Allee Willis Co-Wrote ‘I’ll Be There for You’ and ‘September.’ Her Friends Are Finishing Her Story
Mar 24, 2025
Songwriter Allee Willis had a hand in some of the greatest earworms of the last half century, including Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” the Friends theme song “I’ll Be There for You,” and the Color Purple soundtrack.
She was known for an asymmetrical hairstyle, dressing in a vibrant, joyous mishmash of prints and colors, and throwing incredible parties at a home often compared to Pee Wee’s Playhouse, the fictional, onscreen home of her friend Paul Reubens.
But privately, she struggled with established gender and sexual norms, and buried herself in her work.
She filmed her life since her childhood in Detroit in the 1950s, and said before her death in 2019, at 72, that she wanted her final art piece to be “someone putting together the trail I have left behind.” And now someone has.
The World According to Allee Willis, out today on video on demand, is a music documentary by Alexis Spraic that features interviews with Willis’ many friends and collaborators, including Reubens (who is the subject of his own new posthumous documentary.) It also includes Mark Cuban, Pamela Adlon, Lily Tomlin and many more.
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“Allee is orchestrating all of this from above,” comedian Luelle says in the film’s trailer, which you can watch above.
Willis left behind an extensive archive — not just crates of memories, but also computers with what she said was room for 1,000 terabytes of data.
But Willis’ partner, Prudence Felton, says there was a lot in the songwriter’s mind that “nobody knew about.”
And Adlon adds in the trailer that while Willis was an “open book,” everyone has an “intensely private side.”
The film, which premiered at SXSW last year, and has earned praise across the board: At the time of this writing, it holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Main image: The World According to Allee Willis. Magnolia Pictures.
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