‘We are ready to work with you … we hope you are ready to work with us’

Songwriter, artist and filmmaker Allee Willis started her career writing album liner notes for Columbia Records. But her Detroit roots caught up with her, and with characteristic chutzpah she bought a piano and a tape recorder, wrote and recorded some songs and took the tape to an agent at Columbia, saying, “I just found this girl …” She was the girl, and she got herself a record deal.

Her first album was enough to convince her that she didn’t really want to be in the limelight. Since then, she’s written songs for Bonnie Raitt, Patti LaBelle, Herbie Hancock, and Earth Wind and Fire. She’s worked with Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Bette Midler, the Pet Shop Boys and the Pointer Sisters. She’s sold 40 million records, more than a few of them gold.

But it’s boring. A restless creative spirit led Willis into many arenas other than music. Her vast collection of ’50s and ’60s paraphernalia led to designing television sets for MTV. She paints and builds motorized art pieces. She’s also gotten vast amounts of attention for throwing wild parties at her North Hollywood home (only fitting, since it was originally designed as a party house for MGM), and has made a handful of short, quirky films.

Willis’s goal has always been “to try to combine as many of these mediums as possible,” and when a friend introduced her to CD-ROM-based interactive multimedia, she was sold. “There is no other place that I’m interested in working,” she says. “It’s amazing the types of things you can do, how deep you can get into everything.”

However, Willis is incredulous that, as she says, “the stuff is really boring.” When she shows the existing titles to her friends, they’re “asleep in three minutes.”

A GOOD OMEN

The arrival of artists such as Willis at Digital World is what many people feel has been missing until now, and is a good omen for the future. Willis’s well-taken point is that anyone who has grown up watching TV and listening to the radio, two very compelling media, does not (and will not) find most of today’s interactive product offerings appealing.

“That’s what interactivity is competing with — it needs to have the emotion, the warmth, the ‘hipness’ and sophistication [of TV and radio],” she says. “And that will come from artists now working in other, more linear mediums, who know how to reach out to the public, to grab the public.”

Willis says working with interactive software designers will “take my brain places where it’s never gone before,” and that’s why she and other artists who attended Digital World (i.e., actress/producer Shelley Duvall, actress Lily Tomlin and author Jane Wagner — see p. 26) are convinced that multimedia in the right hands will create an entire new art form.

“I am really interested in process, in things changing,” Willis says. “That’s why I’m interested in multimedia, and why it’s so important to integrate artists into work with the technicians, particularly at this junction.”

As you might expect, Willis disagreed strongly with Grove’s picture of the business market being the only viable one for digital media in the short term. After her talk, Grove said, the mass media market would take off only “after solving the incredibly boring problems of connections and how to place orders in the field. That has to happen before we can deliver gadgets that you and your friends can play with.”

But Willis believes it’s the quality, not the state of the technology, that’s keeping interactive titles out of the mass market. “I don’t know what these people are aiming for — the three people who own the machinery?” she said. “When artists realize this world is opening up to them, not only can we blow this whole thing wide open, but each individual technology will completely change. It will change movies forever, TV forever, music forever. To take it to the next step, entertainment is something that people should really be looking at. We are ready to work with you, and we hope that you are ready to work with us.”

Denise Caruso