The Big Picture

Seeking Mavis Beacon examines the legacy of a beloved figure in Black technological history, exploring the labor behind her creation and questioning the recognition she received. The documentary delves into the impact of the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software, which empowered people to engage with computers and develop confidence in their digital abilities. Throughout the editing process, the filmmakers aimed to create a reflective and truthful narrative, cutting out personal scenes that felt excessive and focusing on the chronological unfolding of interviews with those involved in creating the software.

In one of the more complex entries of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, filmmaker Jazmin Renée Jones’ “hybrid documentary,” Seeking Mavis Beacon, uses the education program to examine the digital realm and its consequences. The multilayered doc looks at the “anthropomorphization and the consumption of marginalized bodies in the tech industry,” as well, highlighting the truth behind one of the most influential Black women in tech.

Hearing the title, the documentary first poses the question: who is Mavis Beacon? Technically, Mavis doesn’t exist outside the software she was created for in the late ‘80s, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. However, the avatar designed to make learning to type more accessible in the early stages of general computer use was modeled after a real-life person, Renee L’esperance. This Haitian-born model then fell into obscurity decades ago, in 1995, after becoming one of the most recognized faces in technology. Through their “DIY” investigation, Jones and co-investigator, Olivia McKayla Ross, seek information on the missing woman while questioning Black representation within the industry, and uncover some shocking truths along the way.

The two filmmakers and investigators stopped by our interview studio in Park City, sponsored by Film.io, to talk with Collider’s Steve Weintraub and shed some light on their documentary. The doc duo explains why this software program became the focus of a five-year research journey, how their own relationship evolved over the course of filming and interviewing, and what they had to drop from the original cut. Check out the video above, or you can read the full conversation in the transcript below, to find out more on this cultural mystery and what’s next for Jones and Ross.

Seeking Mavis Beacon Investigates the disappearance and reexamines the legacy of one of the most influential Black women in technology. Release Date January 20, 2024 Director Jazmin Jones Cast Jazmin Jones , Olivia McKayla Ross Runtime 102 minutes Main Genre Documentary Writers Jazmin Jones , Olivia McKayla Ross

What Is ‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’?
Image via Sundance Film Festival

COLLIDER: I have about 1000 questions for the two of you. I first want to start with a lot of people know Mavis but they don’t know the documentary yet. How have you been explaining it to friends and family?

OLIVIA MCKAYLA ROSS: So the last time I explained it I was in the airport, my layover on the way to here. I met a very lovely woman who lives in Salt Lake City, and I said that we were investigating the legacy of a really well-loved figure in Black technological history. And then I said, also, that she is both not real and also very real in the hearts and minds of people, right? Mavis Beacon is a really core childhood memory for a lot of people, and so I think connecting both our research into the making of this very mythological figure, like this typing prodigy, but then also at the same time trying to get deeper into the meat of the labor behind creating who she became. A lot of that labor was done by a Black femme who we felt didn’t entirely get what she deserved, or we weren’t sure if she did, and we wanted to check. We wanted to know for sure because the impact of her work was so great. So it kind of follows Jazmin and I on a bit of a goose chase to try and get an interview with the woman who lent her face and body to the embodiment of Mavis Beacon, Renee L’esperance.

Making any film is very challenging. I’m curious, how tough was it to get this off the ground in terms of getting some sort of financing and how much was it you guys just doing it on your own?

JAZMIN JONES: Totally. I’d love to talk about the process. I mean, the film is all about process. I think it’s worth naming, this was in development for two years just with me applying and applying to different grants, and it was truly the moment that I found Olivia as a collaborator and she agreed to join the project, and also my producer, Guetty Felin at BelleMoon. There’s power in numbers, so the moment that they joined this project, it felt like everything was getting greenlit.

It also was in 2020 at a really contentious time where a lot of film institutions were like, “Maybe we will listen to what these Black filmmakers have to say.” So I think that was super advantageous to us. We are aware of the stakes of this project and the fact that it was probably greenlit given the brutalization that Black people were facing in 2020.

I really felt your obsession while I was watching. Did you feel the obsession? You were almost losing yourself a little bit — that’s the way I felt while watching it — in trying to get answers.

JONES: No, totally. We have an interview subject in the film who’s a writer, Shola von Reinhold, and she uses this term in her writing, “transfixtions,” to describe what was happening there, which is essentially an obsession. And yeah, it got really meta. The space in the headquarters that you see in the film wasn’t just a location for shooting, it was truly where we were working. So, I was editing proof of concepts in the exact same headquarters. It’s been about five years of talking about Mavis Beacon every day. I didn’t know the process would take this long, and I’m happy to say I actually really love Mavis Beacon, and I’m never sick of talking about the character.

The Impact of ‘Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing’
Image via Photagonist at the Collider Media Studio

When I mentioned you guys were coming in for this talk, a lot of people knew the typing software or had heard of her. For people that don’t realize, can you sort of talk about the impact of this software and Mavis, especially in the Black community, but also just in general. It was a very impactful piece of software.

ROSS: Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing a crazy number on the order of millions.

JONES: When they stopped tracking the numbers it was 10 million, so given the amount of time and the fact that people are still free downloading Mavis Beacon online…

ROSS: Open-source, archive.org. It came out in around 1987, I think was the first launch where people were able to order it online. I think there’s just one New York Times review, and it was “flying off the shelves.” It was at a time where people were really getting used to the concept of computers being inside of their homes and not just being things that scientists use or people in business use. It was around the same time that Apple had their crazy Super Bowl commercial for 1984. There was a lot of collective consciousness about, like, “Oh my god, computers are here. The internet is coming.” And Mavis Beacon was a lot of people’s first entry point to becoming a part of modernity in that way.

So, whether it was school-age children or working adults who were like, “Okay, shoot. I have a new skill that I need to learn,” because of the enormous popularity of the software from the late ‘80s all the way until the late ‘90s, and potentially a little bit more into the early two 2000s, it was like the main way that people really came to embody themselves physically and engage with computers in a way that empowered them to go from hunt and pecking to really being all maestro on the keys. [Laughs] It’s a very affirming experience that makes you feel like, “Okay, I’m not just some schmuck who doesn’t know how computers work sitting in front of the computer. I actually am in command of this machine.” And I think the feeling of being in command of the machine, that up until that point was very alien to you, actually plays a really big role in your confidence and your ability to participate in the digital landscape in a way that you couldn’t before.

Image via Sundance

I’m fascinated by the editing process, and especially on a documentary. How did you ultimately decide on putting it together and the storylines? Were there any storylines that you ultimately pulled out? How did you discover the right runtime? There’s a part three, but was there anything that you were like, “This is too personal,” or, “I can’t include this?”

JONES: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say we’ve been editing for two years lightly and one year seriously. So our editor, Jon [Fine], as Olivia and I were still conducting the search and on the investigation, was ingesting the footage, and he put together an assembly that was chronological. I hated it. [Laughs] He was great, but it was just, like, it was so much of us. I thought we were so obnoxious and navel-gazey. I’m like, “We have to cut a lot of this.” And so basically Jon Fine, Yeelen Cohen, and I at the start of summer had an upstate retreat, and we just started arcing out, like, “How could this go? How can we break up this linear thing and still have it be reflective and truthful of what we experienced?”

What’s interesting is that the interviews that you see with the people who are involved in making the software, all of that does unfold chronologically. In terms of plot lines, it’s hard to believe it’s a personal doc. I’m a very emotional person, and so we actually cut some of the scenes with me crying just because we’re like, “This is a bummer.” And it was just like, within the span of an hour-and-a-half, you can only cry so many times before people are just like, “Okay, wrap it up.”

ROSS: “Oh, the waterworks.”

JONES: [Laughs] Yeah, so I would say we cut out some of the crying. The idea of Olivia going back to school — I’ll let you speak to that — but she’s coming of age and questioning going back to school, and that was truly unfolding with the doc. And so when we ended filming, Olivia got into college and it was a great, heroic story of, like, “Yay! Back to education.” But you can speak to this. It didn’t actually reflect where Olivia was at in her thinking about school, so we opened that up to kind of reflect this other thing where she departs from academia. I’m really excited about that plotline because I do think we’re so used to seeing these brilliant young Black femmes who are geniuses and go off to school. I think Olivia is a genius and is brilliant, but doesn’t source that brilliance in academic institution and all of that, so I’m just really glad to see that.

ROSS: I feel like there’s definitely trying to figure out what our “character arcs” would be in terms of making the film make sense, because we realized quickly the arc wouldn’t be us talking to Renee. So, we had to kind of go on a journey. I mean, we were going on journeys internally, but in order to kind of create a sense of satisfaction, I think it was helpful to kind of have our own internal worlds be starting someplace else, ending someplace else. And I think yours is kind of very emotional in terms of getting to a point of peace.

JONES: Acceptance for me. Olivia definitely accepts things sooner than I do in the film.

Image via Sundance

ROSS: Versus I’m fully just growing up. I go from 18 to I’m 22 now. We started this when I was 18 — I bleached my brows, I turned 21, I get COVID a few times. There’s a sense of real, several personal revolutions of growing up very quickly happened in this space, I think. And I think, also, at the same time, I learned a lot about learning and what curiosity meant to me. I think after encountering just the learning style of being on set and being in an active investigation and pulling up these threads and having to be a real autodidact, and just in the process of working, the idea of going back to school afterwards and being in an environment that does not necessarily encourage creativity or individual thought and kind of wants you to be not a robot, that’s not quite fair because I was applying to BFA programs that were interested in artistic craft, but not necessarily… Like the vibe wasn’t hitting anymore. My goals changed a lot.

I think that college and school is very important, especially for some degrees and things that you want to pursue, and in other ways, it’s a lot of money that maybe doesn’t give you a reward.

JONES: And I think Olivia is a testament to someone who, I mean, she’s doing theoretical work. We’re citing concepts that Olivia has coined at the age of 18 — this term of being a cyber doula, or someone who stewards a healthy relationship to technology. She’s being cited in the text of the people that we’re interviewing. So, it’s been really fascinating to watch Olivia’s growth, and I think she has more of an outward arc that you can track by these moments in her life, whereas mine is an internal arc of denial. [Laughs]

How Renee L’esperance’s Likeness Was Used to Sell Millions
Image via Sundance 

The doc does such a great job at really pulling back who Mavis Beacon was, and Renee, and everything else. But for people that don’t realize, Mavis is a creation of three white men, someone saw a woman, put her on the cover. A, could you sort of talk about that? And B, do you think if you take Renee off that software, maybe it’s nothing? It’s like Renee’s face was so integral in this software’s success.

ROSS: It’s very true. Actually, there were other typing software on the market at the same time that did have spokespeople, but not necessarily a real person on the cover. They had competitors. And there was a big sense, I think at the outset, when they released the software and people were a bit jarred by the presence of a Black woman on the shelves. They weren’t selling well initially. Then there was a shift to all of a sudden they were getting so many orders they couldn’t handle it. A lot of people would call and ask for Mavis Beacon to come speak at their school. There was a sense of, “This is a celebrity endorsement of a software,” and that’s why she’s incorporated, and not that this was a figure of marketing. They didn’t really pivot their marketing strategy to being very clear that she was fake until after the lawsuit and after it became like, “Oh, maybe we’ve given too much power away by allowing this person who’s not part of the company to be so synonymous with the software.” But there’s definitely the ability to accept this introduction of new technology into your house by having a “friendly face,” and one that many people thought was beautiful and dressed in business wear.

JONES: And it can play either way. I think what’s really brilliant about the marketing of it, especially when you’re, like, late ‘80s, you’ve got the Cosbys on television, there’s this image of a Black middle class, and so it’s like, “Look, if you’re pro-Black, that’s a Black woman on the cover, I’m buying it.” If you also have a contentious relationship to Blackness, she’s in a subservient position so she’s there to help you do a thing. Mandy Harris Williams, our interview subject, described it as a culture gem. I think she’s a culture gem, and I don’t think we would be having this conversation if she wasn’t Black.

You know, I have a lot of feelings about that casting choice, but ultimately I’m really grateful. The whole reason I was interested in this project was we don’t have enough role models of Black people in technology. There are so many of our stories at the onset of building these things that just weren’t accounted for and are not archived, so that’s why I was like, “Whether or not she’s real, I need all the role models I can get, so let’s flesh this out a bit and figure out who the real person is.”

ROSS: And just to hold an equal weight, kind of these soft skills, it’s like, whether or not Renee was in the process of coding the thing, not necessarily, but the fact of the matter is that her presence in the labor that she performed is a reason why the work was successful. I think women, Black women, and just in general who might be working in technology and are in more like what is considered “softer roles,” that are either more people-facing or are solving different kinds of problems that might not be technical but are still problems that get in the way of the work being done, oftentimes are discredited and are not given the same level of priority and respect that their peers who might be assumed to be more skilled at technical things because of patriarchy are given more respect in those ways. I think it’s also cool that we’re able to be like, “Yes, this is a role model in technology history despite not being a computer scientist.”

‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’: “The Revolution Must Be Irresistable or Sexy”
Image via Photagonist at the Collider Media Studio

One of the things I’m sure you’ve noticed by now is I’m trying not to give away anything from the doc, but one of the things that you guys did in the doc is you had TikToks, videos. It feels new and fresh. Can you talk about the aesthetic and the importance of having modern social clips inside all the footage?

JONES: I’ve described this film as kind of the baby of somebody who hate-watches true crime while scrolling on TikTok learning about critical race theory. All of those things are present in this film. It’s deeply referential. Olivia has encouraged me, I’m like, “Are we citing too many sources?” And she’s like, “No, this is just a part of feminist practices of citing the sources that come before you.” We’re part of a lineage. So I’m really grateful not only to shout out the Saidiya Hartman’s and Cheryl Dunye’s that are inspiring this work, but also the Black vloggers and TikTokers who are putting an incredible amount of time and research into this.

Also, I love the phrases, like, the revolution must be irresistible or sexy, and I think that people online, the Black internet, they’re so good at taking these really difficult subjects and adding humor to it. So that was something where we’re like, “We know we’re making a film that can potentially have a really, really bad ending and a really sad ending, so we want to approach this with as much levity as possible.” Not going to spoil the ending — it’s definitely not as sad and bad as we were prepared for, but we’re dealing with some pretty heavy themes here, and I think the internet just has a way of making that medicine go down a bit easier.

ROSS: There was definitely a version of the film that we tried to stay away from in terms of, like, searching for a missing Black woman. Black women go missing all the time and no one really looks for them, not in the way that would guarantee their safety in being brought home in a reasonable time frame. While we were filming, there was a lot of news about women who would be going missing. It was a kind of time where that was very top of mind, as well, and so we were like, “How do we talk about this and not be super depressing and also acknowledge the fact that we keep us safe?” All of these people are very comfortable saying, “Oh, we haven’t heard from her in a while, but I’m sure she’s fine,” and we are actually like, “No, why don’t you just look? Why hasn’t anyone looked?” And come to the realization that maybe we are the ones we were waiting for.

I’m just about out of time with you and I have to wrap, but I’m just going to say obviously you guys were very successful working together. So, is it one of these things where you’re like, “Are there other ideas that we want to pursue?”

JONES: I mean, Olivia does have a life to live. She’s brilliant and has made this project so much more thorough. Also, I think we are truly family at this point, and our friendship was not just for the movie. Like, that’s my sister. There’s also so many other mysteries we’ve uncovered, so look, if someone wants to fund us, I have questions. We have a lot of pop culture questions.

ROSS: What was Aretha Franklin filming on that camera?

JONES: Where did Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar go? Was Betty Boop a Black woman? So yeah, if anyone wants to fund that, there’s absolutely room for a spin-off series, but I think we’re going to sleep a little bit, maybe.

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Allegedly. I don’t think you have the ability to shut down. Watching you in this movie, I think that you’re not shutting down.

JONES: No, you’ll probably see us at the next Sundance.

Well, listen, I really want to say congrats on the film and congrats on getting into Sundance. Is it for sale?

JONES: You know, it’s an interesting thing. Neon, they’re a sales company and this is a very unique project that they entered at the production level. It sounds like there’s a strong possibility of a theatrical run, and then we’re figuring out where to stream it.

That sounds awesome.

JONES: Thank you so much for speaking to us and your thoughtful questions.

Special thanks to our 2024 partners at Sundance including presenting partner Film.io and supporting partners Pressed Juicery and DragonFly Coffee Roasters.