bBefore email and thumb text messaging became an acceptable means of communication, typing was a purely manual skill. In the 80s, “the office” was the exclusive preserve of freaks who could type 40 words per minute at least. Those too small or too sweet could sign up for brick-and-mortar classes and get a software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing for $50. At my Catholic high school, the request was the typing class. The priests turned on the computers.
Launched in late 1987, Mavis Beacon quickly took pride of place on home PC desktops among floppy disks for SimCity and After Dark. Amongst other features, Mavis created automated typing drills and tracked typing progress in transparent detail. Her defining feature was the elegant Black woman in a cream suit and slicked-back bob proudly marching from her high-rise position on the cover of the software package. But it would take another few decades for the larger lesson on the difficulties of maintaining control over your image and similarity to corporate interests.
A new documentary, Seeking Mavis Beacon, not only brings that lesson into sharp relief, it’s left filmmakers struggling to even exploit the irony. “Now that the film is finished,” says debutante director Jazmin Renée Jones, “I want to protect her and her privacy.”
Premiering at Sundance, Seeking Mavis Beacon plays another classic PC game – Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Jones and producer Olivia McKayla Ross set out on a journey to find the woman behind Mavis Beacon, a Haitian-born model named Renée L’Espérance. Back when app stores were still physical spaces, retailers were convinced that a software program featuring not just any Black woman, but a dark-skinned Black woman, would turn off potential buyers. But Beacon sold more than 6m copies over the next 11 years, a remarkable result when only a third of American households owned a personal computer. Since then it has become one of the most successful educational products of all time.
Early in the film, Beacon is touted as a pioneer among “servile fembot assistants” – the “Aunt Jemima”-like “cyber doula” of her midwife Siri, Alexa and more; fans have gone as far as in-depth footage of Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey honoring Beacon’s global impact, including notably helping to make computer education accessible to people of color. The character’s cultural specificity extended further to the 3in long acrylic nails superimposed on the screen; the clatter they made as Beacon typed in collaboration with its users rang especially true for the documentary’s Black female creators. They treat L’Espérance’s retreat decades back in retrospect like a cold case of a missing Black Woman that has barely been investigated. They pass out flyers, open a tip line, call around former partners.
They set up an office that wouldn’t look out of place in a detective film, where there was a tangled conspiracy board; you might call it noir if it weren’t for the film’s pastel-heavy color palette. When it’s over, the filmmakers want to draw more comparisons to modern online identity politics, showing how alarming they are in the culture of silence. “Initially, we had this whole ‘the personal is political’ Combahee River Collective idea for the film,” says Ross. “But then as we lived our lives, we began to breathe into more theories. It turned out that we learned so much from trans femmes, from trans women of color about the dangers of hyper-visibility and what it means for pictures of you to go viral. I think it was important to use the documentary as a space to see those ideas being exercised around the world because you don’t always make that connection.”
In one scene, Jones and Ross confront each other through an emotional breakdown caused by a six-year gestation period that began before Covid; One of their biggest inspirations is a Robot Chicken-style TV series in their office – The Watermelon Woman, a brand new film about a young Black lesbian who researches Fae Richards, a Black actress known for stereotypical “mammy” roles ” played in 1930s movies. “I’m a senior,” says Jones. “There were so many references to the boot cup. I hope someone crosses this film and looks into the history.”
Meanwhile, in other scenes depicting pagan forms of Black spirituality the audience will be reminded of another inscrutable Black personality from the Mavis Beacon era – Miss Cleo on TV. The paranormal clues seem so much to open another possible path to reach L’Espérance, as a way for the filmmakers to release the frustration of the building from dealing with so many conflicting witnesses. When one of Beacon’s white male developers tells Jones: “It’s okay if you never get [L’Espérance]” everything in the director must be comfortable. “People only say this about black women,” she would later say.
Finally, Jones and Ross describe L’Espérance’s chronology: it is discovered that while working at a perfume counter in a department store, L’Espérance was paid $500 to pose as Mavis Beacon. (Allegedly, she didn’t even know what a computer was.) That single payment bought rights to photos but not derivatives. When Software Toolworks, Beacon’s parent company, released the fifth edition of the app with a fresh image of their hero instructor looking as if she had been badly carved from a block of mahogany, L’Espérance sued. The company eventually replaces it with a number of Black models – but none of them made as strong an impression.
While the outcome of L’Espérance’s lawsuit is unclear, the app’s developers – for typical Californian garage startup dorks – conspicuously leave those terrifying details out of their carefully crafted folklore. “We had this whole vision of like, ‘We’re going to do two interviews,'” says Jones, recalling Seeking’s initial approach to Beacon’s trust. “We were going to interview them first and we’re going to lie to our face, and then we’re going to hold their feet to the flames, bring them back to headquarters and be like, ‘This is we found.’ But then when we were making the movie, I was like, I’m really sick of people not talking about Renée or someone close to Renée. So it was a conscious decision, to be like: I’m going to sacrifice the really satisfying time of watching these guys and saying ‘I know you lied to me’ to prioritize for other things.”
After a cross-country dragnet and an exhaustive internet search, the filmmakers only get so close to L’Espérance’s son – who politely tells Jones and Ross that, despite their years of surveillance, his mother would rather remain undiscovered. In a more traditional documentary, that ending would be a project killer. But here, it’s just part of the journey. “Olivia and I learned a lot more than you should about a stranger,” says Jones, who is still struggling with how to celebrate L’Espérance publicly while respecting her privacy. “That’s where you see the transformation of, so, ‘If we can’t talk to Renee directly, let’s put ourselves in the film and talk to each other about this’ – and let’s also plant this seed in our audience so that they do’ you feel the need to build on where we left off.”
Aware of the amateur gumshoes who might be watching, Jones explored the prospect of sequel projects exploring the identity of the women who followed L’Espérance in the role of Beacon. “One of them is a life coach,” says Ross. “One of them is an actor. One of them was a Republican politician whose platform was to defund public education. We want to share all of this with the community, but before we could get into that ongoing history, we had to pay tribute to the OG.”
The piece of modern art footage she and Ross made looks like a polite, open-hearted message in a bottle that the right font couldn’t do. Hopefully the OG teacher sees him someday and maybe smiles. “She knows the movie exists,” says Jones, “and when we went into Sundance, she was aware of that, too. But right now, from Renee’s point of view, the meaning is still very much: ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.'”
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