“If I were Mavis Beacon, where would I be?” Jazmin Jones says mischievously at the start of “Seeking Mavis Beacon,” obliging their father to open up a storage locker of all the family’s old things to find her old copy of “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing,” A mere look at the messy locker leads him to surmise, “Well, I wouldn’t be here.”
Then again, there would be nowhere near as much fun in “Seeking Mavis Beacon” if Jones and co-conspirator Olivia McKayla Ross could find Mavis Beacon easily — or rather Renee L’Esperance, the model hired for the box cover to the wildly popular piece of software in the early ‘90s that led to a generation that wouldn’t have to hunt and peck just in time for AOL Instant Messenger. But in untangling her whereabouts, the two find so, so much more as they learn of L’Esperance’s disappearing act, in part because of her own wishes for privacy but also the way in which her image was used, becoming an icon in standing out on CompUSA shelves when the Black community was rarely associated with technology, but hardly treated as such when making no money off sales of the software and the pictures taken were manipulated to no longer bear any resemblance to her.
Jones, an archivist before making their filmmaking debut, and Ross, a programming prodigy, would have a fascinating enough story if all they did was follow the breadcrumbs of L’Esperance’s trail to legendary status in computing circles to not even having a Facebook profile now, but they cast a far larger net in the wildly entertaining nonfiction adventure about nothing less than cultural erasure in the Internet age. L’Esperance may have been content to see her image die down, but in being so clearly meaningful to the directors, their investigation exposes the toll of having their heroes fade into obscurity and even has them experience it happening in real time as their production offices, promised to them by a well-meaning nonprofit, are abruptly pulled away from them, leaving them to literally take down any progress they’ve made before they’re able to make their mark.
One knows that they persevered by the mere fact that “Seeking Mavis Beacon” is now hitting theaters following its premiere at Sundance, but the film goes one step further in fomenting a full-on revolution for anyone that sees it, bound to set one’s brain on fire with all its radical ideas about race and internet culture equal to all the interesting roads Jones and Ross take on their travels from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to Miami in pursuit of L’Esperance. It was a great honor to catch up with them as they’re hitting the road once more in support of the film and the two spoke about how they came up with such a radical and invigorating style of filmmaking based on the collaboration they forged before getting into the director’s chair, having the present mirror the past and finding unique connections with their interview subjects.
How did the two of you actually come to collaborate on this, coming from such different backgrounds professionally?
Jazmin Jones: It truly takes a village. Olivia and I were in community together, orbiting each other and I think we were both familiar with one another’s work. I had a collective, BUFU: By Us For Us that was holding space in New York and online for different QTPOC solidarity building, and Olivia was a participant and a member of that community. On her 18th birthday, she led a class on cyberfeminism. I had the pleasure of editing the footage of Olivia’s class, and I was like, “Whoa, I know who this person is, but I need to know them better.” Olivia was nine years younger than me, but putting me onto concepts and coining terminology that was directly relating to this project, Seeking Me to Speak In, that was in development at the time. I saw Olivia and I thought, “This is the future. This is not only the smartest person I’ve ever met, but also what a delight.” In that class, Olivia was talking about things like the idea of how we think of surveillance as this creepy thing, but it’s always been here. Like if you climb a tree, that is a technology for surveillance. I’m scared of technology. I’m a millennial and I joke about how once it’s online, it’s there forever and your FBI agent is watching you. But Olivia was coming from a deeper understanding of how the technology works, and I thought that she actually had a lot more optimism and autonomy and how she talked about her relationship to technology. That was something that I really admired.
Olivia McKayla Ross: Yeah, my family is from Southeast Queens and for my high school career, I went to a boarding school, part of this nonprofit that takes inner city kids and sends them to prep schools, so it was an experience that definitely made me understand a lot of things about the world very differently in terms of what it feels like when white adults take you seriously, different ways of like code switching, what it means to have lots of money and how rich people raise their children, just a lot of insidious systems that prior to going away [to school], I hadn’t had any perspective on. Leaving that environment, which was very intense academically and very stressful with a lot of supremacist ideas baked into it, and then meeting Jazmin and the community that them and their collective were forming and getting to reintroduce myself to my home city in the context of this DIY queer, BIPOC collective that was specifically working on a new relationship to pedagogy and to community at that time — teaching and learning from each other — was very magical and timely for me.
So I just jumped in with both feet and tried to go to as many events as I could, and I got really inspired by this idea, [which is] something that I think also happens in the film, of guerrilla theory, allowing our lived experiences to inform the way that we understand the theory that is inside of books and that having really heady conversations isn’t something that has to be confined to the walls of a classroom. It can happen on your friend’s roof. It can happen at the bar. It can happen at a community space. There can be candles at an altar and there can be punk music. It reshaped how I thought learning happened, and I think now this approach to community gathering comes through really strongly in the film when all the experts that we reach out to are people who we knew in real life through various means and the conversations that we have with them, even though we are coming to them because of their intellectual generosity and the contributions that they’ve made, we’re having them [talk] at these really intimate spaces in this kind of kitchen table dynamic to emphasize the idea that you can talk about these structures casually and we should. It doesn’t have to be this big production.
That’s something I was so struck by in revisiting the film – what an interview request must’ve entailed – because beyond whatever sit-down you have, you’ll ask to go out to shoot arrows with Sandy Shepard, who beyond her experience as legal counsel for a software company, when she is an archer, or with the writer Shola von Reinhold, you’ll sit for high tea. How did you put it to people you wanted to talk to?
Jazmin Jones: As first-time filmmakers, I think we were aware “This is a production and we’re showing up with the camera crew and we need to get the shot,” but also thinking about it from [the angle of] what would actually be fun? If we’re going to sit with our friends, I really wanted everybody to be filmed in a language that matched the way they wanted to be seen. So it makes sense that like our glossiest and beigest interviews take place with the developers because they’re glossy beige guys. And for Shola, who is allegedly a runaway princess, [we thought] we should be wearing gowns and we should be having a tea party. That mirrors a reality too, right? Shola is a great example — Olivia had read her book “Lote” and was obsessed with it and shared it with me and I was instantly obsessed with it. Then through finessing our way into a gala for an art organization…
Olivia McKayla Ross: I found [Shola] charging her phone.
Jazmin Jones: Underneath the table.
Jazmin Jones: That’s the world we live in where Olivia and I are finessing our way into art galas and using it as a space to network under party tables. [laughs] So that’s the feeling we wanted to convey, which is we’re forcing our way into these spaces, whether they are like technology spaces, academic spaces, but also on our own terms with this DIY sensibility.
The production office itself becomes such a strong manifestation of the story you’re telling — visually, and probably inadvertently, it looks like the internet where there’s intriguing things in every corner — but then when you’re threatened with being evicted, you can see the potential for erasure in real time. Did you know it could be such a big part of the film from the beginning?
Jazmin Jones: Because this film has taken place over the past six years — and Neon came in between the second and third year [to help finance it] — it was a lot of Olivia and I publicly being like, “We have this very big question. We want to know about this person, but we’re not allowing ourselves to look into the question until the cameras are rolling.” So we were aware from the start that we didn’t know if Renee will agree to an interview on camera and we didn’t know how much we can center her story. So in place of having access to her story, what we did have access to is our experience of learning this story, so I wanted it to play it very much like a road movie and a buddy film.
I’m aware of the allegations from general audiences that documentaries are boring or they’re expecting to see a talking head, and it’s like, “Hey, I don’t watch as many documentaries as I should either, because it’s going to be a little rigorous, but quoting back one of our specialists in the film, Mandy Harris Williams, it’s like, “The revolution will be irresistible, it’ll be seductive,” and also it is my first movie, I have a lot that I have to say and there’s a politic behind the film. So you got the spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down — some neon lights and cute outfits help the critical race theory go down and anything we’re going to do naturally would have that style and flair to it and the headquarters are an example of the hive mind of Olivia and I.
Olivia McKayla Ross: Even though the resulting look of the headquarters space became its own character from ceiling to floor, it’s also important to highlight how much of that creation came before we had really huge funding. It came when we were in the earliest stages of setting things up from the idea that we needed like a nest. We needed a space that would suit the level of grandeur that we were trying to achieve, and we needed to do it for cheap. [This film] was going to take a lot of elbow grease and Facebook marketplace hunting and driving stuff around in the car and picking and getting these used CCTVs from different places.
Jazmin Jones: Like the car in the film is the car we were transporting things [in for the production] and it got very meta because I was editing the film in that headquarters.
Olivia McKayla Ross: And we were doing it during the pandemic where there was wasn’t a safe gathering space, so it was a very semi-restricted time for us to be able to even interact with each other without masks [as] all of these diseases are like raging.
Jazmin Jones: But it’s also a perfect metaphor. I’m glad you highlighted it for what it means to be a young black queer artist in Brooklyn trying to do work with very limited resources. Of course the nonprofit that offered you the resources is going to be the same nonprofit that messes with that stability. So everything that happened was really a bummer while we were shooting, but I’m so glad it happened to us because, as a director, it was so fun to work with that material.
“Seeking Mavis Beacon” is now open in New York at the IFC Center and expands on September 6th, including Los Angeles at the Nuart.