wind and Fire to write a song or she was doing 1500 custom baby shower invites for Bette Midler. It was all approached with the same degree of determination and dedication and clarity of vision and nothing was going to get in her way of it looking exactly how she saw it.

We had to make really hard choices in what we included in the film because there was just always something. I think Julie Brown said it in her interview, "Till the very end, whatever she was working on was just going to be the next huge thing. It was going to be bigger than anything she'd done." I think last night at the screening that I was at, someone said to me that they were totally shocked when it comes around to her writing The Color Purple, because you think at that point in her life she's in her '60s, that maybe there's not another kind of huge thing. You've already written September. Most people would be happy with a fraction of her accomplishments.

Allee just always seemed to have another massive hit in her. It was really incredible. I think that came out of that constant curation, that constant thinking, never letting those creative juices-- She'd let there be a drought, but only so that there could be a flood.

Tiffany Hansen: Prudence, I don't want to let you go without talking about Allee's sexuality. You address it in the film, Alexis, and as you mentioned, the pathos in this film, she gets sort of dark in her own video of herself about her sexuality. It was a very specific time in this country for someone to be alive and gay. I just wondered if you, as her longtime partner, could just talk about that.

Prudence Fenton: When you're partnered with somebody like that you're not ever talking about your sexuality. I think by the time I was there full time, it was in the '90s. That footage where she goes, "If I'm gay, I'll kill myself," that was shot in like 1978, 1979. It's a different milieu. By the time I'm there, it's way more accepted and it's not something you really need to talk about, except for the fact that you don't have this big public display of affection. I don't think that makes anybody comfortable to this day. I don't think you need to put that in people's faces, although people do, and it's fine.

I think that was mainly-- she didn't want that label. She was bigger than that. She didn't want to be in that box. She's in the artist box. She's in the creator box. That's her box, if you want to put her in a box. Not the sexuality box.

Tiffany Hansen: I don't think there is a box big enough to contain all that was Allee Willis. That, I think is true. Listeners, you can judge for yourself, The World According to Allee Willis is in theaters now. We've been talking with Director Alexis Spraic and Executive Producer Prudence Fenton. Thank you so much for your time today and thank you for sharing all of this Allee Willis with us. We're going to go out on a song that she wrote that I love. Thank you so much for your time today.

Prudence Fenton: Thank you.

[MUSIC - DEETERR!!: Throwback]